Celebrity chef Heston Blumenthal has opened up about feeling lonely and depressed during the height of his success.
The 56-year-old Michelin star-holding chef said that, although he was constantly surrounded by people, he actually felt “really lonely”.
Blumenthal, the proprietor of the Fat Duck and Hind’s Head in Bray, Berkshire, and Dinner in London, moved to France in 2018. and has stayed out of the spotlight since after he “had enough of cooking”.
He rediscovered his love for cooking six months ago, according to an interview in The Times, but the chef described having “shooting star moments”.
“Then I fell back down to Earth again. Enough was never enough,” he said.
Blumenthal is widely credited as the pioneer of multi-sensory cooking, and became known for his unusual recipes, including Meat Fruit, snail porridge, and savoury ice cream such as bacon and egg ice cream.
The Fat Duck holds three Michelin stars, the last of which was awarded in 2004, and Blumenthal was appointed an OBE in the 2006 New Years Honours List for his services to British Gastronomy.
But his road to success was driven by a need to “keep on, keep on, keep on,” he said, which led to him feeling “lost”.
“I was in London, in a big kitchen with loads of people, and then out from the kitchen into that sort of media world surrounded by people, but I look back and I was really lonely,” he told the newspaper.
“I didn’t think I was lonely at the time, and people would say, ‘He’s got all this, and can do all this and do all that’, but actually it was not what was really at the heart of what drove me.”
Blumenthal said his ambition to always achieve the best awards and accolades was “unconsciously building a monster” without realising it.
“After the third Michelin star in 2004, I thought, ‘I don’t know why I got this. What happens if I lose it?’” he admitted.
His move to France did little to help him reconnect with his love for cooking initially, with the chef describing his state of mind as a “haze of being lost”.
He added: “I’m not sure if I felt depressed at the time, but looking back I think I was. It was unaware anxiety.”
Blumenthal is set to release a new cookbook, Is This A Cookbook?, on 13 October.
