July 1 (Bloomberg) -- Chef Heston Blumenthal is already giving plenty of thought to the menu for his first London restaurant, scheduled to open late next year. One thing is for sure: It’s unlikely to feature his signature snail porridge.

“It’s going to be an upmarket bistro, absolutely not another Fat Duck,” Blumenthal said yesterday in a telephone interview. The food will be somewhere between that served at his pub, the Hinds Head, and the three-Michelin-star restaurant, both in the village of Bray, west of London, Blumenthal said.

“The menu will feature historic British-influenced dishes,” he said. “You couldn’t do snail porridge for those numbers and out of the context of the Fat Duck, but savory porridges? Certainly. There’s room to be adventurous on the odd dish as long as the menu has plenty of comfort food. We might serve a really nice rib of beef with triple-cooked chips.”

The new venue -- at the Mandarin Oriental Hyde Park -- will seat 140 and serve lunch, afternoon tea and dinner. It’s more than three times the size of the Fat Duck, which seats 44. The kitchen will be headed by Ashley Palmer-Watts, Blumenthal’s group executive chef.

A deconstructed pizza in a bulbous test tube featured this week at a dinner in London where each course was prepared by a different Italian chef. The event took place on Monday at Dolada restaurant, whose chef Riccardo de Pra created the liquid pizza with mozzarella, tomato, basil and olive-oil components to be guzzled in one go, accompanied by chunks of crust for texture.

The culinary masters, who also included Alain Ducasse, were in town for Identita Golose, a chefs’ congress being held in London for the first time after five years in Milan. Massimo Bottura (of Osteria Francescana, Modena) served burrata rennet soup with eggplant, cherry tomato and anchovies, while Carlo Cracco (of Ristorante Cracco in Milan) cooked veal fillet with capers, licorice, peas and broad beans.

Speakers at Identita, which was held at the wine-tasting venue Vinopolis, included Rene Redzepi of Noma restaurant in Copenhagen, and London-based Giorgio Locatelli (Locanda Locatelli) and Angela Hartnett (Murano).

Judges of the Roux Scholarship attended a lunch at the Waterside Inn, in Bray, on June 26 to discuss plans for next year and the progress of this year’s winner, Hrishikesh Desai, of Lucknam Park. Michel Roux spoke glowingly about Desai. Among the prizes in the competition for chefs aged below 30 is a three-month training period with a three-Michelin-star chef.

I sat next to chef Gary Rhodes and have come to enjoy his company over the year I have been guest judge, a position whose responsibilities featured a trip to Barcelona with Michel Roux and, less glamorously, one to Birmingham with his son Alain. Other judges included Albert Roux, Michel Roux Jr., Blumenthal, and Andrew Fairlie. I was impressed by the generosity and lack of ego among the chefs. Food journalists can be less kind.

Last weekend, I returned from a vacation in Thailand, where my reading included a touching new memoir, “Bittersweet -- Lessons From My Mother’s Kitchen” by Matt McAllester (Dial Press). The author’s mother suffered mental illness, leading to years of estrangement from her son. She died in 2005.

McAllester’s mother was a keen amateur cook and he decided to try to reconnect with her memory by creating meals from recipes she used by Elizabeth David and other chefs. Grief hits you in funny ways. My mother died in 2001, and I found myself in tears in a Bangkok restaurant while reading the book.

One amusing anecdote concerns McAllester’s father, Don, a photographer who took the cover shot of a cake for the Rolling Stones’ album, “Let It Bleed.” The band showed up for the photo shoot with an entourage and he found the only “vaguely normal person” around was Keith Richards, which makes you wonder about everyone else. The cake, incidentally, was baked by Delia Smith, who went on to TV fame.

Drinks at the Club at the Ivy the other night were marred by a member who kept making and receiving telephone calls. Flying on Emirates to Bangkok, an announcement said phones were welcome. The train journey to the Waterside also was spoiled by callers. Some diners in restaurants consider it fine to chat on the phone. I happily recall the Hong Kong restaurateur who took a customer’s handset and dropped it in a bucket of iced water.

Hot on the heels of his new Boundary restaurant in Shoreditch, the designer and restaurateur Terence Conran and business partner Peter Prescott opened Lutyens on June 29. This establishment in the former Reuters building at 85 Fleet Street appropriately features a long bar and a lengthy wine list.

The new Planet Hollywood on Haymarket will be serving Independence Day dishes and bar snacks this weekend, including mini burgers (2.75 pounds) and pecan pie with vanilla ice cream (6.25 pounds). The main cocktail bar is on the ground floor, with a mezzanine level for drinkers with a head for heights.

Winners at the Guild of Food Writers awards on June 25 included Blumenthal (Food Book of the Year), Mark Hix (Cookery Book of the Year), Fuchsia Dunlop (Food and Travel) and Bee Wilson (Food Journalist of the Year).

(Richard Vines is the chief food critic for Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are his own.)

To contact the writer on the story: Richard Vines in London at rvines@bloomberg.net.

Last Updated: June 30, 2009 19:00 EDT