Many of the gated stone villas in the small French town of Eygalières house a British celebrity. Heston Blumenthal’s property, which he shares with Melanie, his wife of three years, slumbers behind its shutters. He appears on the gravel in small black trainer socks. We take a seat in the garden with his bulldog, Harry, a child of his previous relationship, stretched out and panting against the wall. Blumenthal is still in recovery from a severe mental health crisis which resulted in a diagnosis of bipolar disorder in 2023. He is sweating in his black T-shirt, in Provence’s first heatwave of the year. He is medicated these days, his voice soft: “I’m pausing because I’m thinking.” In person, he makes no attempt to hide how unwell he has been – though in print, the long gaps and cautious speech are somewhat disguised.
Blumenthal is currently filming a documentary called The Rise of the Rockstar Chef, which also features Gordon Ramsay and Marco Pierre White. Jamie Oliver is a notable absence; Blumenthal says he was initially involved but mysteriously disappeared – that this might be something to do with Marco, who likes to point out that Jamie has no Michelin stars. The thesis is that the “rockstars” came to prominence in the 1990s with a culinary celebration of all things British. But Blumenthal disagrees: “In the Britpop decade, Britain exploded in art, in songwriting, but not food. We emerged out of that time, for different reasons.” Rather like the indie bands of the era, they were not best mates working together in the service of Cool Britannia. “I’ve known Gordon for 30 years and I’ve probably met him ten times.”
Blumenthal, now 60, got his first Michelin star for his restaurant the Fat Duck in 1999, but always felt disconnected out there in Berkshire: “I was in a concrete box. I was changing the world of cooking and I didn’t realise it.”
He is known as much for his contribution to culinary science as for his food – for his liquid-nitrogen dish, a bonsai forest brought smoking to your table; or the chicken liver parfait disguised as a mandarin, a trompe l’œil exercise last seen in the Middle Ages. Unlike Rick Stein, he has never been seen salivating over an oyster or a perfect piece of asparagus: his food is subject to so much scientific processing, he seems almost anti-produce.
“The fork-to-table thing was as much a marketing stunt as anything else,” he reflects, slowly and softly. “It was a hierarchical system. That’s not to say that if you grow something and pick it and cook it, it’s not wonderful. But if you have a mindful connection with what you’re eating, even bad food can be better for you. If there’s a purpose to why you eat, you can eat mindfully with a Mars Bar.”
In the morning, he hangs from a doorframe. “It stretches you. I measure myself before and afterwards: it makes a difference. I do feel taller. Then I clean my teeth, I clean my gums, and I do that mindfully.”
After his bipolar diagnosis, his medication, including lithium, caused him to gain five stone. The weight-loss drug Mounjaro took three back off, and in September 2025 he adapted the Fat Duck tasting menu for others living with smaller appetites. “The Mindful Experience” – smaller portions, 80 per cent of the price – had mixed reviews, but the concept of poring over flavours and stopping when full is a “whole subworld”, he argues, which began with Dr Jon Kabat-Zinn and his “mindful raisin” in 1979: “Take one single raisin, roll it in your fingertips, smell it, imagine what it would taste like…”
He was a teenager when he first saw, in his mind’s eye, the food he wanted to make: “The multi-flavoured tea, the chocolate waterfall, the lickable wallpaper, all those sorts of things were in my head as a piece of wonderment, but I never thought I’d get the opportunity to do it.” We are 15 minutes from L’Oustau de Baumanière, the Michelin-starred restaurant his parents took him to when he was 17, in 1984. That night, he decided what he wanted to be.
“It was as if I was in my own bubble,” he says. “The chink of glasses, pouring sauces into soufflés, carving legs of lamb, the noise of crickets, the feet crunching on the gravel, and the sun setting. I’m losing my memory for recent things, so the things that shaped me I seem to remember more. I can picture myself as a child, the feeling of excitement, but last month…?”
This loss of short-term memory is a medication issue. “They call it a bipolar haze. And it is difficult with the medication, because you feel you don’t need it any more.” Yet he knows that he does. “I feel like the TV’s talking to me. I still have suicidal thoughts.”
Does he tell people about them?
“I want to tell Melanie, but I don’t want her to worry.”
We take a break from the sun and move inside. You’d think a famous chef’s kitchen would be full of tools you don’t recognise, measuring spoons of solid gold, but this one looks normal: he selects two rooibos bags and flicks the kettle on. A few years back, his name was on everything from pizza rollers to barbecues, but he and his wife are much more careful with it now. He takes a sip of his rooibos and places the mug perilously close to the edge of the worktop.
