Doubts? Heston Blumenthal’s had a few, although not as many as you might expect from a man inhabiting the volatile, insecure world that seems to be the lot of the three-star Michelin chef. He shows a moment of vulnerability – a rare one, but still… - in when he pauses to contemplate the expensive gamble of moving his restaurant the Fat Duck from England to Melbourne for six months, then back again. “It’s the biggest amount of pressure, this whole thing… I just hope it works. The more you learn, the more you realise how little you know. I’m trying to tell myself it’s all going to be okay.’’
It’s one of only a handful of scenes in the new four-part SBS series where he gets a palpable case of the wobbles doing something many of his peers would class as insanity (although the concept appears to be catching: Rene Redzepi followed suit by moving his acclaimed restaurant Noma from Copenhagen to Sydney for a ).
So is he insane? “Insane… no,” he says after a few seconds of deliberation. “Einstein’s definition of insanity is doing the same thing twice and expecting different results, and I don’t do that.”
The series reveals something Australian audiences might not have been aware of when 250,000 of us vied for one of 14,000 seats during its six-month residency. The Fat Duck’s sabbatical from sleepy Bray, just outside London, was intended as the catalyst for Blumenthal to completely revitalise the 20-year-old restaurant. The jigsaw puzzle that adorned the Melbourne wall – each diner was given a piece to fill in – emerged for Blumenthal as a metaphor for his own head. “One of the things I didn’t realise would have the greatest benefit (is that) there’s something called the incubation period in the creative process. I left the development kitchen behind to get a clearer head, and the puzzle started to come together when I threw out things cluttering the bigger picture. It gave me the opportunity to go back. The things that really built the backbone of the Duck: what were they?”
High stakes: The Fat Duck moved halfway around the world without compromising on quality. Source: Inside Heston's World
History relates that The Fat Duck’s trip to Australia and back again was a piece of tactical brilliance. Not only did it prove an impressive PR coup, but the roll of the dice kept the critics and the dining public in raptures. Blumenthal credits his success with following his gut instinct: “I only realised afterwards the reopening of the Duck in Bray (was) the most ambitious thing I’ve ever done in my entire life. We all like our comfort zone but we all have to jump sometimes,” he says. But iron clad self-belief must surely be another part of the recipe. Not many people would consider it a good idea to open their own restaurant, for instance, after working in professional kitchens for only a few weeks, as the native Londoner did back in 1995.
“Einstein’s definition of insanity is doing the same thing twice and expecting different results, and I don’t do that.” -Heston Blumenthal
By his own admission the self-taught chef nearly went bankrupt three times before turning The Fat Duck into a gold medal success story that won its first Michelin star in 1999 and in 2006 was gonged best restaurant in the world by the prestigious S.Pellegrino list, commonly regarded as the Oscars of the restaurant world. Despite the second Michelin star arriving in 2002, it took another couple of years, he says, until he started turning a profit.
He emerged at a particular moment in food as one of the new breed of chef-auteur. Like the now-defunct El Bulli’s Ferran Adria, another name synonymous with liquid nitrogen, he’s a chef who built his global reputation on some seriously wacky postmodern kitchen shenanigans. The Fat Duck’s snail porridge needs few introductions; ditto the bacon and egg ice-cream. Nor does his “Sound of the Sea” seafood dish in which diners don earphones and listen to an iPod soundtrack of seagulls cawing and waves lapping, and serves as perhaps the most extreme example of what he likes to dub “multi-sensory cooking”. But even those Australians who didn’t eat at The Fat Duck or its replacement, Dinner by Heston Blumenthal, are likely to be on more than nodding terms with Heston, thanks to his appearances on the box.
Heston’s Feasts, where he recreates and re-imagines historic English dishes from the court of Henry VIII through to the Victorians, distils that mad scientist persona while also highlighting the fact Blumenthal seems like a genuinely nice guy not given to the kitchen histrionics of his more explosive peers (case in point: he flew his Fat Duck staff to Australia business class, which is no small beer considering that staff comprised 28 chefs, 10 front of house and six sommeliers).
The only way to eat “Sound of the Sea” is with a Fat Duck iPod plugged in. Source: Inside Heston's World
The Heston universe has its own internal logic, populated by a support crew as committed to The Fat Duck cause as its founder. Head chef Jonny Lake breaks down in tears talking to camera about sacrificing time with his children, while Blumenthal blames the breakdown of his 20-year marriage to workaholism.
He’s done plenty of television before, including the documentaries Little Chef, Submarine Food, Hospital Food and Airline Food, but Inside Heston’s World is the first unadulterated fly-on-the-wall production. “They were documentaries but they were controlled… I got a sense the production company was pulling strings behind the scenes, probably telling the staff to do things to get a reaction.”
Ex post facto, the move to Melbourne still makes him shake his head in wonder at the work involved. Not only freighting an entire restaurant to the other side of the world but having, for example, two sous chefs spend an entire three months doing nothing but tasting Australian ingredients and talking to suppliers.
Pigeon pie, anyone? Heston Blumenthal experiments with historic dishes in Heston's Feasts. Source: SBS Food
For Blumenthal, working in Melbourne while organising the renovation in Bray remotely meant doing double time. “There were moments of exhaustion. At times [when] the UK would wake up, I would have to do night shift for everything that was happening in Bray.”
“The hardest part of if was trying explain the new concept in Bray. I just decided to jump in the deep end then [and the staff] had to all come with me.”
The food world does occasionally disappear up its own fundament and Blumenthal is not immune. He came in for a serve in Steven Poole’s 2012 book You Aren’t What You Eat for this effort: “Preparing and serving food could… be the most complex and comprehensive of the performing arts.” (It was part of a “” written by Blumenthal, fellow international food heavyweights Ferran Adria and Thomas Keller and author Harold McGee, published by The Observer in 2006.)
In Inside Heston’s World, there are almost comical outbreaks of hair-tearing over the minutiae of high-end food - what else to expect from a $525-a-head degustation menu, after all? - but above all, audiences should come away with an impression of a much more down-to-earth individual. It’s a four-hour window into dizzying the kind of energy that has to drive Heston Inc., the global enterprise with its bookends of extreme creativity and pin-point logistics.
If nothing else, they should come away with a handful of fascinating factoids. Did you know, for example, that The Fat Duck receives around 30,000 booking inquiries every day, and while wannabe diners go to extreme lengths such as sending in paper mache ducks to beg for a seat, no one – repeat: no one - is allowed to jump the queue? Except, thanks to a weak spot afflicting the chief bookings officer, international tennis star Rafael Nadal. Rafa, take note.
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