Heston Blumenthal and his 'year of two halves'

10 April 2012

It has been, says Heston Blumenthal wryly, a year "very much of two halves".

"Looking back, I've had a fantastic 12 months except for one thing."

But what will he remember them best for? Blumenthal, dressed blokeishly in black jacket and jeans, grimaces.

Reflection: "I've had a fantastic 12 months except for one thing"

The hatful of international accolades bestowed on his restaurant The Fat Duck, perhaps, including a perfect 10 in The Good Food Guide?

The new level of TV fame acquired over the course of the Channel 4 series that saw him drag Little Chef out of the 1970s and into a kind of gastronomic real world? Well, nope. At The Fat Duck, 2009 will be remembered as the year of the notorious norovirus.

It was in February that Blumenthal was forced to close his three-Michelin-starred restaurant in the Berkshire village of Bray, following an outbreak of illness among diners.

"It was a Monday, and I was in France," he says now, wincing. "I made this horrible decision to close the restaurant - and then I had to do a demonstration in front of 500 people at a gastronomy event in Deauville. It felt like my whole world was caving in.

"When it happened, I had no idea whether we'd reopen and it made me realise just how fragile this whole thing is.

"I'd definitely say that if it had happened to any one of a thousand other restaurants, they simply wouldn't have survived it."

Perfect 10: The Fat Duck in Bray won top marks in The Good Food Guide

We're sitting in Blumenthal's warm, wood-panelled pub and hotel, The Hinds Head , next door to The Fat Duck and across the road from his rabbit warren-like "experimental kitchen" where half a dozen chefs are busily creating chocolate playing cards and Heston's special sweetie bags.

It's in these kitchens that Blumenthal performs his "culinary alchemy", reassessing the science behind even the most basic principles and techniques of cooking, and creating in the process those signature dishes that have bestowed both highbrow culinary fame and a hesitant tabloid celebrity: bacon-and-egg ice cream, snail porridge, sardine-on-toast sorbet, macerated strawberries with an olive and leather purée, sherbet dib-dabs.

Until now, Blumenthal has barely spoken about the forced two-week closure. Legal constraints during the investigation by the Health Protection Agency, and again during further investigative work by insurers, effectively gagged him.

It's clear that he found this enormously frustrating, and hated not being able to talk.

"The worst thing was I couldn't apologise to the customers who'd been ill," he says. "The team here were in contact with them, and with those whose bookings we'd had to cancel, but it must have been awful for them.

"The insurance company just put a big veil over everything too. For a while, I wasn't allowed to go to Bray because the place was crawling with reporters."

Hard working: Blumenthal's restaurant, the Fat Duck, gained its three Michelin stars in just five years

Blumenthal is not a shouty sort of chef, and his kitchen is not a war zone.

Despite ample provocation, he dealt with Ian Pegler, Little Chef MD and professional Yorkshireman, with admirable coolness and a kind of restrained bemusement on the Channel 4 series Big Chef Takes on Little Chef ("Pegler was TV gold," enthuses Blumenthal.

"I was incredibly naive going into that programme and I regretted it for 95 per cent of the time I was actually doing it, but now I'm really proud of it.

"After the Olympic Breakfast, the second-most popular dish at the Little Chef at Popham is the braised ox cheeks, which I find really inspiring").

Yet the long-awaited HPA report into the outbreak at The Fat Duck (delayed until September partly because the agency was so busy with swine flu) has clearly made him very cross indeed.

At the last count 529 people were affected by illness, including sports broadcaster Jim Rosenthal, boxing promoter Frank Warren and a handful of staff members at the restaurant itself.

The source was eventually traced to a specific strain of norovirus, or vomiting bug, found in oysters served in two dishes - "Jelly of Oyster and Passionfruit with Lavender", and the "Sound of the Sea".

"The report insinuated things that I find really frustrating," says Blumenthal. "For example, that people were back at work while they were physically ill.

"Now, our staff training manual very clearly lays out a 48-hour return to work policy - you don't come back to work until 48 hours after you feel better - and I don't know many restaurants that do that.

Struck down: Frank Warren was one of 529 people affected by illness after attending the Fat Duck

"Obviously the norovirus went around like wildfire, and we had several people who were ill over a period of two or three months, and they all followed the 48-hour rule.

"A couple of them later [told the HPA] that they weren't quite feeling right when they came back, but at no point were we aware of that. And if you read the report, it sounds like they were being sick or fainting while they were at work, which isn't true."

The report also noted an "e.coli count in a langoustine cream" found in the Fat Duck freezer, and printed this exact count in its online report.

But Blumenthal, who hired the expert bacteriologist Hugh Pennington as an adviser, insists that it simply wasn't a significant number.

"Hugh looked over it for us and said that the count was lower than you find in ready meals in supermarkets, and that it's on herbs like chervil and parsley." So essentially it was harmless and normal.

There are other quibbles with the HPA report, not least its sudden appearance in full on the internet "two hours" after Blumenthal and his staff at The Fat Duck received it.

"We were supposed to have 24 hours to look at it, which was the very minimum we needed to soak up what they were saying, but that didn't happen.

"I'd say there's no other restaurant in the history of Britain that's gone through such an investigation and then had the results released fully to the public in such detail."

