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Heston Blumenthal, one of Britain’s greatest chefs, lives in a small village in Provence. When we meet, on a weekday morning in February, he is in the Hind’s Head in Bray, a stone’s throw from his very famous restaurant, the Fat Duck, which turns 30 this August. Blumenthal is in England to test dishes he hopes to recall to an anniversary menu – a kind of Greatest Hits of the Duck. “But it’s a backbreaker,” he says. “You start off with the old recipes and you realise they’re not up to scratch – we’ve moved on. So we’re tasting, tasting, tasting.” Yesterday, Blumenthal cooked four pieces of turbot, each at a minimally different temperature, to nail the dish. “At this level, those incremental differences make a massive difference,” he goes on, looking briefly bemused. “It’s been hard.”
Much else has been hard for Blumenthal recently. In November 2023, he was sectioned in France following a week-long manic episode and given a diagnosis of bipolar II disorder. He spent 20 days on a psychiatric ward and a further 40 days at a clinic. Blumenthal describes the ward as “a bit like a prison”. For many days prior to hospitalisation he had been unable to sit still and his mind raced. He had begun talking for hours at a time, often through the night, and he would become irritable when his wife, Melanie, whom he married earlier that year, could not find a way to respond. “He locked himself within his own universe,” Melanie told me later. “And to get in? Good luck.” Melanie eventually left for respite at her parents’ home, a two-hour drive away, and Blumenthal remained in Provence alone, experiencing symptoms of psychosis. In a phone message sent after Melanie left, Blumenthal told her he was in possession of a gun, and he began to suggest arrangements for his funeral. Of the gun he says, “It felt real, but there was nothing there, I was hallucinating… And then I started talking about death.”
When Melanie received Blumenthal’s message, she phoned the town’s mayor, who had helped arrange the couple’s wedding and who now agreed to organise medical help. Blumenthal recalls being at home when a policeman knocked on his back door. “You have to climb over a wall to get to it,” he says. “I’m thinking, ‘What are you doing here?’” Another policeman arrived soon after, followed by several firefighters, a doctor and his assistant. (They had knocked on the front door for 40 minutes, but Blumenthal had been unaware.) When the doctor told Blumenthal he required hospital admission, Blumenthal refused. He sat on a sofa, immovable. At one point he pointed out his OBE medal, which was on display nearby, as well as several photos of a meeting he had with the Queen. Eventually he was restrained. “I was sort of fighting them,” he says. “Then I saw the doctor take out a whacking great needle and I thought, ‘Heston, let go. Just let go.’”
Blumenthal’s memory of these events is not completely reliable. He recalls coming to on the psychiatric ward, heavily medicated, unaware of his exact location or of the date. “I only realised later that I missed a whole day,” he says. He describes his memory from the period as “blocked”.
Blumenthal’s mood has stabilised since the episode, in part due to medication, which has caused him to gain weight. Much of the past year has involved him trying to recall the details of his hospitalisation and the events leading to it, of which he’s still unsure. Blumenthal describes himself as “a walking experiment,” and he has approached his diagnosis with curiosity, as if he were on an adventure of self. (“I can’t stand not knowing how things work,” he has written.) Still, I’m surprised to discover he is unfamiliar with some of the factors that might have contributed to his illness. “It’s something you’re born with,” he says of bipolar II disorder at one point, though this is only partly true, and then, “I don’t think you develop bipolar,” which is incorrect. (One psychiatrist told me, “People tend to have a genetic predisposition to it, and they then may develop it or they may not.”)
When I ask him to describe the characteristics of the episode that resulted in his hospitalisation, he takes out his phone and addresses an AI assistant called Gemini.
“Gemini,” he says, “what are the characteristics of bipolar II disorder?”
I’m not sure if he does this because he doesn’t know the answer, or because he wants to give an answer that is as precise and specific as his recipes.
The phone responds, “Bipolar disorder is a mental illness that causes unusual shifts in mood, energy, activity, concentration and the ability to carry out day-to-day tasks.”