His main creative ancestor is the Hungarian physicist Nicholas Kurti, credited with inventing the term “molecular gastronomy”. An expert in low-temperature physics, Kurti once created a reverse baked Alaska, hot on the inside and cold on the outside. He led workshops in Italy, which Blumenthal attended in the 1990s; in 2008, a public not yet living in austerity Britain bought Blumenthal’s huge white cookbook for £100 and played with the idea that they could make the recipes themselves. He normalised the use of high-tech equipment at home, like the sous-vide (when food is placed in a vacuum-sealed bag and cooked under water) and the digital thermometer stuck in a lump of beef.
It was on this marble worktop, in this kitchen, that Blumenthal first conducted his “rice experiments” inspired by the Japanese researcher Masaru Emoto. Equal volumes of white rice and water are placed in airtight jars, he explains.
“Every morning, you give one jar of rice love and gratitude, you give another abuse, and the third, you ignore. For two months. I’ve done this three or four times, same result each time. The jar with the love goes orange. The jar that’s been abused goes black. And the jar that’s been ignored rots.”
What kind of thing do you shout at the rice to abuse it?
“You piece of shit!”
What do you say to the rice that you love?
“You bless them, say you think they’re wonderful,” he says. “A child that’s been abused has a good-cop/bad-cop syndrome, and a child that’s been ignored just rots. Another time, we put two jars of rice with a speaker, and every morning, one was played Hitler’s voice and the other one was played Martin Luther King. Now I can’t say that Hitler was a genocidal maniac from the results, but certainly, there was a difference…”
Blumenthal talks with the strange clarity of anyone who has been required to do emotional archaeology on themselves following a complete mental breakdown. His own collapse occurred as he attempted to organise a belated memorial for his mother and sister, who died within a week of each other in May 2021. His family’s feud was reported in the Daily Mail: in 2018, his 49-year-old sister Alexis, who also suffered from bipolar disorder but was not being treated, was given a suspended prison sentence for slamming her 76-year-old mother’s head into a car.
As a child, Blumenthal was caught between the two warring parties – though it’s not clear whether he considers himself black rice or rotted. “My mum would be bad cop and then take you to lunch. After she died, we found a whole load of newspaper cuttings she’d kept about me, but she could not bring herself to say anything nice.”
Framed on the kitchen wall is a quote from a 2013 House of Lords debate speech given by the former director general of the BBC, John Birt, on the importance of nurturing Britain’s creative exports: “James Bond and Harry Potter are global brands… ITV’s Mr Bean is instantly recognised in China. ‘Heston’ is a global kitemark for cutting-edge cuisine.” How does he see his influence on the culture?
“I can be more immodest now,” he says. “Melanie’s helped me a lot. Nothing was ever good enough. The last three years, I’ve been looking at doing stuff for my legacy. There’s probably three generations of chefs that’ve passed by the things that I’ve done.”
How does he feel when he sees triple-cooked chips on every pub menu? His originals took five hours to make.
“Generally, I don’t taste them because I don’t want to get myself wound up”.
Does he feel valued?
“I still don’t feel that I’m valued enough as I’d like to be. But sometimes enough is never enough, you know?”
His playfulness is his legacy, whether it’s felt in the proliferation of experiential food at Michelin-star level, or a public willing to buy really weird flavoured crisps. “Programmes such as The Great British Menu might not have happened without me,” he says. “My TV shows – like Great British Feasts – turned adults into children.”
These days, the mind and body connection is of paramount interest to him. “There is evidence emerging about the connection between gut health and bipolar,” he says. “We know that what we eat affects our gut, but what we feel affects our gut – you can eat the same food every day and your caca won’t be the same, because it depends on your mood.”
What does a shit look like from a happy mind? “Well, I’ve got a set of cards about this,” he says, eyes flashing, “and I know that one of the worst ones is the painful one, it’s called ‘The Exterminator!’”
During his manic episode in November 2023, Blumenthal watched a YouTube video of a live performance of Richard Harris’s “MacArthur Park” on repeat. When he says he thought the TV was “talking to him”, he is referring to the algorithm recommending other songs he might like – an alarming feature for those not in their right mind. He also listened to “These Boots Were Made for Walking” – but “not the Nancy Sinatra version”. As the week-long episode unfolded, he talked endlessly into the night, and could not sit still.
Melanie, whom he’d married seven months earlier, eventually needed a break and went to stay with her parents, two hours away. When he sent her a message about a gun, and started to talk about his funeral, she called the mayor of Eygalières for help, and watched on CCTV as the local police and medical staff arrived. Blumenthal was sectioned for 20 days, and spent a further 40 in a psychiatric clinic – the gun, though, had been a hallucination.
