How Heston fell back in love with Christmas
The chef tells Guy Kelly he sees the season through his toddler’s eyes – and always gets his roasties right
On a squally midweek afternoon in central London, I’m in an underground bunker at the BBC. It is 2019, but sitting opposite me, Heston Blumenthal – leaning forward, hands flailing, bug-eyed in his giant spectacles, talking a mile a minute – is lost in 2001.
Like Father Christmas crossed with Willy Wonka, the man who put Lapsang Souchong Tea-smoked salmon and hidden orange Christmas pudding on our tables (via Waitrose) is in town on a brief festive visit. He has overseen The Fable Tree, a new £375-a-head Christmas dining experience at his celebrated restaurant, The Fat Duck in Bray, and another Waitrose range that includes what looks like an ash-covered fig and port cheesecake, but he’s also taken part in a little time travel.
For a BBC documentary, Heston’s Marvellous Menu: Back to the Noughties, Blumenthal has fastidiously recreated the experience of dining at The Fat Duck in 2001. It sees him shrink the kitchen back to the tiny box it was in 2001 (it is now huge, with 42 chefs providing a 1:1 ratio of staff to customers), assemble the same team, serve the same menu, use the same equipment, lay the same table settings, and even invite that year’s famous faces – including the 40 per cent of Hear’Say you can’t remember the names of. He loved the experience, finding it “strangely emotional, in a positive way”.
In 2001 he was turning 35, with three young children at home, and The Fat Duck had been open for six years. It was about to be awarded its second Michelin star, would be named Restaurant of the Year by the AA, and in another er few years would gain a third star and top the list of The World’s 50 Best Restaurants.
You could be forgiven for thinking the man behind this was having the time of his life. In reality, he barely came up for air.
“I didn’t realise what was happening. I was working
120 hours a week, in a tiny little kitchen. So I was oblivious to The Fat Duck and its relevance in the world of gastronomy, because all I was doing was going home exhausted every night thinking: ‘It’s not good enough, it’s s---, it’s got to get better…’ Every night, beating myself up…”
Today, he laughs at the memory. That commitment to his work cost him a lot. He’s previously mentioned it impacting on his relationship with his older children – Jack, 26, who is now a chef who has worked at The Fat Duck, Jessie, 23, and Joy, 22 – his first marriage to Zanna, whom he divorced in 2011, his finances and his health, in that he now has metal in his hip and back from all the standing up. But at 53, he could scarcely be more Zen.
He now lives in a house-cum-test kitchen-cum-laboratory in the Alpilles region of France, with his second wife, Stephanie (a French estate agent, they married last year), 32, and their two-year-old daughter. Every day, he says, he wakes up, brushes his teeth, “hangs from something, anything” – he gestures to a beam above him – “for a minute, just to straighten the spine” then meditates for the first of two sessions that total 90 minutes.
Then he goes to the gym, or does tai chi, or rides his electric bicycle, before getting into the lab, where he and his team are researching water, the molecular structures of food, our microbiome, string theory, dementia and, of course, creating new dishes for The Fat Duck. He works 10 hours a day, “but that also includes working on myself ”.
Three years ago, he was diagnosed with “fairly extreme ADHD”, which is evidenced both in his endless quest for new ideas and helter-skelter conversational style (“A word of warning: Heston is verbose,” I am told on my way to meet him, and truly, keeping him on-topic is like catching a frog made from soap), but he finds his routine has helped.
“Rather than taking drugs for it, meditation changed my focus massively. Our minds naturally wander, especially in today’s society. We’ve lost the relationship with our breath, we’ve stopped appreciating water…”
He goes on to explain how our “chimp brains” are fickle and that we have too much access to choice, and that’s why there’s so much food waste, and how world hunger is what he’s really interested in, but actually his big thing is “the what, the why, the how of hunter-gathering”, because there’s no other creature that cooks or socialises over food like us, and that our brains are in constant dialogue with our gut, but that if he’s focusing on anything in France it’s water, and wellness, and storytelling.
This is how Blumenthal talks – like somebody reading you paragraphs from Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens in random order – but he’s enormously engaging. He is in his out-of-kitchen uniform of all black, including a black leather backpack at his feet that seems to be modelled on an armadillo shell. It’s a little bit S&M.
He’s heading back to France after we’re finished, then to a ski lodge in Italy for Christmas. He loves this time of year, but more than ever now he has a toddler again. “The songs, the trees, the lights, all of that. You enjoy it as a child but when you’ve got children you get to enjoy it again.”
For the record, he rarely has turkey for Christmas lunch. It’s either a chicken or a goose, which he’ll put a truffle in, and the whole thing is fairly traditional, by his standards. But he does have one tip for us all: “Get the roasties right, and base the whole meal around them. Everything else can be mistimed – meat can rest, veg can be done last-minute, but roast potatoes have to be eaten when they’re ready or they’ll go chewy. It actually makes the whole thing more relaxing if you just work around them.”
Wellness research, meditation, electric bicycles… you’d be forgiven for thinking Blumenthal was about to go vegan. Not so. Naturally, he has a full explanation. “It all gets really complicated, like the plastics issue,” he says. “Yes, plastic is a problem for the planet and oceans, but if we made things from another material, that would also bring problems. I’ve seen footage of the rainforests in Borneo and Sumatra being decimated at an incredible rate, so if you’re a vegan and you eat soy or palm oil, but think it’s better for the planet, well…”
He is still heavily involved, often via Skype, at The Fat Duck, which maintains its three Michelin stars but isn’t quite as busy as it was, probably because the rest of the restaurant world caught up. Some of his inventions, such as triple-cooked chips and using liquid nitrogen, are now commonplace. “I think this is the beginning of a whole new approach to cooking,” he predicted to Tamasin Day-Lewis in an interview for this newspaper in 2001.
The reservation line used to ring 30,000 times a day, but now there are plenty of tables still to snap up in January. You’ll need £325 per head before wine, mind.
“The Fat Duck now is in a different league to where it was in 2001,” he says. “The kitchen is a Rolls-Royce, it’s state of the art, the hours are much less, staff meals are amazing…” I wonder, given that staff welfare is so much improved, if he has anything to say about Sharon Anderson, the young chef who is suing The Fat Duck for £200,000 for claiming her job, which included putting 400 sweets a day into small bags using tweezers, left her with repetitive strain injury. It’s the only time he isn’t keen to go off on one.
“Oh, no, no, I have nothing to do with that,” he says, shifting awkwardly. It’s a bit uncomfortable, so I give him one final chance off the lead again. We’ve covered 2001. We’ve covered 2019. What will we be eating in 2037? He rocks back.
“Well. Fast food will still be there. There’ll be new crops, new foods, and we’ll think they’re great for us, but they’ll turn out to be really damaging. Personalisation of food and DNA, that’ll be a big thing, too…” he says, before finally pausing. “I dunno. I’d just quite like to still be alive then.”
‘If you’re vegan and eat soy or palm oil, thinking that’s better for the planet, well...’