No doubt sick to death of endlessly being asked the same question, Heston Blumenthal has finally said he'll open a restaurant in Australia - but only when he's done expanding in the UK.
At a $500-a-head Vasse Felix dinner in the West Australian food mecca of Margaret River on Friday night, Blumenthal was asked by Gourmet Traveller's Pat Nurse the same query he fields every time he meets an Australian.
He started the same way he always does: "I'd love to open a restaurant out here."
But this time, he added a little bit more.
"I have no fixed plans but hopefully, the next restaurant I open outside of the UK will be in Australia," he said, prompting whooping from the black-tie audience.
By contrast, Blumenthal was clad in polo shirt, jeans and sneakers, making the spectacle of him surrounded for virtually the whole evening by adoring middle-aged fans - while he was trying to enjoy a dinner specially prepared in his honour - even more bizarre.
Perhaps trying to subtly win some breathing space, and at the same time revealing what the Wizard of Oz looked like behind the curtain, he tried to demystify his famously eccentric approach to food.
Over-the-top culinary theatre was nothing new, he pointed out, regaling the somewhat shocked audience with tales of royal feasts in medieval times, a historical food obsession that was the basis of his first and hugely popular TV show "Heston's Medieval Feasts".
While the famed self-taught chef had done his own version of four-and-twenty blackbirds flying out of a giant pie in that series - using a cement mixer to stir the colossal pastry dough - that paled in comparison to the Duke of Birmingham, who thought it would be cool to do the same with a butcher's midget son.
The 18 inch eight-year-old pounced out of it wearing a suit of armor and was gifted to the queen.
"Imagine you're sitting at a table and this little action man jumps out of a pie," Blumenthal said.
But It gets worse.
The poor soul then fought in a few wars, was captured in North Africa and held a slave for 20 years.
Blumenthal also tried to temper his rock-star status by letting the diners know the pie episode hadn't gone smoothly.
Humming Wagner's Ride of the Valkyries, he recalled how the birds, once cajoled out of the pastry shell, promptly shat all over one of the guest's heads to the point where her hair was streaked two-tone.
But he stressed his extreme experimentalism wasn't just a nod to food of the past.
It also sought to challenge why certain foods were in favour in the modern world while others were considered repellant.
The sauteed dormouse dish he served in another episode, while drawing "ugghs" from the audience, was in fact delicious and tasted somewhere between quail and pork, he said.
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