On the wall in the kitchen is a large chalkboard covered in white sketches: twizzly shapes like typhoons spiralling up into nothingness, and orbs with mysterious measurements marked on them, a little too small to read. Blumenthal writes and chops with his left hand but does everything else with his right; his script is elaborately calligraphic.
“Golden ratios,” Melanie says, coming up behind me. “This is what he did during his episode. It’s him, it’s his art. It’s his brain.” She shrugs, Frenchly. “He explained it at the time and it made sense to him.” The chalkboard is a reminder of what could happen again.
“We did not know you were manic then, did we, my Mister Vortex,” she says to Blumenthal across the room: he is retrieving his trainers from a cupboard. She has become an advocate for bipolar disorder awareness and speaks at conferences internationally. In France, bipolar is recognised as a disability: she has a sunflower badge that means she can help Blumenthal get quickly through airports, where his anxiety escalates.
Melanie is a strong presence in the Blumenthal home. She played professional basketball until she had an injury; then she worked as a PR in electronic music, then “in every area of hospitality”, before she met her future husband at a ski resort in the Alps in December 2021. He was still with his previous French partner then, with whom he has a young child living not far away.
We get in the car together, and Melanie slaloms for half an hour round the hairpin bends of the dry Provence countryside. We pass only cyclists. Blumenthal used to ride his bike a lot, but he broke his wrist when he came off it – his medication affects his balance. Melanie puts a tender hand on his knee and says, “I know we’re talking about you like you’re not here.”
Lunch takes place in a small restaurant half an hour away, in a shaded courtyard, with true Provençal food – scrolls of lamb like treble clefs, and anchovies in oil. It is one of the few places open year round. Winter is, Melanie says, “peaceful”. “Dead,” Heston returns. In the summer, Provence is so busy that they tend to stay home and have barbecues: “It is our fortress,” Melanie says. “We don’t have that many visitors. If you have a house in the south of France, people act like it’s Club Med.”
They manage the Fat Duck from France. Melanie describes herself as “partner and protector of Heston’s brand” – though at first, I think she says “brain”, which would do just as well. Ever since Blumenthal sold the business to his uncle in 2004, there has been an effort to keep him away from the financial side of things and allow him to focus on ideas. But running the restaurant remotely is hard work. “That’s another thing,” says Melanie. “People think if you live in the south of France you don’t do any work. Fuck off!” She shrugs again.
I ask her what kind of work she’s doing in the service of Blumenthal’s legacy.
“Archiving. We’ve hired a lady who started it three years ago. Going through all that we have. H is not so good at keeping memories – it is a big frustration. And there is not much from his family. This is what I promised to him: that I will protect his legacy. I will start looking to build a foundation. My husband has literally changed our relationship with food. I know Heston’s biggest fear is to have his name featuring on a random chilli con carne box.”
Blumenthal, delicately separating shank from bone, looks up: “Ratatouille is probably the most accurate gastronomic film ever made,” he says, referring to the 2007 Pixar animated movie: “the idea that the big fat chef dies and the Mexican sous chef takes over and puts his name on everything from napkins to whatever, and he has no control over that.”
The Blumenthal empire at present is in a somewhat diminished state. The Dubai branch of his restaurant, Dinner, is temporarily closed because of the US-Iran war. His 12-year deal with Waitrose – which in 2010 gave us the viral Hidden Orange Christmas pudding – ended in early 2023, and his contract with the Mandarin Hotel at Hyde Park, home to the UK branch of Dinner, will finish in January 2027. I ask him why he does not have a restaurant in France, and he says, “I have no desire to open a restaurant anywhere [in France]!”
“I lost a lot of things because of my bipolar disorder,” he says. “Waitrose said I was erratic. They said I was unpredictable. It was the longest contract a chef has had with a supermarket.” (Waitrose rejects this description of his departure.)
“We have to face the reality that his condition still scares some people,” says Melanie. “We had a recent partner and we put an appendix in the contract saying Heston has bipolar; he is going to need a break. And they said ‘no, we are not interested’.”
“This is a Polish…” begins Blumenthal before his wife interrupts him: “We are not going to give the name.”
“My gut feeling is that the bipolar doesn’t affect my creativity,” he says, “but it does put me into a deep, dark depression.”
How did he feel, when he had the highs?
“I was happy. I didn’t sleep. I was too excited. I grieve those moments. I don’t have them any more.”
Nico Ladenis, a UK-based chef, once said of Heston Blumenthal: “If you vomit and make an ice cream out of it, are you a star?” Blumenthal told me this story with delight.
The Fat Duck is still his baby, and he travels to Berkshire almost weekly to taste and smell and tweak. The kitchen in the 16th-century former pub used to be so small that staff had to turn around at the same time when they had plates in their hands. It was extended in 2015, and he moved the restaurant to Australia for six months while he got the workmen in.
