The Ice Man Cometh

Heston Blumenthal powers across the room to say hello, his tanned little head sitting atop the solid block of his body like a Henry Moore statue. The dad in Family Group, perhaps. Or Happy Chef Reclining With Snail Porridge. With his nutty professor inventions such as bacon and egg ice cream and the famous mollusc porridge, Blumenthal is now one of the most famous chefs in the world, but to be honest, meeting him is a little bit embarrassing. Partly because a few years ago I gave one of his restaurants a terrible review, but mostly because the flies of his Diesel jeans appear to be open. Is either of us going to say anything about the obvious? No, of course we are not. This is England, after all.

Instead, we discuss triangular boiled eggs, Butlins holiday camps, being broke – ‘I only stopped worrying about money three months ago’ he says - and his attempts to be a better father to his three young children. A self-taught chef, Blumenthal spent eleven years working around the clock to make his name as the premier British exponent of molecular gastronomy cooking. ‘I wasn’t going off and enjoying myself, I was working. I hope the kids will understand, and that it’s not too late to make it up to them for not being around when they were little. I have missed years of it,’ he says. Two years ago at Christmas, when his then 13 year old son pointed out that it was the first time Dad had helped to decorate the tree, Blumenthal wept.

‘I knew that the Fat Duck had taken its toll, but the innocent, friendly way he said it made it even worse. It was awful. I felt dreadful, absolutely, really so bad. Determined to do better,’ he says.

However, he is friendly and cheerful and seems, at first glance, to be all chest. A great, big wall of prime, organic South African chest. Before he became one of the most famous chefs in Britain, with three Michelin stars and assorted accolades proclaiming his celebrated restaurant, the Fat Duck, to be the best in the world, Blumenthal was a kick boxer and a bailiff. His must have been a formidable presence, as he filled a front doorway, or repossessed a car, or unplugged the family hi-fi system for the last time. Yet today there is nothing aggressive about him, no residue of the institutionalised callousness which one images must be part of the repo-man’s character. In fact, he’s the exact opposite. He is a darling, with a childlike enthusiasm for the better things in life. ‘I’ve got a bit of a problem with ice-cream. I think I need to go to ice cream anonymous,’ he says, as well he might.

Blumenthal has just become an ‘ambassador’ for Haagen-Dazs ice cream and today, in a central London club, he is giving a talk to an audience of food journalists about taste and memory. Why on earth is Blumenthal doing this? Has he sold out? Despite appearances, the chef is not actually making, suggesting or experimenting with ice cream flavours for the company’s benefit. All he seems to be doing is rambling on about flavour, taste and memory in a way that will be familiar to anyone who has read his newspaper columns or knows his work.

No Money To Pay The Staff

Meanwhile, we are all trying hard to concentrate on his reminisces of Pink Panther bars and seaside holidays, and not focus on his jeans, although he does take time to point out that the exposed rivets are part of the jeans’ style, not an oversight on his part. Chefs! They prepare for everything. Thank God.

As Blumenthal amiably chats on, various Haagen-Dazs employees force us to mulch down ice cream and propaganda in equal measure, and tut-tut together about the amount of stabilisers, colourings and exhausted vanilla that rival ice cream companies use in their product. Blumenthal’s role in this swirl of humbug is, I imagine, to add erudite gourmet lustre to the Haagen-Dazs brand, in exchange for a fat, triple choc cheque. Frankly, it seems a strange thing for someone of his stature to be doing, but the catering world is a fickle one. When Blumenthal won his third Michelin star in January 2004, he didn’t have enough money to pay his staff at the end of the week. Even now, the Fat Duck, situated in the Berkshire village of Bray, only survives by being part of the Blumenthal phenomenon; a business that encompasses books, BBC television series, promotions, development kitchens, ambassadorships, lectures and an interest in the Hinds Head, a pub restaurant next door to the Fat Duck which he bought in 2004.

‘Money is not a worry any more,’ says Blumenthal, who is no longer the majority shareholder in the Hinds Head part of the business, following a deal with one of his uncles, a South African based businessman. (Although Blumenthal was born in London in 1966, his father was born in Zimbabwe and raised in South Africa).