We both stare at the phone, which he is holding in his hand between us.
“Characteristics of bipolar disorder,” it goes on. “Manic episodes: abnormally elevated or irritable moods, increased energy and activity, racing thoughts, decreased need for sleep, inflated self-esteem or grandiosity and risky behaviours. Depressive episodes: persistent, sad, empty or irritable feelings, loss of interest or pleasure in activities, significant weight loss or gain, insomnia or hypersomnia, fatigue or loss of energy, feelings of worthlessness or guilt, difficulty concentrating or making decisions, thoughts of death or suicide.”
The voice stops. Blumenthal puts down the phone.
I ask if he experienced all of these characteristics.
“All of them,” he says. “And you know, after the hallucinations… Hold on a second.” He picks up his phone again and asks, “Can hallucinations occur in bipolar?”
“This is for informational purposes only,” the phone answers. “For medical advice or diagnosis, consult a professional. Yes, hallucinations can occur in bipolar disorder. Hallucinations are a type of sensory experience where someone sees, hears, smells, tastes or feels things that aren’t actually there. In bipolar disorder…”
He puts the phone down again.
It is not known exactly what causes bipolar II disorder, but there is a checklist of things that might increase a person’s chances of developing the illness, and we begin to talk through the list together, a kind of process of discovery.
“Recreational drugs?” I ask.
“No,” he says.
“Stress?” I say.
Blumenthal has talked previously of the remarkable effort required to maintain a restaurant of such high standing, while simultaneously running a culinary empire involving several other restaurants, cookbooks, television shows, a well marketed collaboration with Waitrose that ended in 2023 following reports of Blumenthal’s “unpredictability”, and various public appearances. (There was a time in the 2000s when his outsized celebrity saturated food culture to such a degree that triple-cooked chips, a Blumenthal creation, became a pub standard.) He has described receiving his third Michelin star, in 2004, as “like a pat on the back and a knee in the groin”. The chef Juan Mari Arzak told him at the time, “Once you’ve got three stars, there’s no turning back.”
Blumenthal opened the Fat Duck in 1995, with the financial and emotional support of his first wife, Susanna, who he calls Zanna and with whom he has three grownup children. In the restaurant’s early days, he barely slept. Zanna called him “the lodger”, referring to the fact he was rarely at home. (The couple divorced in 2017, after 28 years of marriage; he has a much younger daughter from another relationship.) “On a good day I’d be up by 5am and still prepping at 2am the following morning,” Blumenthal has written. He snatched sleep in 20-minute bursts, “usually curled up on the restaurant’s pile of dirty laundry” which was “softer than the kitchen floor”.
Several behaviours from the time have resurfaced as potential evidence for previous bipolar episodes. He never seemed to need much sleep. He became quickly impatient at trivial things. He frequently became suddenly energised, often “vomiting” ideas, many of which led nowhere, though some of them, you would imagine, landed on the menu at the Fat Duck. He also became so irritable that on three separate occasions he “bit the corner off” an iPhone, and he regularly broke other objects. At his wedding in 2023, he threw a speaker across an empty room because a guest had put on a techno playlist instead of the music designed for the event. And yet “even in the anger I felt good,” he says, and “It didn’t last very long.” Once, while perfecting a recipe for crème brûlée, Blumenthal created three distinct versions, each of which had merits. “I rushed upstairs to try them out on Susanna and get her opinion, oblivious in my excitement to the fact that to do so, I had to shake her awake,” he wrote in 2008. “It was 2am.” In 2017, he was diagnosed with ADHD, a disorder unrelated to bipolar, which he believes has allowed him to hyper-focus on specific tasks.
Running the Fat Duck was a high-wire act, but “It never got to the point where things became unsustainable, in terms of living every day.” He has described the restaurant’s first two years as “bedlam and chaos”. And yet he recalls the time fondly. “At the beginning of the restaurant, my routine was very regular. I was boxed in a little kitchen, peeling tomatoes one day, making stock the next. You can’t escape the routine: doors open for lunch at noon; at 7pm they open for dinner. Deadline, deadline, deadline.” He adds, “I’ve realised more and more that I’ve had many episodes over the course of my life, but I think being in the kitchen somehow contained it.”
