Nearly eight months after being released from a psychiatric hospital, chef Heston Blumenthal is trying to understand his life and career through the prism of his newly diagnosed bipolar disorder. “The more I understand what it’s like, the more I can look back and see it,” he says.
In October, he had a mental health crisis that landed him in hospital, where he found himself hallucinating and coming up with ideas after just an hour or two of sleep. The experience made him reconsider the insomnia that had plagued him early in his career, when he was working 120-hour weeks in his kitchen and sending pre-dawn emails to colleagues. At the time, he saw it as a hallmark of his drive, the price of success. Could his behaviour have been an early symptom of a disorder? “I think I’ve been there for quite some time,” he says. It’s too early to draw any conclusions. “I want to learn more about myself.”
After opening The Fat Duck in 1995, the self-taught chef created a sensory menu of dishes like snail porridge and bacon and egg ice cream, and his experimental approach to food earned him the nickname the Willy Wonka of the culinary world. In 1999 the restaurant was awarded a Michelin star, and five years later it received three stars, a status it still holds today. This success led to him starring in a TV show,Heston’s Feast, Heston Blumenthal: In pursuit of perfection and Heston’s Great British FoodHe sold his books and cookbooks alongside a range of foods for the Waitrose supermarket chain – including a Christmas pudding that was resold for hundreds of pounds on eBay – and later opened The Hines Head in Berkshire and Dinner by Heston in Knightsbridge, London, where we met.
Sitting on the terrace of a two-star restaurant, hidden by a brilliant blue sky, Blumenthal’s shaved head and black-rimmed glasses are a familiar sight, but his demeanor is hesitant, he’s collecting his thoughts, and he is accompanied by his wife of almost 18 months, Melanie Saysson.
Blumenthal wants to talk because, despite increased awareness over the past decade, it’s “really hard” for most people to talk openly about their mental health. “They’re afraid the stigma will affect their ability to do their job.”
Since she went public about her illness, acquaintances and strangers have reached out to her saying, “‘That was really brave, that was really inspiring,’ but no one has said, ‘I get it, I’ve had the same thing.'” 1 million people According to the charity Bipolar UK, there are more than 2,000 people in the UK who have the disorder.
Blumenthal knows he can be open because he has the means to get treatment and is no longer integral to the day-to-day running of the business: “It’s a lot easier having a platform, because I’m not the CEO or the COO.”
In 2006, he sold the restaurant to a company called SL6 to focus on developing his own brand and new ideas. [worry about] “People sitting in seats … if money comes in from the get-go, it can stifle free thinking and creativity.”SL6 made an operating loss of £1.3 million last year on revenues that fell to £9.5 million from £11.5 million, though it expects to make a profit of £2.4 million in 2022. Rising labour, energy and raw material costs have put pressure on the business, and it is focused on increasing foot traffic and cutting spending.
Blumenthal says his role in the business can be roughly described as “creativity and development. My taste buds.” Pointing toward the kitchen, he acknowledges, “These guys do all the work. It’s taken years to organize and build a team. If I went in there, I’d cause chaos.”
The chef has told his senior management team about his diagnosis and is considering what actions the company can take to best support mental health and neurodiversity. He received his ADHD diagnosis in 2016, which he thought was “really great,” but acknowledges, “I don’t know if it’s great for everyone.” Learning about neurodiversity has helped him. A car alarm went off and Blumenthal lost focus because of his sensitivity to noise. “Oh, this is going to be hard,” he said, pausing until the sound stopped. He has found ways to organize his life, including using objects as memory triggers. “I like to see myself as a walking experiment.”
Last year, he was driven by a desire to “save the world” and found himself in an extreme crisis that led to increasing mental and physical changes.
“I wanted to love everyone there, because they were all so amazing. I just spit out ideas,” he recalls. But if someone “moved even one sticky note… bam, I was so angry at the world. I didn’t mince words.” He likens his mood swings to those of a child: “I’d get so excited… the balance would flip and I’d start yelling. There’d be the positives, the ideas and surprises, and then the negatives. You can’t have just one and the other.”
The feeling intensified. “I became a danger to myself. [a] Potential danger to those around me. I’m not talking about physical danger, I’m talking about emotional danger. I’ve never had suicidal thoughts. [before then]”Thank goodness they’re gone,” and at one point he said “it looked like there was a gun on the table…it looked like a real gun.”
This period of excitement fueled ideas. “I wrote pages and pages,” he says. Last year, he had four or five days with only one or two hours of sleep. “I was so excited. I was talking about making things. It was crazy.” “Real madness,” Sayson repeats, refuting the idea that this creativity was productive. ” [having] I had so many ideas and no time to make anything happen.”
In November, Sayson, concerned about Blumenthal’s mental and physical health, had him committed to a psychiatric hospital. Blumenthal spent 20 days in the psychiatric hospital, then transferred to a clinic for 40 days, where he says he was able to get treatment and adjust to his medication. “It was wonderful,” he said.
Blumenthal’s diagnosis is bipolar disorder type 1. He took my notebook and underlined the various ups and downs, depending on the type of illness he has. His own diagnosis is characterized by long periods of highs and short periods of dramatic lows.
“The most wonderful time in the world is actually [most] “I was in a dangerous state,” he said. The lack of sleep and excitement had put his body under stress that doctors said could have been fatal. “I know physically I was really unwell.”
While he doesn’t want to experience mania again, he doesn’t regret what mild mania may have done to his career. When he yelled in the kitchen, he tended to do it at himself, not at others. “If I had a plate in my hand, [I] Unlike the restaurant kitchens depicted in TV dramas, BearHe prefers a quiet workplace.
He admits the Michelin star system is stressful but, despite French chef Sébastien Bras’s request in 2017 to give his star back due to the pressure, he won’t give it back: “I can’t give up. The guide is not for chefs, it’s for the public… You can’t run a three-star restaurant forever,” he says.
There was nothing in Blumenthal’s background that suggested he would become a chef — his father owned an office-supplies company and his mother was a housewife — but his interest in cooking was sparked when, at age 16, he ate for the first time on a family vacation at L’Osteau de Baumanière, a Michelin-starred restaurant in Provence, near where he now lives. He later realized that becoming a chef was “chasing that feeling I got from that restaurant, that cricket, that carving at the table.”
He once attributed his drive in part to his mother’s withholding of praise: “Nothing I did was ever enough,” he says. Fat Duck She said of the book, “‘This is not a book. It took me 10 years to write that. It’s 200,000 words.'” After she died in 2020, he learned that she had been clipping articles about him throughout his career and writing to friends about his successes. “I wish I was in a position to ask her why she never told me that,” he said.
Blumenthal worked in Raymond Blanc’s kitchen for a week to see the realities of running a restaurant, and Marco Pierre White’s Cantine for three weeks, and was a self-taught cook, before opening The Fat Duck with the money he earned from selling his house and a £10,000 loan from his father.
Innovation is Blumenthal’s trademark. He quotes Picasso: “Every child is an artist. The question is to remain an artist when you grow up.”
“We build up fear,” he says, and he once tried to get his staff to overcome it with a “museum of bad ideas.”[You] I had to come up with an idea that nobody had thought of before, and it had to be so bad that nobody could have thought of it.”
Blumenthal says the medication has stabilized his mood, allowing him to really pursue and develop his ideas. That’s now his top priority, along with maintaining a healthy lifestyle. “I’m sleeping better. I’m getting better at not getting distracted by my phone.” However creatively fueled those old highs may have been, he doesn’t want to go back. “Highs mean lows,” he says.
