To mark 25 years of The Fat Duck, Heston Blumenthal reflects on the restaurant’s early days, his 10-year collaboration with Waitrose, and his futuristic plans for food. “I’ve fallen down another rabbit hole,” he tells Emma Higginbotham.
In 1995, Heston Blumenthal bought a grotty pub called The Ringers in the Berkshire village of Bray, and set about turning it into a restaurant.
On paper, it was a terrible idea. He’d never had a cookery lesson, let alone run a kitchen, and the villagers weren’t exactly welcoming.
“I didn’t have any money, so it’s all I could afford, but I didn’t quite realise just how dodgy this pub was before,” says Heston. “I was wheeling a wheelbarrow of rubble to a skip outside, and this old lady walked past and asked me what we were doing, so I gave her this very passionate speech. She picked up her walking stick, pointed it at me and said ‘We’ve had three owners in five years. We’ve closed them down. We’re going to close you down!’ and hobbled off.”
It’s just as well she didn’t. The dodgy boozer, renamed The Fat Duck, would go on to win three Michelin stars, be crowned the World’s Best Restaurant and turn that chap with the wheelbarrow – famed for such curiosities as snail porridge, chocolate wine and lickable wallpaper – into a global star.
To be fair to the old lady, though, Heston’s credentials weren’t massively encouraging. Aged 29, his background was in repossessing office equipment and doing the books for his dad’s leasing company. Even he thought he’d bitten off more than he could chew.
“All I had were my triple-cooked chips, which were my first culinary invention, and a handful of recipes I’d been working on at home,” he says. “But I also had my ‘Question everything’ approach, and my memory from the Baumanière.”
That memory – Heston’s epiphany – is a much-told story. When he was 16, his parents took him to the Michelin-starred L’Oustau de Baumanière in Provence, and he “fell down a rabbit hole.” It wasn’t just the exquisite food that captivated him, it was the intoxicating scent of the lavender, the buzz of the crickets, the sound of the waiters’ feet crunching on the gravel. At that moment, he realised that eating was a multi-sensory experience, and his career path was set.
Before then, London-born Heston had barely lifted a spatula. “I played around when I was probably 12 or 13, chucking a bit of lamb neck in the pan with tomato ketchup, and my sister and I might have made a cake for my mum’s birthday, but nothing of any major note,” he recalls.
“After I went to the Baumanière, I started to buy the great chefs of France’s cookbooks. But they weren’t like the glossy books that us big-name, hoity-toity chefs do today; most were just text. And I couldn’t understand French, so I started translating them with a French-English dictionary, word for word.
“I spent I don’t know how many hundreds of hours experimenting, cooking, reading, questioning. Then every year, six to nine months’ of my savings was spent on a two-week trip to France. I’d go to restaurants, butchers, winemakers, cheesemakers, farms, fishing ports – anything I could do to soak it up. So unknowingly I had these elements in place.”
Initially he opened The Fat Duck as a French-style bistro, with £3.25 starters and mains for less than a tenner. The team, such as it was, consisted of two front-of-house staff plus Heston and a pot-washer in the kitchen.
“I had no idea how to run a restaurant,” he admits. “It was chaos, absolute chaos. For the first few years I only slept 15 hours a week. I was exhausted, and so delirious I remember trying to light a blowtorch from a hot tap.”
Every day he’d work until around 3am before grabbing a couple of hours’ kip on the dirty linen, then begin all over again. “Everything I had was in that restaurant financially, so I had no choice.”
Yet Heston’s curiosity and his curious menu, complete with headline-grabbing dishes such as crab ice-cream, got people talking. Demand for tables grew, and within four years he’d won his first Michelin star. A second followed soon after, then in 2004 the editor of the Michelin Guide rang Heston personally. “He told me we’d got the third star, and I don’t know how much time passed, but I remember him saying ‘Are you still there?!’”
The world began to take notice of the visionary chef, and he responded with verve. On TV shows for the BBC and Channel 4, he explored the extremes of gastronomy and turned fairytales into feasts. And whether he was disguising offal as fruit, making edible cutlery or creating a pork scratching the size of his head, Heston was clearly enjoying himself.
Yet behind the whimsy lay solid science, particularly regarding the senses. He explored how listening to sizzling sounds while eating bacon, or explosions while eating popping candy, made the experience more intense, and poured his findings into his menus: The Fat Duck’s signature dish, Sound of the Sea, involves listening to crashing waves and the cries of seagulls (via an iPod hidden in a conch shell) while nibbling seafood and edible sand.
Inevitably, others in the food world embraced his discoveries too. “So now,” he says, “things like liquid nitrogen, smells in the room, savoury ice creams, popping candy, sous-vide cooking, flavour pairing – they’ve become woven into the mainstay of international gastronomy, whereas years ago, my God! Liquid nitrogen would have nearly put me in prison.”
