The award-winning chef on his new TV show, Heston's Mission Impossible, why no one is allowed to shout in his kitchen ? and how he learned to control his violent temper
One week after opening his new restaurant, and the night before we meet, Heston Blumenthal hosted what is known as a "chef night". A sort of gastro-celebrity Oscars party, it was a gathering of premier league chefs in honour of his arrival in the capital, and Blumenthal and his team served them dishes he has been researching, devising and perfecting for several years. It was the realisation of a project so grand in ambition, and microscopic in detail, that even people who get highly excited about food might pause to wonder at the single-minded obsession of this chef. He served mackerel marinated in bergamot and then smoked over particularly mellow hay, and sirloin steak seared over a fire of five different kinds of wood, and carrots vacuum-sealed and then slow-cooked in a water bath. Then he realised he hadn't eaten a thing. And so all that passed Blumenthal's own lips that entire day was a little chocolate brownie he found in his hotel room when he went to bed at 2am.
"Someone once said to me you might have attention deficit disorder. I said if that's the case, how come I can put so many hours in for so many years? He said that's classic ADD. You'll have the attention span of a gnat for stuff that you're not interested in, but then you'll find something that really gets you, and then you go absolutely the other way. And apparently that's classic ADD." Does he think they might have been on to something? "I dunno, but it's an interesting idea."
I wouldn't be at all surprised if there was some truth in the diagnosis, for there is something decidedly unusual about Blumenthal. Often described as the Willy Wonka of the kitchen, he became fascinated by gastronomy at the age of 16 when his parents took him to a Michelin-starred restaurant in Provence ? an experience he can still describe in forensic detail, right down to the sommelier's moustache. "I chose red mullet with a sauce vierge, lamb in puff pastry and cr�pes baumani�re. And I thought, 'This is it!'" He had never eaten anything like it in his life.
He didn't go on to train as a chef, though. First he bought a book about Michelin-starred chefs, and studied it obsessively. Then he spent his 20s earning a living as a credit controller, but in his spare time teaching himself about the science of food ? despite having failed O-level chemistry ? and the outlandish possibilities to be discovered by introducing industrial technology to the kitchen. "The first recipe I came up with was triple-cooked chips. I got completely focused on this one thing, cos I got obsessed with why chips went soggy. Then I got obsessed about cr�me br�l�e, and then ice-cream."
At the age of 29, when many professional chefs are approaching the downward slopes of their career, he had still never been employed in a kitchen. He sold his home, and moved his wife and two small children in with his parents, so that he could spend the money opening his own restaurant. At first The Fat Duck, in the sleepy Berkshire village of Bray, looked like a modest and unremarkable establishment, and in the early years came very close to bankruptcy. But gradually its menu, which famously featured snail porridge and bacon and egg ice-cream, began to earn not just a reputation for culinary alchemy, but first one, then two, and now three Michelin stars. In 2005 it was named best restaurant in the world.
Since 2008 he has been familiar to an audience wider than one that can afford the Fat Duck's �160-a-head tasting menu, joining Channel 4's stable of celebrity chefs alongside Jamie Oliver, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall and Gordon Ramsay, and winning a Bafta nomination and a Royal Television Society award for his 2009 series Feast. He became the face of Waitrose, creating a Christmas pudding last year that sold out so fast it prompted punch-ups in supermarket aisles, and an eBay bidding war that saw the puddings change hands for up to �1,000. Two weeks ago he opened Heston Blumenthal's Dinner, in a five-star Knightsbridge hotel, sending food critics into an ecstasy of delirium, and later this month his new series, Heston's Mission Impossible, will show him attempting to revolutionise food in a children's hospital, a navy submarine, an airline and a cinema.
But he has always struck me as an unlikely TV personality. Whereas Jamie, Gordon and Hugh are all, in their different ways, effortlessly at ease performing for the camera, there is an ascetic quality about the 44-year-old Blumenthal, with his shaved head and little spectacles, that can make him seem a little stiff, almost even slightly sinister. So it's a surprise when he bounds into the dining room of Dinner with a cheerful kiss for a greeting, altogether looser and less inscrutable than the version we see on our screens.
He is, he agrees, nothing like the old-fashioned stereotype of the blustering shouty chef. "This kitchen is completely calm. Some of the old-fashioned chefs ? they become kings in their kitchen, they've got to be called chef. But I don't care if someone calls me chef or Heston, it really doesn't bother me. I haven't raised my voice for eight to 10 years in the kitchen. And I won't have anybody shouting. If I hear of anybody having a go at anyone else, they'll get disciplined."
The bigger surprise comes when he admits he hasn't always been so serene. "When I was younger I could always look after myself physically, but emotionally it was more difficult. Pre-restaurant opening I'd be the first to go and stick my fist up to somebody. It wasn't that I was full of rage, exactly. If I got into an altercation with somebody it was normally cos I thought I was being Knight Rider or something, or the caped crusader, righting wrongs."
He cured himself of his temper by seeing a cranial osteopath, a therapist and even a faith healer. "And you'll never see me shouting at people. I don't want to go back to that, there's no way I want to go back to that. I could have got myself locked up. It wasn't good." Was he ever actually violent? "Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. If someone started on me in the pub, or if someone was aggressive towards me . . ." Would he throw a punch? "Oh God, yeah, easy. I wouldn't scream and shout though. It was just easier to punch somebody." Was he ever arrested? He pauses for a second or two. "No. But there were some very close incidents. I can safely say I was lucky not to be arrested."
After some slightly embarrassed resistance, he tells a story from years ago, before he opened the Fat Duck, about some men coming to his parents' house and threatening his father over a dispute about an unpaid builder's bill.
