Heston Blumenthal

1966 -

Heston Marc Blumenthal OBE HonFRSC (born 27 May 1966) is a British celebrity chef, TV personality and food writer. Blumenthal is regarded as a pioneer of multi-sensory cooking, food pairing and flavour encapsulation. He came to public attention with unusual recipes, such as bacon-and-egg ice cream and snail porridge. His recipes for triple-cooked chipsand soft-centred Scotch eggs have been widely imitated. He has advocated a scientific approach to cooking, for which he has been awarded honorary degrees from Reading, Bristol and London universities and made an honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry.

Blumenthal's public profile has been increased by a number of television series, most notably for Channel 4, as well as a product range for the Waitrose supermarket chain introduced in 2010. He is the proprietor of the Fat Duck in Bray, Berkshire, a three Michelin star restaurant which is widely regarded as one of the best in the world. Blumenthal also owns Dinner, a two-Michelin star restaurant in London, and two pubs in Bray: the Hind's Head, with one Michelin star, and the Crown at Bray.

Heston Marc Blumenthal was born in Shepherd's Bush, London, on 27 May 1966, to a Jewish father born in Southern Rhodesia and an English mother who converted to Judaism.[1][2][3] His surname comes from a great-grandfather from Latvia and means 'flowered valley' (or 'bloom-dale'), in German.[4][5]

Blumenthal was raised in Paddington, and attended Latymer Upper School in Hammersmith;[6] St John's Church of England School in Lacey Green, Buckinghamshire; and John Hampden Grammar School, High Wycombe.[7]

His interest in cooking began at the age of sixteen on a family holiday to Provence, France, when he was taken to the 3-Michelin-starred restaurant L'Oustau de Baumanière.[8]: 13  He was inspired by the quality of the food and "the whole multi-sensory experience: the sound of fountains and cicadas, the heady smell of lavender, the sight of the waiters carving lamb at the table".[9] When he learned to cook, he was influenced by the cookbook series Les recettes originales, with French chefs such as Alain Chapel.[8]

When he left school at eighteen, Blumenthal began an apprenticeship at Raymond Blanc's Le Manoir aux Quat' Saisons but left after a week's probation.[8]: 28  Over the next ten years he worked in a "relatively undemanding series of jobs – credit controller, repo man"[10] during the day, teaching himself the French classical repertoire in the evenings. A pivotal moment came when reading On Food and Cooking: the Science and Lore of the Kitchen by Harold McGee in the mid-1980s. This challenged kitchen practices such as searing meat to seal in the juices, and it encouraged Heston to "adopt a totally different attitude towards cuisine that at its most basic boiled down to: question everything".[8]: 38 

In 1995, Blumenthal bought a run-down pub in Bray, Berkshire called the Ringers and re-opened it as the Fat Duck. It quickly gained the attention of food critics; Matthew Fort and Fay Maschler praised the cooking.[8]: 62  Blumenthal described the original restaurant as a "bistro".[8]: 51 

In 2002, Heston made a series of six half-hour television programmes, Kitchen Chemistry with Heston Blumenthal, which was transmitted on Discovery Science along with a book Kitchen Chemistry, published by the Royal Society of Chemistry. They have recently been repeated on the Community Channel. During 2004–07, he presented two BBC series called Heston Blumenthal: In Search of Perfection and Heston Blumenthal: Further Adventures In Search of Perfection.

Blumenthal acquired the Hind's Head, also in Bray, in 2004. The building was a 15th-century tavern; it now serves traditional seasonal cuisine and historic British dishes. In 2011, it was named the Michelin Pub Guide's "Pub of the Year".[11][12]

Blumenthal moved from the BBC to Channel 4 in March 2008, joining the channel's group of celebrity chefs which already included Jamie Oliver, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall and Gordon Ramsay. In January 2009 a three-part series of television programmes on Channel 4 covered his efforts to revamp the menu at a Little Chef motorway restaurant on the A303 road at Popham.[19][20] The Little Chef group extended Blumenthal's menu to 12 branches but, in 2013, removed his dishes from all restaurants.[21][22]

In March 2009 Blumenthal began a short series of programmes, called Heston's Feasts, showing themed dinner banquets. A second series of this was commissioned and began in 2010.[23]. From 22 February 2011, Channel 4 began airing Heston's new show, titled Heston's Mission Impossible, in which Heston targets lacklustre food served in various industries and aims to upgrade the food to meals that people enjoy to eat.[24]

In January 2011, Blumenthal opened his first restaurant outside Bray, Dinner by Heston Blumenthal, at the Mandarin Oriental Hyde Park, London. Historians helped to develop the restaurant's dishes from historic British recipes. Dinnerwas awarded its first Michelin star in 2012.[13] It was voted the 7th best restaurant in the world in 2013.[14] It received a second Michelin Star in the 2014 Michelin Guide.[15]. In June 2014, Blumenthal announced a new restaurant, the Perfectionists' Cafe, in Heathrow Airport.[16][17]

In January 2012, How To Cook Like Heston, aired on Channel 4. The programme was aimed at home cooks and featured some of the more approachable techniques employed by Blumenthal.[25]. In November 2012, Blumenthal fronted a television programme for Channel 4 entitled Heston's Fantastical Food and has also been part of a new 2014 series of Heston's Great British Food, again commissioned by Channel 4.[26]

The Fat Duck was temporarily relocated to Melbourne, Australia in 2015 whilst the Bray restaurant was refurbished.[18] Upon reaching the end of its temporary opening, the restaurant became a permanent Melbourne-based Dinner by Heston Blumenthal.

