First, Queen Elizabeth awarded him the Order of the British Empire for his merits in British gastronomy. Later, the founder of the legendary three-star restaurant The Fat Duck in the English town of Bray received an even greater honor. The British Office of Heraldics granted Heston Blumenthal the right to bear his own coat of arms. The now 58-year-old Englishman opted for a duck with three lavender stalks in its mouth. Among them is a slogan that sums up his cooking philosophy – not to mention his life – in the best possible way: “Question everything”.
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Between chef’s jacket and lab coat
Born in London, he is one of the most significant innovators in molecular cuisine. His urge to relentlessly question traditional conventions not only makes him one of the world’s top chefs. It has also led him to work closely with food scientists and chemists. Men’s magazine Esquire therefore calls Blumenthal “the crazy scientist of British cuisine, whose “cooking jacket is also a lab coat”. In fact, his quest for perfection has gained the respect of the scientific community. Heston Blumenthal is the only chef to be appointed an honorary member of the Royal Society of Chemistry.
Heston Blumenthal is not even a trained chef. He is self-taught and follows his curiosity and passion. This passion is ultimately reflected in his success, as his restaurants have been awarded a total of six Michelin stars. The beginning of his story and the starting point of his career as an exceptional restaurateur could be described as “fateful”. Instead of their usual vacation on the south coast of England, the Blumenthals spent the summer of 1982 on the European mainland. While there, they dined for the first time in a Michelin-starred restaurant, L’Oustau de Baumanière in the southern French municipality of Les Baux-de-Provence.
Heston Blumenthal can still vividly remember the many impressions that were to forever change his then 16-year-old self. “The crickets chirping, the smell of lavender at sunset, the clinking of glasses, the slicing of a leg of lamb as the waiters poured sauces over soufflés. And this was at a time when olive oil was only available at the pharmacy in England to clean your ears with! It was so different from fish and chips, which had been the greatest possible pleasure up until then.”
Vanilla ice cream as inspiration for culinary innovation
With the taste of red mullet with sauce Vierge, leg of lamb in puff pastry with green beans and potato gratin and the final crêpes Baumanière still on his tongue, Heston Blumenthal decided to become a chef. However, the martial arts enthusiast had no interest in formal training He preferred to devour French cookbooks in his mother’s kitchen, which he laboriously translated using a dictionary.
This laid the foundation for his future culinary work, as he later recalled. “When you look at 15 cookbooks, you read 15 different recipes for vanilla ice cream. I thought to myself, Why are there such big differences? Is it because the chefs themselves have learned to do so? Or do these ingredients play a role beyond the pure taste?”
Always looking for innovation and inspiration, Heston Blumenthal started to focus on making ice cream. “In an Italian cookbook from the 19th century, I found a recipe for a Parmesan ice cream. And I thought, Ah, why do we always think of ice cream as something that has to be sweet? So I created a crab risotto with a layer of passion fruit jelly and a reduction of red bell pepper. It then turned into something that can best be described as the middle between crab sorbet and crab ice cream.”
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21-hour days
With the exception of a one-week internship at Raymond Blancs Le Manoir aux Quat’ Saisons near Oxford, the young Blumenthal gained no gastronomic experience. But he was pursuing a clear goal, which he worked towards with odd jobs for ten years. His declared goal: his own restaurant – where he could implement ideas such as his crab ice cream without compromise.
He worked as a debt collector, office supplies salesman and accountant in his father-in-law’s company, all “glamorous stuff,” as he later ironically noted. “After regular eight-hour days, I was exhausted and dead tired. In The Fat Duck, I worked 20, 21 hours a day at the beginning, but I was never exhausted. Time passed incredibly quickly and unlike in the office, I wasn’t bored for a second.” Perhaps because he was the first restaurateur to experiment with liquid nitrogen in his kitchen?
