I grew up in west London in the 1970s, when Britain’s gastronomic reputation was at a pretty low ebb – basket meals, Berni Inns, prawn cocktail and Black Forest gâteau were the height of sophistication. My mum was actually a good cook – goulash, Coronation chicken, ‘exotic’ pressure‑cooker dishes – but eating out usually felt rather stiff and joyless.

I certainly didn’t grow up saying I wanted to be a chef. I was more interested in kickboxing and taking things apart to see how they worked. What I did have, even then, was an over‑active curiosity. I wanted to know why some meals felt magical and others didn’t.

The real turning point came when I was 16 and my parents took me to a three‑star restaurant in Provence, L’Oustau de Baumanière. That evening completely rewired my brain – the crunch of gravel, the perfume of lavender and roses, the ballet of waiters carving lamb and pouring sauces, the sound of cicadas in the background. I came away knowing I wanted to be part of that world.

One very strong early memory is from Sundays at Church Street Market near Marylebone. My grandmother would march my sister and me up and down the stalls and, as a reward for being dragged round, we were allowed an ice cream at the Regent Snack Bar on Edgware Road – a tiny Sicilian‑run place with a giant plastic cone over the door and a man in a white coat smoothing ice cream into cones with a trowel‑like scoop.

It wasn’t just the taste; it was the whole ritual – the anticipation, the stallholders shouting, the smell of the market, the feel of the cone. That sense of food as reward, layered with memory and emotion, has been a thread running through my cooking ever since.

The meal at Baumanière in 1982 was my coup de foudre. I remember the gravel, the light, the smell of lavender, the theatre of bow‑tied waiters and soufflés being sauced at the table. I left completely obsessed with the idea of cooking.

I didn’t go to culinary school. I’m a self‑taught chef. My training was cooking the same classic French recipes over and over at home, following books by Chapel, Troisgros, Bocuse and others, and then cross‑checking everything against Larousse Gastronomique and Escoffier. I’d drive miles to a good butcher just to buy bones and carcasses for stock, and spend my evenings making demi‑glace after demi‑glace in search of something that felt ‘right’.

I did a week’s probation at Raymond Blanc’s Le Manoir aux Quat’Saisons and was offered an apprenticeship, but I turned it down. It would have meant years at the bottom of a very well‑run brigade; instead, I carried on my slightly mad, very detailed home‑training. That habit of questioning and experimenting became the foundation of everything that followed.

Very few, in the conventional sense. Apart from that week at Le Manoir and a short, intense spell at Marco Pierre White’s Canteen to prove to myself I could cook at speed for 250 covers, I wasn’t brought up in a traditional brigade.

My real apprenticeship came from eating my way across France every summer for a decade – from Troisgros to Chapel, Bras, Bise, Bocuse and many others – and then going home and trying to reverse‑engineer what I’d tasted, dish by dish, in a tiny English kitchen. Those trips were about banking ‘flavour memories’ and realising how far I still had to go. I would come back with a thousand benchmarks in my head – and a renewed determination to close the gap.

The Fat Duck in Bray is the most ‘me’ in terms of sheer curiosity and experimentation. It started in 1995 as a modest pub – one door, no view, a tiny, impractical kitchen and a fairly colourful local reputation. That was all I could afford.

Out of that chaos came the question that still drives me: what is flavour, and how do we actually experience it? That led to triple‑cooked chips, crab ice cream, low‑temperature cooking, collaborations with scientists and perfumers, and eventually things like ‘Sound of the Sea’, where you literally listen to the shoreline as you eat.

Dinner by Heston Blumenthal at Mandarin Oriental Hyde Park has been ambitious in a different way: taking centuries of British culinary history – often unfairly maligned – and re‑expressing it in a contemporary, luxurious setting in the heart of London. If The Fat Duck is my rabbit hole, Dinner has been my time machine.

My relationship with Mandarin Oriental Hyde Park has been a hugely important chapter in my life. When we created Dinner, the idea was to shine a new light on historic British dishes – to show that the country that gave us meat fruit, tipsy cake and mock turtle soup could hold its own on the world stage.

Over time you feel when a chapter is naturally drawing to a close. Creatively, I’m increasingly drawn to questions about wellbeing, the microbiome, mindful eating and how all our senses shape a meal. It felt like the right moment – for both sides – to allow new stories to be written. It isn’t a break‑up; it’s more like putting a full stop at the end of a very good sentence.

The people, absolutely. The team at Dinner by Heston Blumenthal, and the wider Mandarin Oriental family, have been extraordinary. There’s a particular hum to that dining room – the light from Hyde Park, the quiet choreography of the service, the sense of London just beyond the windows – that has been the perfect backdrop for telling the story of British food.

I’ll miss that daily sense of theatre, and the privilege of watching guests encounter, say, meat fruit for the first time – the flicker of surprise, the smile, the sense that their idea of British cuisine has just shifted a little.

It feels exhilarating and exhausting in roughly equal measure. The early Fat Duck years were held together with tape and sheer stubbornness; when we finally received three stars, we were still wheeling the bins through the dining room each morning because there was no back entrance.

The pressure at that level is intense, but the real work is quite simple: relentless tasting and re‑tasting, obsessive attention to ingredients and technique, and building a culture where curiosity is encouraged.

For chefs, I’d say: don’t chase stars; chase understanding. Learn the classics properly. Question every bit of kitchen lore – ‘searing seals in the juices’, ‘this is just how we do it’ – and test things for yourself. Perfectionism can easily become the enemy of creativity. Allow yourself, and your team, to fail intelligently. Some of my best ideas have come from so‑called mistakes.

My head is still, as ever, ‘a kid in a sweetshop’. The areas that excite me most at the moment are:

•  The microbiome and gut–brain axis: how what we eat shapes our internal ecosystem and, in turn, our mood and wellbeing.
• Mindful, multisensory eating: not just what’s on the plate but how sound, smell, context and attention change an experience.
• Continuing to evolve The Fat Duck and my other restaurants as places of exploration – part laboratory, part theatre, part memory machine.

The common thread is using science not as a gimmick, but as a way to make food more delicious, more nourishing, and more emotionally resonant.

I have enormous admiration for restaurants where you can taste the chef’s thinking in every detail – where there’s rigour and generosity, not just polish.

Rather than pick out a single ‘favourite’, I’d say London’s strength is its contrasts: you can move, in a single day, from a deeply technical tasting menu experience to a tiny place serving one or two things perfectly, and both can be equally moving. That spectrum – from the equivalent of three‑star ‘Baumanière moments’ to honest, joyful neighbourhood cooking – is what makes the city so compelling.

I’m constantly inspired by chefs who keep questioning – who are willing to revisit assumptions about technique, sourcing, even the structure of a menu. I’m also very impressed by younger chefs who are thinking about their teams’ wellbeing and about sustainability with the same seriousness previous generations reserved for sauces.

More than a list of names, what encourages me most is the mindset: an openness to science, to collaboration with different disciplines, and to the idea that a restaurant can be more than just a place that feeds you.

Reading, mostly. Not just cookbooks – though I still devour those – but science, psychology and philosophy, anything that helps explain how we experience the world. Books like Harold McGee’s On Food and Cooking, Oliver Sacks’ The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Lisa Feldman Barrett’s How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain have all shaped how I think about flavour, perception and emotion.

And then I try to do the opposite of restaurant life: be outside, slow down, pay attention. High‑end kitchens run on adrenaline and deadlines; you need moments of stillness to balance that. Mindfulness, in its simplest sense – actually noticing what you’re tasting, seeing, smelling – has become very important to me, both as a person and as a cook.