SBS Food caught up with the man who invented bacon and egg ice-cream when he was in town recently for the Melbourne Food and Wine Festival and asked: is he having a laugh?
Heston Blumenthal says he is the kind of bloke whose happy to eat prawn cocktail, a cheap one bought from a supermarket straight from the plastic tub. He’s also happy at home eating a doner kebab with his son.
But on screen he’s the very serious, clean, white food science man with the shaven head and the stylized wrap around glasses. He’s the food intellectual with the big brain who is searching for perfection.
Yet today he’s slightly sweaty and in his racket ball gear just having just thrashed Melbourne Chef Shannon Bennett 4-0 while in Australia for the Melbourne Food and Wine Festival and a Starlight Foundation charity dinner hosted by Neil Perry in Sydney.
Having watched, on Youtube the previous day, Blumenthal wheeling out a giant green luminous absinthe jelly to a table of celebrities, its wobble powered by a battery of personal vibrators – that’s sex toys – only one question springs to mind: Is he having a laugh?
“I love what I do,” he laughs. “I do think that it doesn’t matter how gastronomic food is or it can be. I think you should be able to have fun. If one word that a customer could say to me to describe the experience of the restaurant it would be fun, to have a sense of fun.”
Blumenthal is the chef behind the UK’s top restaurant The Fat Duck at Bray famous for the whimsy of its food including snail porridge and bacon and egg ice cream. And for the recent scare in which over 400 guests fell ill to the norovirus, the same bug usually responsible for gastroenteritis on cruise ships.
Blumenthal opened the Fat Duck as a simple bistro in 1995 on the doorstep on Michelin starred Waterside Inn, run by godfathers of Michelin-starred English dining, the French born and trained Roux brothers, Albert and Michel.
Blumenthal never expected to be awarded beyond one Michelin star. But in 2004 he was awarded three and The Fat Duck is consistently ranked among the top two restaurants in the world.
It was back in his tiny new pub kitchen in the late 1990s that he started asking questions about the science of cooking. “I’m a cook but I’m interested in finding out how things work,” he says. “So I ask lots of questions. My food science knowledge came about over the last ten to 15 years, not liking not knowing how something works and then trying to find out how it did work.”
And thus began a journey which has inspired some of his most memorable dishes – using the application of his scientific research to move dishes in a new direction from traditional recipes.
Acceptance of some dishes by diners has been tough with some, such as salmon and licorice, being confronting combinations. And then there’s the smoked bacon and egg ice-cream, a dessert that is mostly described as delicious.
“People did love it from the beginning,” he says. “But it polarised people. It really did. It was a love or hate thing and now it is one of those dishes that if you take it off the menu people will say: ‘why don’t you have bacon and egg ice cream’.”
Reassuringly sex toys haven’t made it into the restaurant yet. The vibrator stimulated jelly was part of an interpretation of The Mad Hatters Tea Party for the UK’s Channel 4. And it is part of his journey back through time creating a fusion between modern cooking technique and historic recipes.
Having temporarily closed The Fat Duck to trace the source of the health scare earlier this year Blumenthal is now reassessing what he presents diners and what they will accept on the plate. He is dropping the “safe” a la carte menu of conventional dishes served in three courses. “The reason the a la carte thing was there was a confidence thing,” he says. “I didn’t want to alienate people. You’d have the more creative stuff and then the safe stuff. My confidence has changed quite a bit I don’t need to do that any more.”
He’s thinking of cutting seat numbers and offering more of his creative dishes, based on historic British menus and playing with the human senses.
He says his real fascination is how the brain works and the notion of perception. “The way that the senses actually influence the way that we perceive and appreciate food,” he says. “It is the multi-sensory element of it that I find most exciting.”
“Sound of the sea” was an early exploration of multiple senses in which a seafood dish delivered with an iPod with the sounds of waves lapping on the seashore and gulls. It is meant to explore the combination of memories and emotions conjured up by sound and the flavours of the sea.
While everything seems like fun, behind the scenes it is very serious. Some 45 kitchen staff cater for 42 diners and he spends months perfecting dishes in a laboratory. “I’d be lying to say I don’t take what I do seriously. Elements of myself I probably take too seriously sometimes.
“It’s funny isn’t it how sometimes you are just in that moment and you think you are the fourth emergency service. And at the end of the day you are just cooking.”