AIR
Fire and sense of direction, they were man’s big things. We’ve got GPS, so that’s one out. Us men are hanging on by the skin of our teeth
breed white horses. It’s incredibly fertile. And the Romans! The biggest amphitheatre outside of Italy is down the road in Arles and you’ve got the Pont du Gard aqueduct in Nîmes to take water 50km. Every road has ...” There follows an explanation of the French drainage system, but this isn’t quite as tangential as you might think, because it brings us to his new lab, where he is setting up his water project. “Water has a memory and carries data. Without it we can’t live. It forms the basis of every food we eat, every living creature, in some shape or form. You can activate it by sunlight, by passing current through it. You can activate it by motions.” He then leaps into a riff about the stuff we can’t see making up trillions of times more of the universe than the stuff that we can. “It’s a bit tricky to get your head around,” he admits. I am in agreement with him on this point, but try to steer him back to safer terrain. Will we be seeing the fruits of this research in the Fat Duck soon? Oh yes, he says, and starts talking, almost in bullet points, about dementia, Alzheimer’s, gut health, vibrating particles, string theory and quantum theory. “Everything is vibrating.” What, though, does this all mean for the Fat Duck, the restaurant at the heart of an empire that includes Dinner, the restaurant in the Mandarin Oriental Hyde Park hotel, his Hind’s Head gastropub in Bray and his range of products for Waitrose? Is he taking a back seat while he pursues a better life balance and his mysterious research into water? “No, in fact, in a funny 74
way I’m actually doing the opposite.” His development kitchen in France will work “hand in hand” with his team in Bray, where all the wonkery takes place. “This next stage is an evolution of what’s been happening. I’ve been busier than I’ve ever been with R&D, and it will start to manifest itself over the next couple of years.” The costs that go with this creativity are huge. The Fat Duck seats fewer diners at a sitting (38) than the number of chefs on its payroll. Accounts for Snail Porridge Limited for the year ending May 2018 showed that losses had increased from USD866,000 to USD2.1 million. The company said it was starting to see the impact of efficiencies and that the accounts provided a historic view only. Reports in Australia this year said that his Dinner restaurant in Melbourne, which is owned by a company in the Caribbean, also made a loss in 2017-18. More recently, UK newspaper The Sun reported that staff were worried that Blumenthal’s restaurant business could “do a Jamie Oliver”, but that the company’s spokesman insisted that there was no truth in the rumours. Given the challenging marketplace his restaurants are operating in, it is unsurprising though, that Blumenthal is promoting other money-spinning ventures, such as his new barbecue. I tell him that I was surprised, looking at the Fat Duck website, to see that a table for two people – once notoriously hard to secure – was available for the following evening. There was also availability over the next week. “The secret of the Duck is that we have cancellations and rebookings. So if
you happen to get on just after cancellation, then you can get a table,” Blumenthal says. While still working in kitchens, he was obsessed with working out and was a muscular figure. Today, dressed all in black with his trademark thickrimmed specs, he looks a bit heavier. He recently had an accident while cycling and fractured his kneecaps. The boyish curiosity is, if anything, even more pronounced. He rummages in his bag and pulls out a microbiome kit, for which he has produced a sample in order to get his gut bacteria analysed. But let’s not get distracted by his stomach’s contents. “Tomorrow we’ve got an all-day development meeting,” he says, focusing on the immediate future, “but the basic principle comes back to the fact that human beings are storytellers. I’ve used food to tell stories.” And the story behind his new barbecue? “Nanotechnology meets philosophy,” he proclaims and offers a short history of human evolution, which sounds as if he has read Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari, and takes in the lengthening of the larynx, the discovery of cooking on fire and the start of communal meals, and arrives at the modern day with Blumenthal’s wife trying out his fancy new barbie and leaving him wondering what purpose men still serve. “Fire and sense of direction, they were our big things,” he says, smiling. “We’ve got GPS, so that’s one out. And she looked at me and said in her beautiful French accent, ‘I can do this.’ And I thought, ‘Have I just [blown] it?’ “Us men are hanging on by the skin of our teeth.”