"My wife, Zanna, keeps telling me I need to have a bit more self-confidence,” says Heston Blumenthal.
Zanna has a point. At the age of 41, Blumenthal has earned global recognition for his gastronomic talents. His restaurant, The Fat Duck in the Berkshire village of Bray, has three Michelin stars and has been hailed as the best restaurant in the world. Yet Blumenthal is no bragger. (“It’s a wonderful compliment,” he says, “but you can’t really have a best restaurant in the world.”) In fact, he is modest, down-to-earth and charming – especially now his “psychotic” anger issue is under control (more of which later).
Look, for instance, at what happened last year, when he was standing in a queue at Buckingham Palace with Ozwald Boateng, the fashion designer. The two men were waiting to pick up OBEs from the Queen. “We could hear the names of people in front us being called out and what their services to the country were,” recalls Blumenthal. “There was a woman who’d set up an orang-utan hospice and a man who’d devoted his life to looking after terminally ill children. I turned to Ozwald and said, ‘It’s bizarre that we’re here. There’s you doing a bit of knitting and I chop onions.’ I was joking, but I meant it as well. I’m not sure if Ozwald saw the funny side of it.”
The highly accomplished onion-chopper is in a flap when we meet. It’s 8.45 in the morning and he dashes into the Hinds Head, the gastropub he owns, which is a few steps away from The Fat Duck. Last night, he lost his car keys, so his BMW is sitting in an NCP car park in London. His assistant, Roisin, sees that he’s not looking his best and says, “Shall I get you a razor?” Steve, the restaurant manager, brings Earl Grey and, as he sips, Blumenthal tells me about an “incident” – a scuffle – that occurred while he was in New York, filming In Search of Perfection, his BBC TV series, which begins its second series this month.
Blumenthal and his producer were drinking in Manhattan’s The Spotted Pig with the restaurant’s co-owner, Mario Batali, the Michelin-starred chef of substantial girth with a red beard and pigtail. “Mario produced this bottle of something strong and he was talking about how the English can’t hold their drink. Two hours later, he was slumped beside me with a cigarette in his mouth and his head swaying to loud music. I made a comment about what a nice room we were in and then he went to grab my nuts. So I grabbed his hand, then he pulled my hand up to his mouth, put one of my fingers into his mouth and started biting it.”
Mario Batali was biting his finger? “Yes. I thought, if I don’t do something, he’s going to bite my finger off. I jumped up, got behind him, stuck my free fingers in his nostrils and yanked his head back.” Blumenthal, an accomplished kickboxer, puts his fingers in his own nostrils to demonstrate the move. “Then I got carried away. I jumped onto the sofa and back-dived him so that my back hit his front.” Then what? “Mario got up and went home.”
Both Blumenthal and Batali are protégés of Marco Pierre White and Blumenthal now explains that White is due to arrive in Bray. White, star of the summer’s Hell’s Kitchen on ITV, is visiting to get a few words on film from his friend.
Suddenly, the beam of sunlight shining into the room is cut off and we are in virtual darkness. On the other side of the window is the reason for the darkness: the hulking figure of Marco Pierre White. His nostrils – Marlboro Red smoke streaming from them – are squashed against the glass as he stands peering in. White has arrived in Bray accompanied by a director called Andy; a producer called Maria; a cameraman; a man with a boom mike; and a man who follows the man with the boom mike. “Heston nailed Mario physically,” says White. “And then I arrived in New York a week later and nailed Mario with sambuca.”
As the crew set up, White is asking Andy just the sort of questions likely to annoy a director – “Have you enough light?” During the TV interview, Andy asks questions that seem designed to get Blumenthal to describe White as a monster in the kitchen.
Andy: “How would you describe Marco’s personality?”
Blumenthal: “I can’t. He’s indescribable.”
Andy (losing patience): “Is it fair to say Marco’s temperamental?”
Blumenthal: “I would say that he is emotionally passionate.”
