Heston Blumenthal made his reputation with dishes that sound more like kitchen accidents than the creations of one of the world's leading chefs.
Egg and bacon ice cream and snail porridge thrust his brand of playful experimental gastronomy into the limelight and helped earn him three Michelin stars.
Now, as he prepares for his biggest opening yet, a restaurant with views across Hyde Park in London called Dinner With Heston Blumenthal, the Guardian understands he is putting the finishing touches to a new signature dish to grab the headlines: ice-cream meat pie.
It remains unclear whether the dish, to be served with afternoon tea from March 2011, involves meat that tastes like ice-cream or meat-flavoured ice-cream or something else altogether. Either way, its traditional English references and echoes of school dinners sum up the chef's passion for subverting diners' expectations and tapping into their most distant memories of food.
For the opening at the Mandarin Oriental hotel he has plundered recipes dating as far back as the 16th century. Expect to see scallops with cucumber ketchup and peas and bergamot cured mackerel salad among the dishes at Blumenthal's first London branch.