Blumenthal is aware now that maintaining regular routines can help manage bipolar episodes. But not having enough sleep can be causative, and “I didn’t have enough sleep for years,” he says. He moved to France, in 2019, in part to rebalance his life – to escape what he describes as “the hamster wheel”.
So “yes” to stress.
We return to the checklist.
“What about childhood trauma or abuse?” I ask. “A stressful event, a problem with a relationship, a death?”
“My dad died a few years ago,” he says. His father, Stephen, died in 2011. “And I lost my mum and my sister in the same week. That was about five years ago. My mum died on my birthday. My sister died two or three days before that. I’ve only just thought about this now, that there’s an element of trauma.”
Blumenthal’s mother, Celia, died of cancer on 27 May 2021, after the death of his sister, Alexis. Blumenthal was in France, unable to return to the UK. “She was bipolar,” he says, of Alexis. This is the first time Blumenthal has spoken about his sister’s diagnosis. “But she didn’t believe she was bipolar. To me it’s an illness. And you can fix an illness. You can do it with meds. But also, I say now that it’s part of who I am. I’m learning more and more about that. I’m more self-aware. And I’m able to sleep now, eight hours minimum.”
I ask to hear more about his sister. “You could write a book about her life. She had several car crashes in South Africa. She smashed her hips. They fixed all of that up badly. She was on all sorts of painkillers. I think her body just gave in.” (Alexis was found dead at her home. A postmortem was inconclusive about the cause of her death.)
I ask if either of his parents were diagnosed with bipolar.
“I think my mum could have had it,” he says. “That’s something Melanie and I have talked about since the diagnosis. She could have had it.”
Blumenthal remembers his mother as a frequently angry woman who struggled to offer parental love. “I grew up being called useless and stupid,” he says. “I don’t even remember if she was aware of it. It had a big effect on me, but also in the positive, because I wanted to prove to the world I wasn’t stupid.” He considered it normal for his mother to blow up at the slightest infraction. Whenever he made a mistake, he expected her to lash out verbally. He adds, “Cretin was another word.”
I ask if his sister suffered the same behaviour.
“My sister and my mum fought massively,” he says. “This was in the press. They had a fight on Thame high street. Someone took a picture of it. It was in the Mail. Let me try…”
He picks up his phone and searches for the story.
“Manhunt for Heston Blumenthal’s sister” he says, paraphrasing a headline. “Four-year campaign of rage against the pair’s 70-year-old mother, Celia.” He reads on. “Heston Blumenthal’s sister was given a suspended judgement for slamming their mother’s head against a car…”
This happened in 2017. Alexis had been living on and off with their mother. It was reported that she had already punched Celia several times while shouting, “I’m going to kill you.” Alexis was given a 10-week suspended prison sentence. The events, which Celia described in court reports as “verbal and violent abuse”, were blamed on Alexis’s drinking. “I tried to get involved to help,” Blumenthal says. “But I couldn’t, not being there.”
I ask him to describe his father.
“He was calm as anything, my dad. I think he had to be because my mum was a massive character.” Whenever the couple argued, Blumenthal’s father would remain quiet until his wife’s anger blew over. “My dad used to say that I was brought up in a war between the two of them.”
Blumenthal recalls his family history matter-of-factly and without self-pity. “It’s funny,” he goes on. “She never acknowledged anything I did.” When he published his bestselling The Fat Duck Cookbook, in 2008, his mother announced, “That’s not a cookbook.” He recalls his mother once visiting the restaurant. “I had a sous chef called Gary at the time. Mum ordered some cod and said, ‘I want Gary to cook this, because Heston can’t cook fish.’” He shakes his head. “We had one or two stars by then.”
