Take it on tour: Heston Blumenthal's recipe for keeping restaurant on its toes

The entire staff of Heston Blumenthal's restaurant The Fat Duck, once voted number one in the world, were summoned last Sunday evening to a mock-Tudor building across the road from the three-Michelin-starred mother ship in the Berkshire village of Bray. Champagne and canapés had been laid on for the 70 staff, but Blumenthal himself was not there. He was in Australia, preparing to address his team via Skype. When he had finished talking there was silence.

"It was only when they all started cheering and clapping that I realised they weren't stunned. It was just a few seconds' delay," Blumenthal says.

The rapturous response was understandable. He had just announced that at the end of the year the restaurant would close for building works lasting more than six months. During that time the entire business, including almost all its staff, the sign outside, the leather from the seats, dishes like his snail porridge and salmon poached in liquorice, and perhaps even the front door, would be relocating to a hotel in Melbourne.

"We needed to close the restaurant but I didn't want to lay off all the staff," Blumenthal says. "I couldn't guarantee to get them back. This is a brilliant way to deal with the issue. It's really energising."

The only thing not travelling with them is their Michelin stars. Australia is not in the scheme, and the restaurant will drop out of the 2015 UK guide.

"We hope it will be just a short break,' says guide editor Rebecca Burr. "It looks as if everything should slot back into place very quickly."

Coincidentally, last weekend in Copenhagen, René Redzepi of Noma (two Michelin stars), another restaurant once voted number one, issued a statement of his own. He was also shifting his restaurant, in his case to Tokyo, for two months. This came hard on the heels of news that Spanish restaurant El Celler de Can Roca (three Michelin stars), current holder of the number one spot, was going on tour, with stop-offs in Mexico City, Lima, Medellín in Colombia, New York, Istanbul, Houston and Santiago, Chile.

It's not uncommon for high- end chefs to do one-off nights in restaurants a long way from home, but complete relocations are a different matter. Meals on wheels has suddenly taken on a new meaning.

While the chefs cite specific reasons for their bursts of wanderlust, many in the restaurant world believe that underlying the current vogue for restaurant relocation is the long-term impact of the 50 best restaurants list, which they have all topped.

The list, published each spring since 2002 by Restaurant magazine, has its critics. Questions have been raised over the way restaurants solicit votes by offering not just free meals but, in conjunction with tourist boards, all-expenses-paid tours of whole countries.

However, the list has always been best justified by the regard in which the world's top chefs hold it. Each year dozens of them fly to London from around the world for its announcement and, from that, relationships have been born.

"I can't think of any event in the world that brings in so many chefs," says Richard Vines, chief food critic for Bloomberg and current chair of the UK judges. "It's not just one evening. It's three days of events, and a lot of collaborations have grown out of these friendships developed in London."

Blumenthal acknowledges that events such as this one and the yearly Madrid Fusion gastronomic conference have played a part in the creation of both an international audience for his brand of modernist cooking and of a new relationship between top cooks.

"In the 1980s and 1990s there was a lot of backstabbing," he says. "But now there's a real camaraderie." Renowned Australian chef Tetsuya Wakuda was one of the first to call Blumenthal to congratulate him when the move to Melbourne was announced.

In this case, however, Blumenthal says, a lot of the impetus behind the relocation was his work on four of the past five series of MasterChef Australia, and his product lines in the country's Coles supermarket chain. "We had actually been looking at a way to do something like this for five years because of the work we needed to do to rebuild our kitchen. We were approached by establishments in Saint-Tropez, Las Vegas and Lake Geneva. We even considered using a bunch of articulated lorries like we were a Formula One team and going on tour."

The deal he made – with James Packer's Crown Resort Hotel in Melbourne – works, he says, because it is part of a longer-term plan.

Blumenthal had been looking to open a foreign outpost of his Dinner restaurant, specialising in a modern take on historic British food, which is already a success at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel in London, where it holds two Michelin stars of its own. So a new Dinner will be built in Melbourne, and the temporary Fat Duck will be located inside it like a stage set, so that when they leave, Dinner will remain.

"Commercially it works for us," he says. But it goes beyond that: "Although I will be shuttling back and forth, overseeing building works, I told my team I will actually be in the kitchen with them much more."

He is also looking forward to working with Australian ingredients. "The meat in Australia is just fantastic," he says. New dishes will be created as a result of the produce available.

For René Redzepi of Noma, which made its name with a very precise Nordic menu, the ingredients are the whole point. They will be using only local produce. "Our food will have the same sensibility but it will be very different," he says. "It will have to be – when you are using, say, lily bulbs from Hokkaido rather than potatoes from North Zealand."

Redzepi says his move grew out of a growing fascination with Japanese food since his first visit there five years ago, along with a thirst for personal development. "I had become interested in fermentation and realised that I needed to do what all young chefs do, which is intern in a restaurant somewhere, like Korea or Japan." He wanted to take what's known as an unpaid stage.

"But I can't do that. I am a head chef with two kids. I can't just disappear off. This made me very sad." The solution was offered by highly regarded Japanese chef Yoshihiro Murata, who will rent Noma the space in Tokyo.

"It'll be our business," says Redzepi. "Normally you're approached first and decide the terms of the deal. In this case we've been courting our partner in Japan. The only cost we won't have is accommodation, which they are handling. Everything else is ours."

It does have to make financial sense. Though prices have yet to be set they will be higher than the 1,600 kroner (£177) charged for the set menu in Copenhagen, because costs are higher in Tokyo. But that is not what's driving it. "The main motivation is to have life experiences," he says. "It's a way of rebooting ourselves."

But will these relocated restaurants be the same as at their original addresses? In 2012 Noma moved for 10 days to Claridge's hotel in London. "We were quite consciously not trying to replicate Noma," says Thomas Kochs, general manager of the hotel. "It was Nomaesque – the outcome of him putting his mind to our produce."

It is, he adds, all about offering experiences to people which would not otherwise be available. "I'm sure the Japanese and Australian foodies are very excited."

So why does he think the chefs are doing it? "Obviously they need their restaurants to be occupying consumers' minds. They have seats to fill. But they are also getting an education." Maintaining a restaurant with three Michelin stars can be arduous and very repetitive. "It's about being out of your comfort zone."

There can be little doubt that there is an audience for it. Bookings for the Fat Duck in Melbourne do not open until September. Even so, within a few hours of the announcement they had 3,000 phone calls.