Blooming Blumenthal

Celebrity chef Heston Blumenthal, reluctant figurehead of molecular gastronomy, tells HELEN DALLEY of his food memories and favourite new chefs, and of possibly opening a restaurant in Hong Kong

BRITISH CHEF HESTON BLUMENTHAL has never been comfortable with the “molecular gastronomy” tag, seeing the food genre as excessively complicated and elitist. Dishes like snail porridge, and bacon and egg ice cream, however, as well as other experimental fare served up at his three-star Michelin Guide-rated The Fat Duck restaurant in the small English village of Bray, ensured he was lazily pigeonholed by the media, and his cooking – unfairly perhaps – will be forever linked with the term.

Sixteen years after The Fat Duck’s opening as a humble French brasserie, Blumenthal is arguably the hardest-working chef in Britain. His new television series, Heston at Home, is about to hit screens. Another series, currently in development, aims to unearth the country’s next Blumenthal – a job in one of the chef’s kitchens awaits whoever makes the grade.

Blumenthal’s latest restaurant, Dinner By Heston at Mandarin Oriental Hyde Park, opened in February to rave reviews. The dining room serves up dishes inspired by ancient British fare. Dinner’s appetiser meat fruit – Blumenthal’s take on a 16th-century dish – features chicken-liver parfait inside a faux-tangerine made from mandarin jelly. Spiced pigeon, prepared with ale and artichokes, is a main based on a meal that was eaten in the 1780s.

With Dinner’s success, the self-taught chef is considering rolling out the concept, which, he insists, has always been the intention. “I’d love to open up a restaurant in New York, but it would probably be Asia,” Blumenthal says. “Perhaps Hong Kong or Singapore, maybe India. Anywhere there’s some British history. That’s where the concept would work best.”

I’m with Blumenthal at his gastropub, The Hind’s Head (claim to fame: in 1947 Britain’s Prince Philip held his stag party here), which is just steps away from The Fat Duck. The pub’s markedly different menu features British classics such as oxtail and kidney pudding, and pea and ham soup, while Blumenthal – in spotless whites and thick black-rimmed specs, and sporting a healthy tan – is disarmingly friendly and down-to-earth. He politely dodges a question about how he’s helped make British cuisine cool, but is full of praise for the current UK dining scene, less so about the French.

“I would say now that London and New York are the two best cities in the world for eating, although I’d probably put London just a bit ahead of New York,” he says. “If you want serious French gastronomy, of course, it’s still Paris, but it’s dull. The old adage, ‘You can’t get a bad meal in France,’ doesn’t apply any more. You can get thousands of bad meals in France.”

Blumenthal says the revolution in British dining has only come about in the last 10 years. “When I opened the Duck in 1995, we had complaints like the fish wasn’t cooked enough, the food wasn’t hot enough, and where was the veg,” he recalls. “Men would moan to the wait staff that we’d given ladies menus with the prices on. It’s only in the last five to eight years that [British people have] become more confident about food and comfortable in restaurants.”

London may have the best dining scene on the planet as far as Blumenthal is concerned, but the best chefs have come from outside of London over the last three or four years. Ashley Palmer-Watts, Blumenthal’s head chef at Dinner, for instance, is from Dorset in England’s West Country. Chef Jonny Lake, who holds the helm at The Fat Duck, is Canadian. “One guy I really like is Sat Bains, who has a Michelin-starred restaurant in Nottingham,” Blumenthal says. “I ate there recently and it was one of the best meals I’ve had for a long time. And I still really want to go to Yang Sing, a Cantonese restaurant in Manchester that’s meant to be very good.”

Back in the British capital, Blumenthal rates Barshu Restaurant. “It’s probably one of the first authentic Sichuan restaurants in the city and has Fuchsia Dunlop as consultant,” he says. “She was the first Westerner to graduate from a Sichuan cooking school. The food is very hot, and it’s a waste of time asking them to tone it down.”

With a packed schedule developing hundreds of new dishes (he currently has 450 on the go) and juggling TV projects, Blumenthal finds it difficult to find the time to eat out. “I go out to dinner every six weeks to two months, so not that much really,” he says. “I’ve been in the Duck three times in 15 years and Dinner three times in five months. The last time I ate at Dinner, I really lapped it up and was totally relaxed.”

In fact, there’s no formal dress code at The Fat Duck or at Dinner By Heston so that guests can feel comfortable, not sweating in a dinner jacket or wondering when they can take off their tie. “I think people used to feel a bit nervous about coming to the Duck,” Blumenthal says, “but I want them to relax and have a good time. As soon as they walk in, I want to see their shoulders come down.” He concedes that The Fat Duck’s winning of Restaurant magazine’s Best Restaurant in the World award in 2005 was a double-edged sword. “Some people would come in with the attitude, ‘So they think they’re the best restaurant in the world do they? We’ll see about that.’ It was like they wanted to find fault with the experience.”

In addition to his interest in historic gastronomy, Blumenthal has explored the role of nostalgia in food during his career. The final item on the 16-course The Fat Duck tasting menu is called Like a Kid in a Sweet Shop, the waiter delivering a paper bag of sugary goodies for diners to take home. “We’ve just created a new biscuit for this course, the queen of hearts, which is white chocolate, raspberry compote and crushed-up shortbread,” Blumenthal says. “After putting this course on the menu, I’ve had to build a new kitchen. Everyone who comes gets four different sweets, and as 400-plus people a week come to the Duck, that’s almost 2,000 sweets every week that need to be hand-made. I had to employ three more staff just to do that.”

Recreating the magical emotions we felt as kids on entering sweet shops is a typically ambitious step for a chef who once employed a magician to set fire to diners’ sorbets without melting them (he later scrapped the idea – it was too expensive). So what are Blumenthal’s earliest food memories? “Ice cream played a big role,” he says. “I grew up near Hyde Park and used to go to this market on Saturday morning with my mum when I was about six or seven. What kept me going was a trip to Regent’s Snack Bar afterwards. It was this art deco cafe with a big ice cream cone on the front.”

Holidays to the West Country county of Cornwall also feature. “I remember eating Cornish pasties covered in sand out of the boot of my dad’s car, and Shipham’s paste sandwiches wrapped in tin foil, followed by Orange Maid [ice] lollies, which used to set my mouth tingling.”

In London, the young Blumenthal started cooking at the age of 14, taking items such as frozen lamb-neck fillets and cooking them in a pan with tomato ketchup. “I learnt my French through translating cookery books,” he says. “I wanted to know why some ice cream recipes used egg and others used milk, or honey over sugar. I was very inquisitive.”

Thirty years on, that heightened sense of curiosity is still very much the driving force behind brand Blumenthal, and one can only hope that he will choose to open his second Dinner venture in Hong Kong, not Singapore, India, New York or anywhere else.