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Not a squeak from Fat Duck

OK, so you’re Heston Blumenthal. Your Fat Duck flagship is the only UK restaurant that’s of any real note internationally. On the back of this, you’re building – sigh! – something of a media career. Indeed, you have a series on TV at the moment.

Then 400+ guests fall ill. Your little local difficulty becomes big news – even the NY Times is interested.

And so the world watches and waits for news of the re-opening. Interested people – people with those bookings they made two months ahead, perhaps? – visit the Fat Duck website to find out where the investigation is up to, and when re-opening may be.

And there they find… bugger all that’s of any use. No news at all on the closure, and still less on when the reopening may be – an absence compounded by the fatuous statement that: “All the information and facts you are about to read are current”.

No they’re not, they’re all entirely beside the point. The failure of such a household-name figure as Heston Blumenthal to use effectively the basic mass communications device of the 21st century really does beggar belief.

And it doesn’t get any better if you hit the – so last-century – telephone. No recorded news at all, just a business-as-usual-push-button-1-2-3 message, which rings out when you try to speak to anyone.

We’d like to tell you what Heston’s PRs had to say about all this… but they weren’t there at 9.45 this morning. Enough time already, spent on not finding something out which should have required a visit to a single web page…

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