Nearly eight months after leaving a psychiatric clinic, chef Heston Blumenthal is trying to make sense of his life and career through the prism of his new bipolar diagnosis. “The more I understand what it is, the more I can look back and look at my past,” he says.
In October, in the midst of a mental health crisis that led to his hospitalization, he created a frenzy of ideas on just one or two hours of sleep, leading to hallucinations. The experience made him rethink the insomnia he suffered from early in his career, when he worked 120-hour weeks in the kitchen and emailed colleagues before dawn. At the time, he saw it as a feature of his drive, the price of success. Could his behavior also have been an early symptom of his disorder? “I think it’s been there for a long time.” It’s too early to draw conclusions. “I still want to know more about myself.”
After opening The Fat Duck in 1995, self-taught Blumenthal was dubbed a culinary Willy Wonka for his experimental approach to food, creating menus that appealed to all the senses, including snail porridge and bacon and egg ice cream. In 1999, the restaurant won a Michelin star and five years later it had three, which it still holds. The success made him a celebrity, with television shows (Heston’s Parties, Heston Blumenthal: In Search of Perfection and Heston’s Great British Food) and cookbooks along with a range of food items at the Waitrose supermarket chain, including a Christmas pudding that resold for hundreds of pounds on eBay. She later opened Hinds Head in Berkshire and Dinner by Heston, in Knightsbridge, London, where we meet.
Sitting on the terrace of his two-star restaurant, shaded by the bright blue sky, Blumenthal’s shaved head and black-framed glasses are familiar, but his demeanor is hesitant, gauging his thoughts. He is accompanied by Melanie Ceysson, his wife of almost 18 months.
Blumenthal wants to speak out because “it’s really hard” for most people to talk openly about their mental health despite the awareness that has come about in the last decade. “They’re afraid that the stigmatization will affect their jobs.”
Since revealing her condition, people known and unknown have contacted me “saying, ‘That was really brave and really emotional. ‘ But no one has contacted me to say, ‘It’s OK, I’ve got it, too. ‘” This is despite more than 100,000 people having contacted me to say, ‘Well, I’ve got it, too. ‘” 1 million people have the disorder in the UK, according to the charity Bipolar UK.
Blumenthal knows he can be open because he is backed by his wealth, which gives him access to the treatment, and he is no longer central to the day-to-day running of the company. “It’s much easier for me to have a platform… I’m not the CEO or the COO.”
In 2006, he sold his restaurants to a company called SL6 to concentrate on developing his personal brand and new ideas. “Those in charge [worry about] butts in seats… When money comes in right at the start it can block free thinking and creativity.” SL6 made an operating loss last year of £1.3m, after a profit of £2.4m in 2022, on revenues that fell from £11.5m to £9.5m. The business has been squeezed by increases in labour, energy and ingredient costs and is focusing on increasing foot traffic and cutting spending.
Blumenthal says that, broadly speaking, his role in the business now is “creativity and development. It’s my taste buds.” Gesturing toward the kitchen, he acknowledges: “These guys do all the work… It’s taken me years to build a structure and a team. If I go into the kitchen, I’m going to cause chaos.”
The chef has spoken to management about his diagnosis and is considering what steps the company could take to better support mental health and neurodiversity. In 2016, he received an ADHD diagnosis that he thought was “really cool,” but he acknowledges that “I’m not sure it’s good for everyone.” Learning about neurodiversity helped. A car alarm goes off and Blumenthal loses focus because of his sensitivity to noise. “Oh, this is going to be painful,” he says, pausing until he stops. He has discovered ways to organize his life, such as using objects as memory prompts. “I love seeing myself as a walking experiment.”
The mental and physical changes increased as she experienced extreme moments of her crisis last year, driven by a desire to “save the world.”
“I wanted to love every single person in the book, because they’re all wonderful. I was throwing up ideas,” she recalls. “But if someone moved so much as a sticky note… then, boom! I was so angry at the world, I didn’t beat around the bush.” She compares her mood swings to those of a child. “Sometimes they get too excited and then… the scales tip the other way and they have a screaming fit. Both the positive side, all the ideas and wonder, and the negative side. You can’t have one without the other.”
The feelings intensified. “I had become a danger to myself and also [a] Potential danger to the people around me. I don’t mean physical danger, but emotional danger. I’ve never had suicidal thoughts. [before then]“Knock on wood, thank goodness they’re gone.” At one point he thought there was “a gun on the table… It looked real.”
This period of upheaval stimulated ideas. “I’ve written pages,” he says. For four or five days last year he only slept for an hour or two. “I was so excited. Talking about doing things. It was a real mania.” “A real mania,” Ceysson repeats, rejecting the idea that this creativity was productive. “You were [having] “So many ideas that there was no time to do anything.”
In November, Ceysson, concerned about his physical and mental health, had him admitted. Blumenthal stayed in a psychiatric hospital for 20 days before being transferred to a clinic for 40 days, which he said “was fantastic” as it allowed him to undergo therapy and adjust to medication.
Blumenthal’s diagnosis is bipolar I disorder. He takes my notebook and draws lines indicating the different ups and downs, depending on the type of the illness: his own version, characterized by long periods of highs with brief bursts of dramatic lows.
“The most amazing moment in the world is actually the [most] “A very dangerous one.” The lack of sleep and the state of excitement put his body under a stress that doctors said was potentially lethal. “I know he was very physically ill.”
While he has no desire to experience the mania again, he doesn’t regret the contribution a milder version may have had on his career. The yelling in the kitchen, he says, tended to be directed at himself rather than others. “If I had a plate in my hand, [I] I could have broken it. It wasn’t something that happened often.” Unlike the restaurant kitchen shown in the TV drama The bearprefers a quiet workplace.
The Michelin star system is stressful, he admits, although he would not give back a star as French chef Sébastien Bras asked for in 2017, citing the pressure. “You can’t give up. The guide is for the public, not for the chefs… running a three-star restaurant is not sustainable forever,” he says.
There was nothing in Blumenthal’s background to suggest he would become a chef: his father ran an office supplies business and his mother was a housewife. But his interest in food was sparked at age 16, during a family holiday, when he ate for the first time at a Michelin-starred restaurant, L’Oustau de Baumanière, in Provence, near where he now lives. He later realised that becoming a chef “was about seeking out the effect I got from that restaurant, the crickets, the carving at the table”.
In the past, he attributed his drive in part to his mother not praising him. “Nothing was good enough,” he says. When he wrote his Fat Duck In her book, she said: “This is not a book. It took me ten years to write that… 200,000 words.” After his death in 2020, he discovered that she had clipped articles about him throughout his career and written to friends about his successes. “I would love to be in a position where I can ask” why he never told her.
Aside from spending a week in Raymond Blanc’s kitchen and three at Marco Pierre White’s restaurant, Canteen, to see the practical side of running a restaurant, Blumenthal taught himself to cook. He founded the Fat Duck with money from the sale of his house and a £10,000 loan from his father.
Innovation is Blumenthal’s trademark. He quotes Picasso: “Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up.”
“We build up layers of fear,” he says. He used to try to get the staff to overcome this with his Museum of Trash ideas.[You] We had to have an idea that no one else would have thought of and it had to be so bad that no one else would have thought of it.”
Blumenthal says the medication has stabilized his mood, allowing him to pursue and develop his ideas. That, along with maintaining a healthy routine, is now his priority. “I sleep well. I’m getting better at not letting my phone distract me.” He doesn’t want to go back to the extra creativity that came from highs: “Highs mean lows,” he says.