That temporary relocation looks different in the light of his bipolar diagnosis. In the 2016 documentary Inside Heston’s World, Blumenthal can be seen gathering the entire staff together for an announcement (it is de rigueur in posh restaurants to have more staff than customers, and the Fat Duck has 59). He appears on a video call and everyone cheers; champagne is poured. Then he tells them the Fat Duck is closing. The silence, and the faces of the young staff, stay with you. “And we’re all going to Australia!” Only a few of them rally round. “He took the families as well,” says his restaurant manager, Nefeli Fakiri, “but yes, it was still a shock.” She says that in retrospect, the boss was always in fight or flight back then – “but then most of us are”. In 2024, research by the Burnt Chef Project found that around 50 per cent of people in the hospitality industry are neurodivergent, often attracted to the intensity and discipline of the work.
At the Fat Duck, where the waiters narrate the dishes and the process, you’ll hear a lot about how this miniature orb of beetroot meringue is achieved by someone rendering beets in a juicer for the whole of Wednesday each week, how this beef stock takes a fortnight to prepare. Seven years ago, a former pastry chef, Sharon Anderson, sued Blumenthal for £200,000, claiming the demands of her job – making chocolate playing cards, packing sweets with tweezers – gave her chronic repetitive strain injury. She did not win her case.
The latest experience on offer at the restaurant is called “The Top Seat”, which Blumenthal describes like this: “You’re in the kitchen, the chefs give you the food, and you eat on your own. I used to think when I was younger, ‘Oh, you sad bastard, eating on your own,’ but now it’s a pleasure.”
On a Sunday night at the end of June, every table at the Fat Duck is booked but the steel kitchen before me is hushed as a library. I take a seat on a single high stool for the new solo dining experience. The workspace is divided into four sections: pastry, sound of the sea, forest, hot; in the distance, a young man makes a miniature cone of crab ice cream and tops it off with a tiny flake.
Head chef Karl Jaques calls an order: “Two forests, no worms” (there are dried mealworms on the bonsai forest dish, like the ones used for fishing, and vegans tend not to want them). The only indication that the kitchen is getting stressful as the orders come in is that it gets quieter – not what you got in the world of Gordon Ramsay. Chef Karl walked out of his last job; “When I started here, I thought, when is it going to kick in?” Much has been said of Blumenthal’s temper, but in the kitchen, says Karl, “he would not pick on people because he didn’t come from that culture. He hadn’t had it done to him when he was training, so he didn’t think he had the right to do it to everyone else.” (Blumenthal’s apprenticeship was short: he only did a couple of two-week “stages” before he opened his own place at 29.)
“The Top Seat” experience demands that Karl talks to me, but really the kitchen staff want to be left on their own (“Why do you think I’m not front-facing?”). One new recruit threads miniature dry Shirazu fish into miso “sand” under my nose and his hands shake a little. I’m served tea that is hot on one side and cold on the other: different levels of coagulant used on each half of the cup. My placemat depicts a “journey around Hestonland” – an island shaped like his brain, which reminds me a bit of something by the grotesque painter Giuseppe Arcimboldo.
It is clear, now, that the Fat Duck was created in the image of Blumenthal’s brain before anyone – least of all him – understood quite how that brain worked. He remains one foot in and one foot out, deeply involved and yet thinking about endings. Though the menu is subject to constant refining, the overall concept has changed very little. “Sound of the Sea” – the oceanic experience enjoyed with headphones – has a new fish marinade, and the sea jelly gums are “improved”. “But most importantly it’s the soundtrack,” Blumenthal told me in France. “Less seagulls. Nick Mason, the Pink Floyd drummer, he came in several times and said: ‘I think you’ve got too many seagulls, do you want a sound engineer?’” Back in 2007, guests were given an iPod Nano each; now it’s a central server with Bluetooth.
To ask what someone has given us lately, when they have already given a lot, is a favourite feature of our nation’s cultural criticism. It is hard, at times, to see how it moves the culture on. The Fat Duck is the Blumenthal brain in good health, and with his recent loss of short-term memory, the menu’s childlike wonder over all things sensory – even its fear of change – acquires new meaning.
Late at night, I am taken through the restaurant and up to a cold wine cellar, to a table for one, where a white cushion twirls in midair. I’m fed delicate lavender meringues dusted with “Johnson’s baby powder” (icing sugar) as a waiter stands and watches, talking about Alice in Wonderland.
[Further reading: Donald Trump’s one-sided bromance with Kim Jong Un]
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This article appears in the 20 Aug 2026 issue of the New Statesman, Summer Special
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