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Just about every foodie has heard of Heston Blumenthal and his Michelin three-star restaurant west of London, the Fat Duck (#1 in the World’s 50 Best Restaurant Awards for 2005 and in the top two — at the moment after El Bullí, near Barcelona — for the past five years). There Blumenthal wows more than 80 people a day, each spending around £220 (over $300) for gastronomic wonders such as snail porridge and bacon-and-egg ice cream.

So you can imagine the shock and horror that ensued on February 27, when Blumenthal announced he was temporarily closing the Fat Duck because of a health scare. Over the preceding three or four weeks, he told reporters, 40 diners had called in to say they’d become ill after patronizing the Fat Duck. He said he hoped to reopen this week, since tests had shown no evidence of food poisoning (and the week of shutdown would cost him £100,000 — $141,000 — which he didn’t know whether his insurance would cover).

Bad enough, but jeez, Friday it got worse: Bloomberg reported that by now, rather than 40, 400 people have called to report the trots and nausea after Fat Duck meals. (A spot of opportunistic me-tooism, ya think?)

Blumenthal’s first phone call after learning what was going on, as you see the poor bloke tell the Guardian reporter at the first link, was to the Health Protection Agency of the Royal Borough of Windsor & Maidenhead. Reports Bloomberg:

“This is a very complex outbreak,” Dr. Graham Bickler, the agency’s regional director, said yesterday in a press statement. “We are working closely with the restaurant and with colleagues in the Royal Borough’s Environmental Health team to explain what happened and to ensure that the risks of it happening again are reduced as much as possible.” …

Health officials have conducted tests on foodstuffs from the Fat Duck and taken samples from diners and from staff members, looking for signs of contamination by germs — either bacterial or viral — which might have occurred at any time from being supplied to the restaurant to being served, the agency said. …

“We’re saying 400 possible cases, not that 400 people have fallen sick,” Teresa Cash, a spokeswoman for the agency, said in a telephone interview last night. “When people hear something like this has happened, they may call and report something.” The complaints relate to meals since late January.

Blumenthal’s spokeswoman, Monica Brown, said the chef had no further comment while the investigation was continuing.

The restaurant has examined records of which waiters served which customers, which dishes the diners ordered and where they sat without finding any correlation, Blumenthal said in a telephone interview on Feb. 28. The Fat Duck has used an independent company, Food Alert, for four years to monitor hygiene and it is involved in investigating the complaints, he said.

Well, could it have something to do with serving sand?

The tasting menu costs [$182] for about a dozen courses such as the Sound of the Sea, where diners don earphones and listen to lapping waves while consuming seafood washed up on what looks like a beach. The sand is a mix of tapioca and Japanese breadcrumbs.

Cute, ‘eston. But ‘ow’s a Duck to stay Fat on that?