Heston Blumenthal, one of Britain’s greatest chefs, lives in a small village in Provence. When we meet, on a weekday morning in February, he is in the Hind’s Head in Bray, a stone’s throw from his very famous restaurant, the Fat Duck, which turns 30 this August. Blumenthal is in England to test dishes he hopes to recall to an anniversary menu – a kind of Greatest Hits of the Duck. “But it’s a backbreaker,” he says. “You start off with the old recipes and you realise they’re not up to scratch – we’ve moved on. So we’re tasting, tasting, tasting.” Yesterday, Blumenthal cooked four pieces of turbot, each at a minimally different temperature, to nail the dish. “At this level, those incremental differences make a massive difference,” he goes on, looking briefly bemused. “It’s been hard.”
Much else has been hard for Blumenthal recently. In November 2023, he was sectioned in France following a week-long manic episode and given a diagnosis of bipolar disorder. He spent 20 days on a psychiatric ward and a further 40 days at a clinic. Blumenthal describes the ward as “a bit like a prison”. For many days prior to hospitalisation he had been unable to sit still and his mind raced. He had begun talking for hours at a time, often through the night, and he would become irritable when his wife, Melanie, whom he married earlier that year, could not find a way to respond. “He locked himself within his own universe,” Melanie told me later. “And to get in? Good luck.” Melanie eventually left for respite at her parents’ home, a two-hour drive away, and Blumenthal remained in Provence alone, experiencing symptoms of psychosis. In a phone message sent after Melanie left, Blumenthal told her he was in possession of a gun, and he began to suggest arrangements for his funeral. Of the gun he says, “It felt real, but there was nothing there, I was hallucinating… And then I started talking about death.”