In the end, of course, the HPA did not rule out cross-contamination in the restaurant itself but Blumenthal claims there was absolutely no evidence for that at all.

"The only thing the report did categorically state was that the norovirus came from ingested oysters," he says.

"Obviously The Fat Duck was at the centre of it but there were other restaurants that bought oysters from the same supplier who had people fall ill.

"You have to ask the question: how is it that oysters are allowed to be harvested from waters containing sewage - at low levels, but sewage nevertheless - when this thing is so horrendously contagious?

"You only need one spore, and an oyster with a virus is still a glisteningly fresh clean oyster. It has no smell, and it's very hard to test for."

The insurance company is meanwhile turning its attention to the oyster supplier in Essex and to the local water authority.

To say the episode left Blumenthal bruised is an understatement. For a while, his confidence plummeted.

Self-belief has always been a hallmark of his career - from the moment when, as an 18-year-old upstart from High Wycombe who had taught himself how to cook using old French cookbooks, he turned down an apprenticeship at Raymond Blanc's Le Manoir Aux Quat' Saisons in favour of going it alone.

It wasn't until 1995 that he opened The Fat Duck, which was then a pub with a bad reputation (on his fourth evening, there was a knife fight in the garden and the police were called).

Blumenthal turned it around through sheer hard work and the restaurant gained its three Michelin stars in just five years, faster than any other kitchen in the UK.

When faith in his own judgment began to waver, the whole Fat Duck project was in serious trouble. "The investigation thing dragged on and on, and when you've got long enough to think about a problem, you do start questioning yourself. Did I do this the right way? Was this the right thing to do? How much more have I still got in me? I did really think about all that stuff, and I found it very undermining."

But only briefly. When The Fat Duck reopened in March, normal business resumed pretty much immediately.

Several months later, as if by way of exoneration, the restaurant was awarded that 10 out of 10 in the 2010 Good Food Guide, and then came second - for the second year running - in the prestigious S Pellegrino World's 50 Best Restaurants, behind Ferran Adrià's El Bulli in Spain. "That was just brilliant," says Blumenthal, beaming. "It felt like great motivation for me and the whole team."

A grand unveiling of The Fat Duck's new tasting menu, which had been delayed by three months as a result of the closure, was also a big success. Dishes now include Mock Turtle Soup, Powdered Anjou Pigeon, Salmon poached in Liquorice and a reinstituted Sound of the Sea.

Blumenthal's popularity, then, appears barely to have taken a dent.

Next month he's at the ExCeL centre in east London for the prestigious Taste of Christmas restaurant festival, where he'll reveal some of his top Christmas tips and explain why he never cooks turkey ("It just goes too dry. I'll do a goose, though I've also cooked capon before, with a white truffle. I do think it's a time when you can be decadent").

The Fat Duck is always closed over the holiday, allowing Blumenthal to spend proper time at home in Marlow with the family he rarely saw during the difficult early years at the restaurant - his wife Zanna, and three children, Jack, 17, Jessica, 14, and Joy, 12. Despite the absence of turkey, it will be a traditional British Christmas, with only the odd Blumenthalesque tweak.

There might be a potted Stilton (mix the cheese with mascarpone and sherry) alongside an Eccles cake and a glass of port. There will be beef and Yorkshire pud on Boxing Day.

Christmas pudding will be served with whisky ice cream - made, mind you, not in a conventional ice cream maker, but according to Heston's rigorously scientific method, which uses dry ice supplied at a temperature of minus 80 degrees.

He tells me, too, about the pure black caviar sorbet he served to guests on the Christmas edition of his Channel 4 series Feast, along with ambergris, an intestinal secretion of the sperm whale, and eggs.

And I get the distinct impression as I leave The Hinds Head that it will take more than a few crates of dodgy oysters to enervate Blumenthal's restless, playful, and sometimes just a little icky, imagination.

Heston's taste of Christmas - Roast potatoes

The variety of potato is important. Maris Piper is a good all-rounder but if you can get something like Golden Wonder or Arran Victory — both Scottish varieties — so much the better.

Cut them so that there are plenty of corners and edges to get crispy. Then cook them in simmering water, and take them as far as you possibly can — this is absolutely key — until they're just about to fall apart.

The fat will only go into the potato when there's a crack in it, and it's the fat that makes a crispy, juicy roast potato. (If you don't want fat in your potatoes, don't do roasties.)
Strain them off and let them steam-dry.

You might want to give them a tiny shake but they'll be delicate and you don't want to break them up completely.

Now put them in a pan of either olive oil or beef dripping. It's been trendy recently to use goose or duck fat but dripping is best for crispiness.

You need a good centimetre or two of oil or dripping in the pan, then pop them in the oven at about 180 or 190 degrees. Start turning after half an hour.

They'll take between 60 and 90 minutes, but just before they're done, get a load of rosemary and a few bashed-up cloves of garlic and bung that in. Once they're out of the oven, sprinkle with salt. Perfect.

Taste of Christmas runs at ExCeL from Friday-Sunday, 4-6 December.

Heston Blumenthal will be appearing at the event on the Sunday. For more information go to tasteofchristmas.com.

To access the Evening Standard special offer of two tickets for £32 visit standard.co.uk/tasteofchristmas. See page 45 for details.

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