‘With my uncle coming in, I now have that security. For the first time in my life, I feel fantastic. I did not realise how stressed I had been. That deal has taken a weight off my shoulders. Freed me up to do other things,’ he says. ‘Yes, I make money now. Not directly from the Fat Duck, which has a huge development kitchen attached. If we didn’t have that, then as a stand alone business the Fat Duck would be fine, it would be making money. It doesn’t lose money as such, but the turnover is not much. What it does do is sustain the rest of the business. Nothing –the books, the television – would have happened without the Fat Duck.’

There Is No Best Restaurant In The World

I think we can take that to mean that it scrapes by, despite its position as one of a trio of Michelin triple starred restaurants in the UK. At the moment, the Fat Duck is usually 95% full and in a period of transition as it changes its a la carte menu from a modern classic French style to something which Blumenthal calls Historic British, following his long period of study with food historians at Hampton Court. I hope it means his horrible tobacco chocolates are off the menu, and perhaps the salmon poached in liquorice too - but I know I am in the minority here. People love the quirkiness of his tasting menu, which currently includes a dish called The Sound of the Sea (you eat it listening to sea sounds on an iPod); a silver rose bush with edible petals; and after dinner whisky gums. Fellow chefs, foodies and most of the catering industry adore all this stuff. On top of his Michelin accolades, the Fat Duck was voted best restaurant in the world by a panel of experts polled by Restaurant magazine in 2005 and for the last two years has come second to El Bulli, the Spanish restaurant which has inspired him the most. Yet even Blumenthal has to take this tribute with a pinch of (extra fine) sea salt.

‘You can’t have the best restaurant in the world. You just can’t. Best restaurant? For what purpose? Not only for styles of cooking, but for the occasion and what you fancy eating, and things like that. When I got the award, I remember waking up the morning after, and I said to my wife, you know what; regardless if this is valid or not valid, or what the competition is, all I am going to do is really enjoy this and take it for what it is.’

Heston and Suzanna have been together since 1985, she is a former nurse who shares his love of all things gastronomic. They have three children, Jack (15), Jessie (12) and Joy (10) and it is touching how he takes every opportunity to thank her for keeping the home fires burning for all those years when he was climbing into his chest size 60 chef’s jacket and working out how to make tomato water or the perfect triple cooked chip. ‘She never moaned or complained. She set me free to do it all, and I could not have done it without her,’ he says.

Now, as a reconstituted father, he has just returned from a school rugby tournament with Jack, where all the dads and the boys stayed in Butlins, Bognor Regis. ‘That’s where I got my tan,’ says Blumenthal, rubbing the stubble on his scalp. What was the food like there? ‘Honestly, I am not a food snob,’ he says, ‘but it was so bad. It was sub-school dinners.’

Blumenthal, the Willy Wonka of British cuisine, found himself entranced by a tray of Butlins boiled eggs, which had somehow transmogrified into triangular shapes. ‘It took me hours to work it out, but I realised what they had done was peel them and leave them on a metal tray under the lights and the tray got hotter, absorbing the energy until the underside of the egg collapsed. The egg white was rock, hard, not rubbery. It was absolutely amazing.’

One afternoon, the group escaped for a barbeque on the beach which Blumenthal helped to organise with supplies sourced from the local Tesco. ‘We did it for under £4 a head’, he says, obviously quite proud of this. ‘I was going to do the cooking, too, but there is something about blokes and barbeques, isn’t there? It is hard wired into us. I dunno if it is the caveman pagan ritual or what. But some blokes put the burgers on and I could smell the paraffin that the charcoal was coated in. And I said, don’t you think you should leave it for a bit to get rid of that? But that was it; they just took over, ignored me and carried on.’

The highest rated chef in the country then understood what every housewife has known for decades, which is that even if you have three sodding Michelin stars and own one of the best restaurants in the world, you should never get between an Englishman and his barbeque. So Heston Blumenthal just poured himself a glass of wine and sat down in the sunshine, forming another handsome Henry Moore as he did so. Reclining Chef Learns How To Smell the Roses. ‘It was still a great day out,’ says the spurned cook, who is discovering how to relax at last.

© jan moir 2007

• © jan moir are you ready to order First published in April 2007