The director keeps up the interrogation, until Blumenthal confesses that when he did his first stint in a professional kitchen – at Le Manoir aux Quat’ Saisons – he saw White attempting to drag a waiter out of the kitchen by his feet, while the waiter’s hands were clinging onto the passe. After this story, Andy is happy to call cut.
When White and his troupe have departed, I ask Blumenthal about his own leadership techniques. His cooks seem to be positively cheerful. However, Blumenthal says there was a time, in the early years of running The Fat Duck, when he was an angry, volatile young man both in and out of the kitchen. “There’s a point when the service is controlling you, you’re not controlling the service. I had a really bad temper. Staff stayed for just a few months.” The turning point came after several instances of road rage. “I remember coming into Bray one day, chasing a car in front of me. The driver wouldn’t stop, so I actually had the door of my car open, and was driving and hooting and screaming at him to stop.”
He concedes: “It was slightly psychotic behaviour, so I had to do something about it. The missus sent me to a cranial osteopath and things like that, and it started to work. It’s not as if I don’t have a temper. I have a temper that’s there, but I’ve dealt with it. I am so calm now. I don’t think I’ve raised my voice in the kitchen for seven years. When I look back, I think, God, did I really behave like that? At work, there’s no excuse for humiliating somebody physically, mentally. If someone has messed up and you bawl them out in public, that can’t do them any good.”
He adds, “Other chefs have quite a peaceful life away from work and encounter bedlam in the kitchen. For me, it’s the other way round. When I’m in the kitchen, it’s peace and quiet.”
In The Fat Duck, a photographer is waiting to shoot Blumenthal with his managing director Tony Baker. The two men are seated at a table upon which sits one of Blumenthal’s magnificently imaginative creations: a little box topped with oak moss. Dry ice pours from it, giving the diner the smell of a walk in a wet forest. The diner first eats a minute film made of oak resin with a soft, woody note, then a dish of pea purée, jellied quail consommé, foie gras and langoustine cream, then a truffle and oak purée. “The recipe for this runs to eight pages,” says Blumenthal.
A man recently came for dinner and was so moved, he started to weep. Blumenthal tells a story about The Fat Duck’s highly publicised Sound of the Sea dish, which is accompanied by an iPod so that diners can listen to the sound of waves hitting the shore. “There was a woman whose dad loved the sea, but sadly he died of cancer before he got to come here and try the dish. Shortly after he died, the daughter and her mother came in and ate it. They sat at the table with their iPods on and they were both crying. We made up a CD from the sound,” says Blumenthal. “They played it at his funeral.” He scurries off for service.
Unlike many other leading chefs, Blumenthal did not grow up assisting his mother in the kitchen. On the contrary, he got in the way. “We lived in this basement flat and I remember a pressure cooker on the hob in the kitchen. If I jumped up and down at the edge of the kitchen, I’d set the pressure gauge off.”
The Blumenthals were not foodies. Occasionally, they would splash out for dinner at a Berni Inn
The family were not foodies: a birthday treat was a meal at a Chinese restaurant; occasionally, the Blumenthals would splash out for dinner at a Berni Inn. When he was ten, the
family moved out of London to High Wycombe. His father “worked his socks off” and his business prospered. The money started coming in, enough of it for the family to enjoy holidays in France where, one sunny day, they went for a meal at a Michelin-starred restaurant and 16-year-old Heston sat transfixed. The birth
of his passion for food was such: “Olive groves in the valley. The waiting staff all had dickie bows and waistcoats, the sommeliers big leather aprons. There was the noise of crunching gravel, the clink of wine being poured into glasses, the cheese trolleys being pushed past and legs of lamb being carved. I knew I wanted to give that feeling to others.”