This year The Fat Duck celebrates its 25th anniversary with Anthology: four ‘volumes’ of tasting menus spread out over the coming seasons. Each volume outlines the 54-year-old’s culinary journey, with dishes old and new. Currently on the table is volume one, featuring snail porridge from the Duck’s early days and the more recent ‘Counting Sheep’ dessert, served on a floating pillow.
For those who love Heston’s quirky flavour combinations and visual magic but can’t afford the restaurant’s prices (the Anthology volumes start at £250 per person), his collaboration with Waitrose & Partners offers a rather tasty alternative.
More than 200 Heston from Waitrose products have been launched over the last decade, from Banana & Bacon Trifle to a festive dessert that looks like Brussels sprouts, complete with chocolate ‘gravy’. And for Heston, each has to be absolutely perfect.
“Our way of working is the opposite of someone just stamping their name on a box,” he says, referring to the painstaking process whereby his team and Waitrose’s development chefs come up with ideas, make them, then go back and forth with ever-improved versions.
“The one I always remember is the chicken liver parfait, which was about a dozen times between Waitrose and us, and then another dozen times with the manufacturer, and then I ditched it! I wasn’t happy with it.
“It sat in the metaphorical storeroom until Waitrose found a new supplier, and we started again. This time it only took a couple of goes, but it took an awful lot of work to get it to that quality.
“Over the years we’ve found a much more efficient way to work together, because they can second-guess things I always look for, but the relationship has evolved through thousands of hours, collectively, of hard work.”
Heston’s products often cause a stir. Take the Hidden Orange Christmas Pudding, which sold out almost as soon as it was launched in 2010; within days, the £14 puds were appearing eBay for hundreds of pounds. “The last two products that we’ve released have generated a load of press too,” he adds. “One was the full English breakfast sandwich, and the gin has gone down really well.”
Called Lazy Sunshine Gin, the new lavender-infused spirit, which should be served with a drizzle of olive oil, was created with his home in the South of France in mind, “because I wanted to reflect something about me being here.”
Fittingly, Heston now lives in the same village as the Baumanière with his second wife, Stephanie, and their three-year-old daughter, Shea Rose (he also has three grown-up children from his first marriage). Currently he divides his week between Provence and, thanks to a local pharmacy with its €25 Covid tests, Bray.
“My main focus and absolute number one priority, is getting the Duck – I was going to say purring, I suppose I should say quacking,” he says. “But I absolutely love it here.
“If I have a full-on couple of days in the UK, I come back and it’s still full-on, but it’s breathing space. I can work on the bigger picture stuff with less distraction, and I can do it by trees, fields, mountains and olive groves. I never remember being this happy, clear and motivated.”
The ‘bigger picture stuff’ is pretty out-there, even by Heston’s standards. He’s currently trying to prove that our emotions can physically change the consistency of water, and that this in turn can change food.
“Our thoughts and emotions are vibrations: a high-frequency vibration could be excitement or anger, and a low-frequency vibration could be depressed or relaxed,” he explains.
“We’ve done experiments with three jars of rice: same rice, same water. Each morning you give one jar positive intent, gratitude and love. The other jar you say you hate it, you can’t eat it, you make me sick, and the third jar you ignore.
“We’ve done five of these, and the results come out the same each time. The rice with the gratitude, the water goes slightly golden, it smells a bit floral, fermented, slightly sweet. The one that’s been given the abuse goes like an over-ripe stinking cheese, and the one that’s been ignored is the worst of the lot.
“This is a humongous subject that needs a lot more work, but this for me is like I’ve fallen down another rabbit hole,” he says. “It’s absolutely fascinating, and my belief is that it could have a major impact on our wellness.”
With ideas like this, it’s not surprising that Heston has been labelled a ‘mad scientist’. Does that bother him? “Years ago I might have had a bit of an inferiority complex about not being understood, and sometimes I allowed those comments to affect me,” he admits. “But now? No.”
Moreover, his quest to ‘Question everything’ is clearly as pressing as ever.
“I got a couple of lifetime achievement awards recently, and I thought actually, it could feel like I’m being rolled out to pasture,” he says, and laughs. “Thanks, but no way!”
TASTING NOTES
Despite failing his Chemistry O-Level, Heston’s scientific progress won him an honorary fellowship of the Royal Society of Chemistry. “It took me a while to process how big that was,” he says. “About three people a year get offered a fellowship; when I went, these other two guys were Nobel prizewinners – and I chop onions.”
The chef, who is also behind Dinner by Heston at the Mandarin Oriental in London, and Bray gastropubs The Hind’s Head and The Crown, relocated the entire Fat Duck team to a pop-up in Melbourne, Australia, in 2015 while the restaurant was being refurbished.
As patron of industry charity Action Hospitality, Heston released a video of himself miming how to prepare triple-cooked chips to raise awareness about their #InvisibleChips campaign, which invites diners to add the cost of a portion of chips to their bill to support hospitality workers facing redundancy due to the pandemic.
An edited version of this interview appeared in Waitrose Weekend in October 2020 (c) Waitrose