Farewell, Fat Duck. Dinner by Heston Blumenthal is set to open Tuesday 20 October, and it’s determined to make Australia excited about the lamington in a whole new way.

Yes, the lamington, that coconut-iced sponge cake more commonly associated with Nana’s afternoon tea than world-leading gastronomy. It – or an approximation thereof - will be on the menu at Dinner by Heston Blumenthal when it opens at Crown in Melbourne tomorrow.

British chefs Down Under seem fatally attracted to the lamington. Gordon Ramsay also did a version at Maze, his short-lived Crown venture. But the Dinner lamington will be different for two reasons. First, says Dinner executive chef and long-time Blumenthal lieutenant Ashley Palmer-Watts, “it’s really more of a gateaux than a classic lamington’’. Second, unlike the Fat Duck’s wildly popular yet short seven-month season and Maze’s premature demise, Dinner is - hopefully - here to stay.

Opened at London’s Mandarin Oriental Hotel four-and-a-half years ago, the original Dinner has eclipsed its older sibling, at least going by the S.Pellegrino World’s Best Restaurants hip-list, where Dinner currently sits at number seven ahead of the Fat Duck’s 73. It’s a simpler beast to the Fat Duck’s wacky gastronomic futurism, although “simpler’’ in Blumenthal parlance is a relative term. The Dinner brief will be familiar to any viewer ofHeston’s Feasts, in which the obsessive, self-taught chef delves through the history books to resurrect and reinvent historical British dishes dating from the 1300s through to the Victorian era.

And herein lies the million-dollar question: Can a menu created from excursions in the British Library, aided and abetted by Blumethal’s own researcher and food historians, grab the attention of Australian diners?

In favour of the affirmative, the appeal of Dinner London proved more catholic than anticipated by jaded critics (“flavour-led cooking that showcases 600 years of British cuisine and provides diners with a world-class contemporary dining experience,’’ says its World’s Best citation). Palmer-Watts also points out that the dishes at Dinner were as unfamiliar to Britons as they will be to Australians: for example, roast scallop with cucumber sauce, drawn in part from the 1826 publication The Cook and Housewife’s Manual, or frumenty, a type of porridge popular in Medieval cuisine.

A larger Australian presence on the menu will develop once the hard work of opening is done (the attention to detail includes a custom-made scent of damp moss, wood smoke and leather guiding diners through the entrance tunnel).

Braised kangaroo tail will be replacing calf tail in a dish known as “rice and flesh’’ (c. 1300), but at this early stage the Dinner menu here could be considered the equivalent of a British backpacker arriving in Australia and donning board shorts and thongs but still drinking lager and eating chips. Certain iconic Australian dishes have been mentioned – lamington aside, Blumenthal and co. have been investigating uses of the Anzac biscuit – but Palmer-Watts says they’re yet to really go native.

“We’ve got some historical Australian cookbooks from around 1870 to 1900. It all refers back to England but cooking was pretty basic in many instances. [It was] very plain, very practical cookery rather than flamboyant technical dishes. From 1300 and 1400 in England when they were making meat look like fruit, we jump to 1900 where cooking in Australia was only just getting going. You can see how it’s translated over but in a simplified way. And really, the earlier back in time you go in Australia, the more it was about what you could get your hands on depending on your status.’’

Blumenthal and Palmer-Watts have been reading historical Australian cookbooks but are keen to find a local food historian. “With the whole lamington thing, for example, there are three or four stories as to how it came about,’’ says Palmer-Watts. “We haven’t gotten to the bottom of that one and there’s got to be someone who can fill us in on the details. We’d love to strike something up with a couple of historians in Australia. They can feel free to make themselves known. Information in exchange for meat fruit.’’

Meat fruit? It's an iconic Dinner dish, a ball of chicken liver parfait dipped in mandarin jelly to resemble an intact piece of fruit and, by all accounts, delicious.

Indeed, for people who don’t particularly care that salmagundy was originally a kind of throw-it-all-in salad dish from early 17th century England, or that “umbles’’ means offal, they promise that Dinner can be just… well, dinner.