He drifted from job to job before setting his heart on owning a restaurant. In 1995, he found the site that, today, is The Fat Duck. “I never wanted to create anything other than a bistro,” he says. But success seemed to come quickly, with two Michelin stars, five AA rosettes and a score of nine out of ten in the Good Food Guide. The truth, Blumenthal tells me, was very different. The restaurant was busy at weekends, but dead during the week. The Fat Duck was about to become one of the restaurant industry’s turkeys.
Then, in January 2004, a quite remarkable thing happened in Blumenthal’s life. “We were in the worst position we’d ever been in,” he remembers. “On the Monday, I sat in my office with Roisin and we realised we did not have enough money to pay the wages on Friday. We had no money and no way of borrowing money.”
He’d committed himself to a cookery demonstration in Madrid and was reluctant to cancel as his audience would be hundreds of journalists and chefs. On Tuesday, he flew to Spain. “It was as if someone sprinkled magic dust on the plane,” he says. “At the hotel, there was a message to phone work. When I did, they said, ‘We’ve been voted best restaurant by The Observer.’ The demo went down fantastically and afterwards someone said, ‘Your book [Family Food] has been voted the best cookbook in the world.’ ”
Just when he thought things could not get any better, they did. “I was on my way to a restaurant when Roisin phoned: ‘There’s a journalist doing a report on your response to a third star.’ I knew the Michelin guide came out in January, but I didn’t think a third star was on the cards. Then [Michelin guide editor] Derek Bulmer phoned and said, ‘I hear the story’s breaking and wanted to tell you first. Congratulations.’ I phoned Zanna and she just screamed. This was the flip side of everything she had had to deal with. She’s raised the family [Jack, 14; Jessie, 12; Joy, 11] single-handedly.”
Before returning to Britain, he was interviewed by British journalists about the third star and asked how he came by the name Heston. “I don’t know why, but I found myself saying, ‘Who knows? My parents probably named me after Heston Services.’
“When I flew back, there were stories on BBC news and a headline in The Times saying, ‘Chef named after parents’ love of motorway service station gains third star.’ I spent six months apologising to them.” He’s still not sure how his parents came up with the name. “I’d asked my parents where my name came from, but they never gave a clear answer. They said, ‘Oh, it’s just a name.’ ”
There was a part of me thinking, what’ll happen now? What if we lose the Michelin star next year?
The day before the Michelin award, The Fat Duck had ten customers. The day after, there were 50. When Blumenthal got home, his wife and children were asleep. “My wife had framed the Times cutting and the house was decorated with balloons. I poured myself a glass of wine and sat back. It was fantastic. But there was a part of me thinking, what’s going to happen now? Did we deserve it? What happens if we lose it next year?” They didn’t.
There are difficulties in the lab ahead of the second series of In Search of Perfection. As part of the show, Blumenthal will show viewers how to perfect Peking duck and baked Alaska. “It’s just not working,” he says, inserting a prod to test the temperature of the dessert. It has been baked, then microwaved to heat inner tubes of biscuit, but the pudding is melting. The duck is hanging from chains above a large pot and sous chef Chris is basting the bird with hot oil. The problem is that the meat has cooked before the skin has crisped. “Chuck it back in the oven,” says Blumenthal, “and cook the f*** out of it.” Viewers are unlikely to witness this instruction.
Blumenthal is obsessed by the science of cooking, but is sick and tired of the ‘molecular gastronomy’ tag. “What I do is just cooking,” he says. “My cooking styles are born out of being inquisitive and maybe there’s an element of creativity. The science knowledge helps that.”
He tells the story of a scientific encounter in Holland. “This scientist wanted to demonstrate how saliva bonds to fat and protein molecules, so he gave me a spoonful of custard then, when I’d swallowed it, stuck a tampon in my mouth for a while. Then I had a second spoonful of custard and it tasted much richer. It’s all about how you can make custard seem more creamy with a dry mouth.” He pauses. “It’s interesting stuff, but I’m not going to start serving Fat Duck customers with Tampax before they eat.”
The second series of Heston Blumenthal’s ‘In Search of Perfection’ will begin on BBC2 in mid-October.