Blumenthal’s restaurants
The aforementioned Fat Duck opened in 1995 in the small town of Bray in England with one dishwasher as the only employee. It is still the center of Blumenthal’s gastronomic empire today. An empire that includes restaurants with distinct characteristics: The casual village pub The Hinds Head in the immediate vicinity of the main house in Bray has also received a Michelin star. The Perfectionists’ Café at London’s Heathrow Airport provides a fast food oasis at the highest level. In addition to The Dinner by Heston Blumenthal (two stars) in the Mandarin Oriental Hotel at London’s Hyde Park, Heston Blumenthal will open a spin-off of the luxury hotel concept at Atlantis The Royal on Dubai’s artificial archipelago The Palm at the beginning of 2024.
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The upside-down menu at the Fat Duck
The Fat Duck can accommodate 42 guests at 14 tables at lunchtime and in the evening. The eleven-course menu – surrounded by a story concept inspired by “Alice in Wonderland” – includes Blumenthal’s legendary snail porridge. If you wish, you can recall the motto “question everything”, and enjoy everything in the reverse order, from the dessert mix “Like a Kid in a Sweet Shop” to the “Nitroaperitif”.
From the very beginning, Blumenthal has been enthusiastically pursuing innovation at his flagship restaurant, which was named the best restaurant in the world in 2005. He even calls sous vide “the greatest advance in cooking technology in decades”. But the popular TV star and author (“In Search of Perfection”) is also developing his own ideas to better realize his vision of the “multi-sensory” experience. “For me, cooking has nothing to do with mathematical formulas, it has to do with touch, ideas and taste. However, the knowledge gained from cooking science allows us to think new and be precise in every respect.”
Heston Blumenthal: Discoverer of food pairing
Heston Blumenthal is enriching the world of gastronomy with the theory (and practice) of foodpairing. He absolutely wants to understand why caviar and white chocolate taste so well together. François Benzi from the Swiss fragrance manufacturer Firmenich finds the answer in the laboratory using gas chromatography and mass spectroscopy. Both caviar and white chocolate contain a substance called trimethylamine. And this is the chemical reason why two at first glance incompatible foods harmonize so surprisingly well on the palate.
However, Great Britain’s Chef of the Year 2004 does not consider the targeted analysis and categorization of individual taste components to be the complete picture. Sure, food pairing is a useful tool, says Heston Blumenthal, but it should by no means overshadow the chef’s culinary inspiration. “The molecular profile of a single ingredient is so complex that even if it has multiple compounds in common with another, there are still as many reasons why they don’t fit together…”
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Life is beautiful
Heston Blumenthal is a father of four. His three adult children from his first marriage (Zack, Jessie and Joy) were followed by daughter Shea-Rose in 2018. His life is not only based on the premise of always questioning everything. Above the 300-year-old fireplace in his village pub, there is a motto that has also had a very powerful effect on him. “Fear knocked on the door, faith answered and no one was there.” And yet, says Blumenthal, there is also something positive about fear. “We need it. Because fear gives us the opportunity to rise above it and ourselves.”
He knows he may not always be the easiest person to deal with personally – even if he couldn’t put his finger on the reason for a long time. In an impressively candid interview at the Global ADHD Conference in 2022, Blumenthal spoke about his attention deficit, which was initially self-diagnosed and has since been medically confirmed. He also spoke tearfully about his thoughts of suicide. “Despite having all these awards, all these titles and honors, I still felt like it wasn’t enough. I had lost my orientation, my inner compass. Day in, day out – I laid on my couch and was so lost. If I’d had a gun at that moment, I would have used it.”
He has long since turned these negative thoughts back into positive energy, says Heston Blumenthal. Now he does strength exercises three times a day and feels physically in top shape. “I think to myself every day now, Oh my God, life is so beautiful! But if I hadn’t gone through that difficult time, I wouldn’t be where I am today. My life has never been so precious, so fulfilling. I wouldn’t want to change anything about this time, about these experiences – because I’m still here. And what’s more, I’m just getting started!”
