Heston Blumenthal

Heston Marc Blumenthal OBE HonFRSC (/ˈbluːmənθɔːl/; born 27 May 1966) is an English celebrity chef, TV personality and food writer. His restaurants include the Fat Duck in Bray, Berkshire, a three-Michelin-star restaurant that was named the world's best by the World's 50 Best Restaurants in 2005.

Blumenthal is regarded as a pioneer of multi-sensory cooking, food pairing and flavour encapsulation. He came to public attention with unusual recipes such as bacon-and-egg ice cream and snail porridge. His recipes for triple-cooked chips and soft-centred Scotch eggs have been widely imitated. He has advocated a scientific approach to cooking, for which he has been awarded honorary degrees from the universities of Reading, Bristol and London and made an honorary fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry.

Blumenthal's public profile was boosted by a number of television series, most notably for Channel 4, as well as a product range for the Waitrose supermarket chain introduced in 2010. Blumenthal also owns Dinner, a two-Michelin-star restaurant in London, and a one-Michelin-star pub in Bray, the Hind's Head.

Blumenthal has attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, a condition he believes made him hyper-focused on his work, and bipolar disorder. He is an ambassador for the charity Bipolar UK.

Heston Marc Blumenthal was born in Shepherd's Bush, London, on 27 May 1966, to a Jewish businessman born in Southern Rhodesia and an English mother, a secretary, who converted to Judaism. His surname comes from a great-grandfather from Latvia and means "flowered valley" (or "bloom-dale"), in German. His mother was often angry and unloving, calling him "useless" and "stupid", and never acknowledged his later achievements. Blumenthal was raised in Paddington, and attended Latymer Upper School in Hammersmith; St John's Church of England School in Lacey Green, Buckinghamshire; and John Hampden Grammar School, High Wycombe.

His interest in cooking began at the age of sixteen on a family holiday to Provence, France, when he was taken to the three-Michelin-starred restaurant L'Oustau de Baumanière. He was inspired by the quality of the food and "the whole multi-sensory experience: the sound of fountains and cicadas, the heady smell of lavender, the sight of the waiters carving lamb at the table". When he learned to cook, he was influenced by the cookbook series Les recettes originales, with French chefs such as Alain Chapel.

When he left school at eighteen, Blumenthal began an apprenticeship at Raymond Blanc's Le Manoir aux Quat' Saisons but left after a week's probation. Over the next ten years he worked in a "relatively undemanding series of jobs – credit controller, repo man" during the day, teaching himself the French classical repertoire in the evenings. A pivotal moment came when reading On Food and Cooking: the Science and Lore of the Kitchen by Harold McGee in the mid-1980s. This challenged kitchen practices such as searing meat to seal in the juices, and it encouraged Blumenthal to "adopt a totally different attitude towards cuisine that at its most basic boiled down to: question everything".

In 1995, Blumenthal bought a run-down pub in Bray, Berkshire, the Ringers, and re-opened it as the Fat Duck. It was initially staffed only by Blumenthal and a dishwasher. It served meals in the style of a French bistro, such as lemon tarts and steak and chips. Blumenthal later said that science had already begun to influence the cooking at this stage, as already on the menu were his triple-cooked chips, which were developed to stop the potato from going soft. The Fat Duck came close to going bankrupt, and Blumenthal sold his house, his car and many of his possessions to keep it open.