Heston has had the courage to tell his own story

Do you remember when movies and TV shows about chefs and restaurants were about fun?

The British TV shows I recall were things like Chef! (With Lenny Henry) and Whites. In the US I enjoyed Kitchen Confidential inspired by the Anthony Bourdain book and starring Bradley Cooper.

 

American movies were also largely upbeat when they dealt with chefs and cooking. Julie and Julia (with Meryl Streep as Julia Child) was fun. So was No Reservations about a female chef played by Catherine Zeta-Jones. And I enjoyed Burnt which also starred Bradley Cooper who is clearly good at playing chefs.

 

   Lately, however, the trend is to go much darker. The Menu with Ralph Fiennes starts out as a sly sendup of fine dining culture but suddenly turns into a horror film where everyone (with one exception) dies a messy death. It is much the same with such films as the British Boiling Point (and the TV series of the same name) which is all about the horrific pressures of the kitchen. Nobody is ever portrayed as being happy in a restaurant kitchen.

 

   And then, of course, there is The Bear, probably the most acclaimed TV series about restaurants and chefs ever made. Much of it is relentlessly downbeat and it has been praised for its authenticity (such real life legends as Rene Redzepi and Thomas Keller appear in it). It differs from other fictional food shows because it focuses on the trials and traumas of running a professional kitchen much more than it does on the food.

 

   I was reminded of The Bear when I watched an interview with Heston Blumenthal on Newsnight on BBCTV. Unusually for a chef, Blumenthal has gone public with what years in the kitchen have done to his mental health. He has been diagnosed with both attention deficit disorder (ADHD) and bipolar syndrome. The BBC interviewer asked Blumenthal if he had seen The Bear and he answered, with remarkable candour, that he had made a deliberate decision not to watch it. His wife Melanie, who was interviewed along with him, said that they feared that all the scenes of pressure and tension in the kitchen could trigger something inside him and have damaging consequences for his mental health.

 

   Blumenthal has been talking to the media about his bipolarity diagnosis and journalists keep asking him about The Bear (which, I guess, shows you how much the show has come to represent life in the professional kitchen). He was also asked about it last week by The Times and he gave the same reply: “it’s on my list. I haven’t watched it because it might trigger a bit of a bipolar thing in me.”

 

   I have to declare a personal interest. Blumenthal is a close friend and we talk at least once a week no matter where in the world we are. So while most people were shocked when Blumenthal went public with his diagnosis, I had been familiar with his condition, and with what he was going through.

 

   Heston has been successfully treated for his disorder and his life is back to normal. He is calmer and sharper now than he has been for the last few years. So I thought he might want to keep quiet about that terrible phase. To his credit, he has made the courageous decision to tell his story in the hope of helping others with his condition.

 

   The events that led to the diagnosis were terrifying. His wife had got used to his hyper phases, but she was startled when one such phase would not end and Heston seemed out of control. She took the difficult decision to call in the mental health professionals and they decided that Blumenthal needed to be sectioned, which gives authorities the legal right to keep you in hospital without your consent until they decide that your mental health is back to normal.

 

   In France, where the Blumenthals have a home, the authorities can be harsher. The psychiatric ward that Heston was sent to was, he says, “basically a prison”. It was like a cell with a metal toilet. Only after two weeks did they decide that he was well enough to be moved to a more peaceful, much nicer facility. It was two months before they finally decided that his problems had receded and he was ready to face the world.

 

"For the first 10 years of The Fat Duck, Heston was in the kitchen for nearly every service. He worked 120 hours a week and spent only 20 hours sleeping in the whole week."

   It is, as you can imagine, a harrowing story and certainly not the sort of experience that you associate with one of the world’s most famous and influential chefs. Because it happened in Provence, in the south of France, few people in Britain had any idea of what was going on with Heston.

 

   But he soon recovered, resumed his normal life, was feted for his work, received many more awards and went back to revitalising the menu at The Fat Duck, the three Michelin star restaurant in the English village of Bray, with which he had first made his reputation over two decades ago.

 

   I thought that the Blumenthals had decided to put that unhappy phase behind them. But Heston had other ideas. He read up on bipolarity and discovered that, when it came to the symptoms, he had ticked all the boxes.

 

   How many other people – and chefs in particular – he wondered, had suffered from the same sort of problems and had never been correctly diagnosed? And what about those who were too scared to go to the doctors fearing that once the diagnosis was declared it would be bad for their careers?

 

   Which is why Heston is going public with his diagnosis. Because he is such a big name, the media have lined up to do interviews with him. It can’t be easy to talk about that terrible time, but he believes that it is important to make the effort.

 

   Listening to him on the BBC and other platforms, I wondered: was his bipolarity caused by his lifestyle as a chef? Or do people with this condition naturally gravitate to restaurant kitchens? Could the manic bipolar streak have helped him become such a brilliant chef?

 

   For the first 10 years of The Fat Duck, Heston was in the kitchen for nearly every service. He worked 120 hours a week and spent only 20 hours sleeping in the whole week. Obviously he was exhausted all the time. He would fall asleep in the kitchen late at night while still prepping for the next day’s service. On one occasion he fell asleep while he was filleting a cod. At another time he was cleaning the oven when the exhaustion got to him and he fell into a stupor.

 

   But it was also one of the most creative phases of his life. Because he was always on a high and bursting with ideas, many of the innovations that came to redefine restaurant cuisine emerged during this phase.

 

   But there was a terrible price to be paid. And because too many chefs continue to lead these frantic, frenetic lives, sacrificing nearly everything including their families in pursuit of culinary excellence, this mad lifestyle has come to be regarded as the norm. Chefs struggle to cope with the pressures and the exhaustion, often turning to alcohol or cocaine to get them through the day.

 

   Though Heston has had his moments of rage, he was not known as one of the restaurant world’s bad boys who enjoy abusing the junior chefs and behaving like gang bosses in the kitchen. The growing acceptance of that kind of behaviour on the grounds that kitchens are high pressure places and so chefs have the right to be abusive may well be what caused the change in the way restaurants and chefs are portrayed in fiction, in popular media, on TV and in the movies. We don’t want to see love in the kitchen anymore. We want pressure, naked aggression and trauma.

 

   It is a worrying trend. And the more abusive chefs are celebrated and encouraged to shout and swear on reality television and to pepper every sentence with four letter words. Fortunately Heston has had the courage to tell his own story and to assert that the manic lifestyle of today’s chefs is not good for anyone’s mental health.

 

   Good food is about happiness and joy. And that joy should extend to the kitchen.