In 2020, Blumenthal appeared as a judge in the Channel 4 series 'Crazy Delicious' hosted by British comedian and TV presenter Jayde Adams, alongside chefs Niklas Ekstedt and Carla Hall.[27]. In 2021, he participated as a judge in the french version of Top Chef, proposing a food pairing test.[28]

Blumenthal calls his scientific approach to cuisine "multi-sensory cooking", arguing that eating is "one of the few activities we do that involves all of the senses simultaneously".[30] One of the catalysts for this culinary approach was a visit at 16 to the restaurant L'Oustau de Baumanière in Provence, which at the time had three Michelin stars.[31] The trip prompted a passion for cooking, above all because of "the whole multisensory experience: the sound of fountains and cicadas, the heady smell of lavender, the sight of the waiters carving lamb at the table".[32] One of the other main inspirations for a multi-sensory style of cooking was the lack of space and opulence at the Fat Duck. "Places like the Baumaniere had a view and a history and architecture that took its diners to a world of beauty and indulgence. The Fat Duck didn't have any of that, so it had had to capture the diners’ imagination in a different way – taking them to the mysteries of flavour perception and multi sensory delight."[5][8]: 117 

The event that cemented Heston's interest in this area was his creation of a crab ice cream to accompany a crab risotto. "People had difficulty accepting Crab Ice Cream, yet if it was renamed "Frozen Crab Bisque", people found it more acceptable and less sweet.[8] p. 71 The phenomenon was subsequently researched by Martin Yeomans and Lucy Chambers of the University of Sussex, who served test subjects a version of Blumenthal's ice cream flavoured with smoked salmon, but told one group they would be tasting ice cream and the other that they would be tasting a frozen savoury mousse. Although all consumed identical food, those eating what they thought was savoury mousse found the flavour acceptable while those eating what they thought was ice cream found the taste salty and generally disgusting.[8][33] For Blumenthal, this confirmed his ideas. "If something as simple as a name could make a dish appear more or less salty ... what effect might other cues have on flavours and our appreciation of them?"[8]: 105 

Since that point, exploring the sensory potential of food – via both research and the creation of new dishes – has been an ongoing and characteristic strand of Heston's cooking. In 2004, working on a commission for the photographer Nick Knight, he created a Delice of Chocolate containing popping candy and took the imaginative step of arranging for diners to listen on headphones to the little explosions it made as they ate – the first time such a thing had been done.[8]: 106–7  With Professor Charles Spence, head of the Crossmodal Research Laboratory at Oxford University he has conducted several experiments into how our sense of sound can affect perception of flavour. In one experiment, test subjects consumed an oyster in two-halves: the first half was accompanied by maritime sounds, the second by farmyard sounds, and they were then asked to rate pleasantness and intensity of flavour. It was found that oysters eaten while listening to seaside sounds were considered significantly more pleasant. In another, similar experiment, test subjects tasted bacon-and-egg ice cream while listening to sounds of bacon sizzling, followed by tasting it while listening to the sound of chickens clucking. The sizzling bacon sound made the bacon flavour appear more intense.[8]: 485 

In Blumenthal's view, experiments such as these show that our appreciation of food is subjective, determined by information sent by the senses to the brain: "the ways in which we make sense of what we are eating and decide whether we like it or not depend to a large extent on memory and contrast. Memory provides us with a range of references – flavours, tastes, smells, sights, sounds, emotions – that we draw on continually as we eat."[8]: 112  His dishes, therefore, tend to be designed to appeal to the senses in concert, and through this to trigger memories, associations and emotions.[34] Thus the Nitro-poached Green Tea and Lime Mousse on the Fat Duck menu is served with spritz of ‘lime grove’ scent from an atomiser; and the Jelly of Quail dish includes among its tableware a bed of oak moss, as well as being accompanied by a specially created scent of oak moss that is dispersed at the table by means of dry ice.

The most complete expression to date of his multisensory philosophy, however, is probably the dish ‘Sound of the Sea’, which first appeared on the Fat Duck menu in 2007. In this, ingredients with a distinctly oceanic character and flavour – dried kelp, hijiki seaweed, baby eels, razor clams, cockles, mussels, sea urchins – are fashioned into a course that has the appearance of the shore's edge, complete with sea ‘spume’ and edible sand. It is served on a glass-topped box containing real sand, and accompanied by headphones relaying the sounds of seagulls and the sea by means of a small iPod (placed in a conch shell) and earphones. The idea, according to Blumenthal, was one ‘of creating a world, of transporting the diner – through sound, through food, through an integrated appeal to the senses – to another place’.[8]: 212