The world moving Blumenthal

He is the father of extraordinary things: lickable wallpaper, live pigeon pies, dishes that take weeks and months of research. And then, day to day, there is the rest of Operation Heston Blumenthal: cookbooks, television shows, supermarket ranges, speaking tours, two acclaimed restaurants, two gastropubs. In the sleepy, wealthy Berkshire town of Bray, site of his first restaurant, The Fat Duck, Blumenthal alone employs 170 people.

He is busy. “My assistant organises everything – I get into my car to drive 20 minutes and my phone goes ‘zzzt’; it says call so-and-so to discuss so-and-so, and I just press ‘call’. If I had to do that organising myself I’d probably have to be in an institution right now. It’ll all be in the diary, but in that respect, my life now feels less my own.”

In the Olympic year, his lunatic schedule has nevertheless found a way to go a little bit higher, faster, better. In partnership with British Airways, official airline of the London 2012 Games, he has worked with and mentored another British chef, Simon Hulstone, to create two menus that will be served from July to September on BA flights. Hulstone already has a Michelin star at his restaurant, The Elephant, in Torquay, but won a “Great Briton” competition run by BA to promote native talent.

Together the two chefs worked for a year to improve the famously bad food that usually gets on a plane. “If you were charged five or six quid for an airline meal in a pub you’d take it back. But in a plane we eat it,” Blumenthal says. “We’ve got nothing else to do.”

He has a typically scientific approach to making airline food better – thinking first about the environment of a plane, and how it spoils the eating experience. “One of the things we did [while] mentoring Simon was amend his dishes for the sky. We need foods that are more acidic, more salty … With the senses suppressed you need to push things up.”

Sitting in a meeting room at his development kitchen in Bray, with chefs prepping staff lunch downstairs, a camera crew milling about, Blumenthal puts his fingers in his ears. He is simulating high-altitude eating. “If you do that, you don’t get the noise of the crunch … it’s important to give [textural] contrast as an airplane is so noisy.” Only Blumenthal can talk about sound passing through your jawbone and make it sound like a convincing factor to consider when cooking airline food. But there are more basic things too: “BA and other airlines don’t have to give so many options – it’s always better to cut the variety down and focus on doing a few things well.” He speaks admiringly of a flight to Iceland on which he was served a piece of pink, juicy lamb. The attendant had cooked it on a low heat and simply removed from the oven when she thought it was ready.

Blumenthal says he would always order “something cold, or a stew or something curried” when on a plane. He seems to have a horror of overcooked fish. “Fish always gets obliterated,” he says. “You need someone on the plane who knows what a piece of overcooked fish looks like.”

Little wonder that the Club (business class) BA menu features a lot of smoked and cured salmon options, supplied by London smokehouse Forman’s, while the main course in first class is potted braised beef with a potato and horseradish topping. Some more elaborate Olympics-themed dishes were quickly ruled out. “There was always the danger of doing something too Olympics-related – Olympic onion rings or a chocolate podium. We were trying to get the balance right.”

Is Blumenthal optimistic for what the Games could do for Britain? “I am, depending on the road system. I don’t know how that’s going to work. The restaurants [Dinner and The Fat Duck] are busy anyway. Let’s say we get a month of madness, it could be a nightmare, they’re closing off part of Park Lane. How are the staff going to get to and from work?”

He hopes “we’ll be left with some great stadiums, London will be cleaned up, but at what cost, I don’t know.”

In Blumenthal’s heavily pressured life, he does undoubtedly have some pleasures to look forward to. He will be with BA at the Olympic opening ceremony, and has applied via other sponsors for Velodrome tickets, though he “hasn’t heard anything back yet”. He should also be a torch bearer, though he jokes he has yet to clear the necessary security checks. “Touch wood.”

And later that evening he is meeting his friend Liccy Dahl, Roald Dahl’s widow.

This prospect seems to be real “Heston” time, not demanded or diarised. “She first came into the restaurant years ago. The maître d’ said someone wants to speak to you – in those days people looked at my eyes and ears as if to say ‘are you on crack or something, what are you doing to the food?’ – but this pretty, elegant woman stood up and said, ‘how wonderful, if only my husband had been alive to see the real Willy Wonka.’”

You sense that there could be no higher compliment for an inventor such as Blumenthal.

Source: Financial Times