For a while in adulthood, Blumenthal considered his mother’s treatment a form of abuse. But recently his opinion has changed. “I think it was her way of caring,” he says. After she died, Blumenthal returned to the UK to clear out her home. He found a cabinet filled with news articles about him and his work, and he took this collection as proof of her love. “But she could never say she was proud of me, which was an interesting thing. It was like I was in competition with her. I don’t know why. And obviously I can’t talk to her about it now.”
I ask how Blumenthal’s own children have reacted to the diagnosis. “Well, my son went, ‘Hello…’ He didn’t seem very surprised.” Blumenthal’s son, Jack, is now a chef. “They’re a good barometer. They tell me, you know, if I’m sounding good. And they haven’t shown any signs of bipolar.”
Blumenthal was born in 1966 in London. His father was a businessman who suffered financial ups and downs. His mother was a secretary who often worked alongside her husband. For a time, the family lived in a basement flat at the address 1 Hyde Park. They had relatives in South Africa, where they would visit, and on at least one occasion Blumenthal and his sister accompanied his grandmother, the family matriarch, on a trip to the US. But he struggled at school. A curious boy with interests different to his peers, he found it difficult to fit in. “It was a comfortable life,” Melanie told me later. “But I think not so much love.”
When Blumenthal was 16, he visited L’Oustau de Baumanière, a three-star Michelin restaurant in Provence, with his family. He fell in love with the food, but also the restaurant’s theatre: the waiters in bow ties, the mustachio-ed sommelier, the chirruping of grasshoppers. It was 1982. Blumenthal’s mother had been a fine cook. She “made good use of the pressure cooker,” he has written. But he “grew up in an era when Britain’s gastronomic reputation was at an all-time (and largely deserved) low.”
When he returned to the UK, he began to experiment in the kitchen, sometimes making dishes for dinner parties organised by his parents. For a while he worked odd jobs and cooked at the weekend, “trying to reproduce whatever had caught my imagination,” on further trips to France, where he was “banking flavour-memories, developing a set of reference points”. He opened the Fat Duck with almost no experience of working in a kitchen. And yet his approach, which mixed scientific precision with avant-garde flair, was almost immediately successful. Several of his early dishes – including snail porridge, and bacon ice-cream – were controversial, and instantly became culinary and cultural touchpoints. The New York Times once said of him, “There appears to be no culinary shibboleth that Mr Blumenthal will not challenge, and no limit for his search for a better way.”
Blumenthal never considered the possibility of receiving three Michelin stars. “I thought maybe one day I’d get one,” he says. “That was it.” Asked if he has ever strived to be great, he shakes his head, replying, “I wanted to be… I guess I wanted to be understood.”
A couple of weeks after I meet Blumenthal in Bray, I speak to him again on Zoom. He is back in Provence with Melanie, who is sitting alongside him. I want to ask about his use of cocaine, rumours of which had been relayed to me since our first conversation by friends and acquaintances, who had worried for Blumenthal’s safety. (One chef told me, “Nobody seemed to be sorting him out.”)
When we first met, Blumenthal had denied the use of recreational drugs, despite it perhaps being a factor in his illness, and I had wondered why. Now he is reticent. I sense he is embarrassed, perhaps at the fact people had been talking about him. But he then appears to give in. “There was an element of self-medication,” he says. “And I realised it wasn’t helping at all.” (He does not say how long it took him to realise this.) He mentions the actor Stephen Fry, who also has bipolar II disorder, and who once relied on cocaine and alcohol to combat sudden and severe mood swings. (Fry used cocaine to upswing from depression and alcohol to calm the highs of mania; Blumenthal did not drink.) He goes on, “It’s a classic thing with bipolar. You don’t allow yourself to say, ‘I’m not OK.’ And there is this automatic thing to try to self-medicate.” A psychiatrist will tell you that cocaine, a stimulant, can mimic behaviour commonly experienced during a manic episode, while adding that people with bipolar are more likely to engage in reckless behaviour, including drug-taking. In a later voice note he adds, “It was never a party thing,” and then, “The problem is: what goes up, must come down.”
