World's Greatest Restaurant and Molecules of Taste -- Tales of the UK's Fat Duck

Apparently, the world's top food minds agree: The best restaurant in the world is The Fat Duck in Bray, Berkshire, UK, at least according to a panel of 600 experts convened by Restaurant magazine.

What this restaurants brings to the new biology economy is found in its innovative approach to food.

Food writers are calling it molecular gastronomy, a movement ignited by Ferran Adria, the chef at Spain's El Bulli, which came up No. 2 on the list. Adria experiments in his kitchen for half a year and then serves up the good stuff he has found for the other half of the year at his small establishment on the Mediterranean coast. He is selling a cookbook for $350.

At Fat Duck, the molecular approach of chef and owner Heston Blumenthal goes beyond a team in the back of the house, as well as the front, to include scientists and psychologists on staff.

In these two restaurants is a metaphor for what is happening in the biology world. Suddenly, faced with the torrent of data coming from relatively new technologies such as microarrays, and the extention of mass spectrometry for use in biomarker discovery, biologists are finding that they can not do it all and they need help.

Across the country, college campuses are constructing new multimillion dollar multidisciplinary facilities to connect biologists with statisticians, physicists, engineers in an effort to spur innovation and solve big new puzzles of biology. This is a highly simplified explanation of systems biology, which is the new discipline that is emerging from the human genome project, which not only unraveled the blueprint of human biology, giving us new knowledge, but also reminding us of how much we don't know – what this all means on a systems level.

So, the restaurants are a great way to see what can happen in taking a new approach.

Take a look at the Fat Duck menu and then read about the philosophy of the establishment.

Then read an article from the Royal Society of Chemistry's publication, Chemistry World, and get a behind-the-scenes view of the Fat Duck, and a recipe.

This too is New Biology.

Tags -- Biology, Molecular Gastronomy