"I had my son with me and had to take him indoors and he was crying, and I just thought right, this is it. I put him down and this weird thing happened, everything just slowed down, my eyes went red and everything was in complete slow motion. The crazy thing was, the feeling was fantastic. It wasn't like, 'Oh, I'm so cross!' It went the other way, slow motion, eyes went red, almost grinning."
It was a nice feeling? "Yeah, dangerously nice. So I went into the cupboard where my old man kept his shotgun, a Beretta, pulled it out, loaded both barrels and stood at the door. I shot the gun, they got in the car and drove off, and I got in my car and followed them. I found them in the car park in the village and I said you've got a choice, we can have this out right now here or you can come and talk about it, so I drove them back to my dad's, sat them down in the kitchen with a meat cleaver in my hand, and talked about it. By the end of it everyone shook hands." He shakes his head in almost dazed wonderment.
"It's not like that happened every time I got angry, but it's dangerous when the feeling's really good. The extreme stuff was always the slow motion ? and then it's like being on some high, you feel great. But it's weird. Nothing is left of that anger. It's all gone."
What would he do now if his father were being threatened?
"Just pick up the phone and call the police."
Talking to Blumenthal, you get the impression that his whole life divides into pre- and post-Fat Duck. It's almost as if he's recalling someone else altogether when he tells that tale ? yet when he talks about the Duck, he becomes so intensely animated that nothing else appears to matter. He ate there three weeks ago, for his son's 18th birthday ? "And it was the first time in 15 years that I can hand-on-heart say I'm happy with the restaurant."
It still isn't actually making any money, he cheerfully admits ? partly because his wage bills and other overheads are so astronomical, but also because he keeps removing more tables. On an average day the receptionists manage to answer about 400 booking phone calls, but they have a computer system that logs all the calls that fail to get through ? and on a typical day these number 24,000. On one bank holiday it logged 32,000 missed calls. Given that a table for two generates revenue of �250,000 a year, you'd think it might be an idea to try and squeeze a few more in, rather than take them away, and he agrees, "It breaks all the rules of running a restaurant." And yet the restaurant is now down to 42 seats.
"Because with fewer covers we can pay more attention to detail. The Duck allows everything else to happen ? so everything I do is to pay the Duck back and protect it. Everything else I do ? all the other areas of the business ? are all about protecting the Duck. The Duck is my baby."
Were the TV and restaurant critic AA Gill to write a bad review, would it hurt more if it were of his restaurants or his TV series? He looks as if the question were insane."My restaurants, of course. Without a shadow of a doubt. Television isn't my day job."
In fact, though we're ostensibly here to talk about Heston's Mission Impossible, he doesn't even mention it, and had I not brought the new series up I suspect we might never have got round to it. The four documentaries follow Blumenthal tackling food in traditionally unpromising settings, and the programme I saw shows him inventing a new menu for the children at Liverpool's Alder Hey hospital. It features all the tropes of reality makeover television ? the hostile kitchen staff, the defeatist bureaucrats, the initially wary but finally delighted children ? and although Blumenthal's innovations are particularly whacky (pizza topped with fried worms injected with tomato ketchup), the overall impression is of overly familiar territory, and in truth a bit derivative of Jamie's School Dinners.
"I wanted to show that if you make meal times exciting, kids will eat anything ? even worms. If they'll eat that, just think what else they'll eat. That was the idea." But though Blumenthal talks about wanting to "make a difference", and does clearly care about what the nation eats ? "As a chef you wouldn't really be worth your salt if you didn't" ? he doesn't really come across as a natural campaigner. The big appeal of TV, he acknowledges, is the opportunities it offers for research and development, which then "feed back to the Duck".
How does he square the inherently exclusive nature of his restaurants with a mission to make good food more accessible to all? The dining room at Dinner cost �6.5m to fit out, the kitchen cost another �1.5m, and the tea menu is so intricately complex it takes the waiter a good five minutes to talk diners through it, and the final item on the list costs �14.50 a cup."But is paying �50 for a dish more elitist than spending �20,000 on a car?" Blumenthal queries. He is not, he insists, a foodie purist, claiming, "I like a kebab as much as the next person." Hmm, I say, picturing my local kebab shop ? probably not. "OK," he grins, "maybe not quite. But I don't think you should be too snobbish about food. I like a pork pie, I like a sandwich. At home I'll open the fridge and if there's some ham and Hellmann's mayo, I'll eat that."
He seldom eats a meal, though ? particularly not at home. "We've got 600 dishes in development, between the restaurants and the television and the books and Waitrose, and so sometimes the tasting sessions we have are brutal. I can go through 60 or 70 dishes in a day." And though fanatically organised and thorough at work, "At home I've got 1,500 cook books and the spines have all gone, the pages are all torn ? it's chaos. It's weird ? even ironing, I can put on a creased T-shirt at home and it doesn't bother me at all. I'm very lucky to have a wife who picks up after me."
Being Mrs Blumenthal must be a lonely business, for she has had to bring up their three children, all now in their teens, more or less by herself. The most the family saw of her husband at home was during the fortnight two years ago, when he had to close the Fat Duck following a food poisoning scare ? the "worst period of my life, without a doubt". He wasn't even sure it would ever reopen, and although the restaurant was cleared of any blame, he still seems scarred by the experience, and a little defensive.
He is much more relaxed about clearing up any confusion regarding his name. "No, I am not named after Heston motorway services! When we got the third star I did an interview with a newspaper ? and they asked where the name came from? I said I didn't know, my parents probably had a night out and parked up at Heston services. It was obviously a joke, but it got taken seriously, and keeps being repeated, and I've had to spend forever apologising to them. So officially, I was not named after Heston services."
Heston's Mission Impossible is at 9pm on 22 February on Channel 4.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2011/feb/13/heston-blumenthal-mission-impossible-chef
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