On Zoom, Melanie says, “It’s a part of the condition. When you are in crisis, you are so sure you are healthy, that everything is OK.” She looks at Blumenthal and then back at me. “That’s why we also arrived at this point. He didn’t want to see a doctor. Nothing.” Blumenthal says, “I wouldn’t face up to it. It was nonsense to me.”
I ask Melanie what it was like to be aware that Blumenthal was unwell while he couldn’t accept it. “I felt stupid,” she says. “Would you say you felt lost?” Blumenthal asks. “Well, I was lost, yes. But I was more feeling out of power. I couldn’t bring comfort to him. He was not sleeping. He was barely eating. Everything was escalating.”
Blumenthal has to join another call, so I continue the conversation with Melanie, who moves to a second office. “This was happening a year ago,” she says, referring to previous manic episodes. “But it would stop and he would be OK. Then from September or October everything became more intense.” Blumenthal was due to finalise some paperwork relating to the estate of his parents. And he was planning a belated celebration of the lives of his mother and sister, whose ashes he had only recently received. In the midst of the organisation, it “became difficult to get Heston’s attention,” Melanie says. “He was full of anxiety. I could see it was at this point that everything starts to accelerate.”
Melanie sensed Blumenthal’s loss had become too much to bear. During his manic episode, she asked her father, who once worked as a manager of mental health centres in France, to visit for a few days, in an attempt to seek early help. When he arrived, he knew immediately that something was wrong. He and Melanie also noticed that Blumenthal was speaking more and more about his family. “Heston said to my dad, ‘I’ve lost my mum, I’ve lost my sister,’” Melanie says. She supposed it was an effort to explain away his behaviour, which had become increasingly erratic. It was as though Blumenthal had not yet processed his grief, Melanie thought. And, now, here it was, the past exploding into the present.
During our first conversation, Blumenthal told me he was admitted to hospital on 12 November. “It was 11 November,” Melanie says now, “which was his sister’s birthday.” Blumenthal met Melanie in 2021 in Val d’Isère, where Melanie was working. She met neither of his parents or his sister. Of Blumenthal she says, “His memories [of family] are changing at the moment. He’s starting to remember more and more things.”
I ask how it felt to have made the decision to have Blumenthal sectioned. “I would say I’m working on it,” she says. “I have massive guilt. Sectioning someone is removing their freedom. It is me saying he wasn’t able to take care of himself.” She has worried that onlookers would suppose she was attempting to take control of his life. “But they don’t know.” She adds, “You think, ‘Is he going to understand?’ I hope he understands.”
Blumenthal does understand. “It’s kind of forged us closer,” he told me of their relationship. Of his current self he said, “You could argue that I’m grieving for where I was before,” and yet he is coming to accept his new situation: more calm, more balance, more patience. “There’s no breaking things,” he added, and less “vocalising of ideas.” At the Fat Duck, he has surrounded himself with old colleagues he has worked with for many years, in an attempt to recover a kind of professional stability. And he is returning to the restaurant more frequently now than he has done over the past 20 years.
Blumenthal calls me the next morning, while I am taking my young children to school. When I call back he is eager to clarify points from our previous conversations, particularly around his use of cocaine, which he is worried will make headlines. For a while we talk politely around the subject of perception – how his story is likely to be received by a public that has until now associated him with a kind of culinary genius – and I sense his nervousness. Before we hang up, he says, “I have been very open with you.” It is an effort, I think, to reiterate his vulnerability, and perhaps an attempt to influence what comes from our discussions. But then he seems to relax, and I feel his anxiety ease. He had earlier told me that “to open up is difficult, especially for men,” and yet he seems to relish the responsibility of becoming a kind of spokesperson, to spread the word of his experience, to inform others. Our call lasts five or so minutes. As a parting line he says, “Perhaps it is just better to be honest.”
The Fat Duck celebrates its 30th anniversary with the return of the à la carte menu (thefatduck.co.uk)
If you have been affected by any of these issues, call Samaritans on freephone 116 123 or contact Mind
