Heston Blumenthal

Heston Blumenthal is best known for his award-winning London restaurant, The Fat Duck, and his rather terrifying appearances on the reality TV show MasterChef. He’s the man with the Midas Touch — it’s not just that his restaurants top the charts, he alchemises the food itself turning it into something that either tastes marvellously familiar but looks other-worldly, or the other way around.

Heston Blumenthal is best known for his award-winning London restaurant, The Fat Duck, and his rather terrifying appearances on the reality TV show MasterChef. He’s the man with the Midas Touch — it’s not just that his restaurants top the charts, he alchemises the food itself turning it into something that either tastes marvellously familiar but looks other-worldly, or the other way around.

The 53-year-old English restaurateur is the ultimate culinary showman, playing on childhood memories and culinary history (primarily Britain’s) to craft edible experiments. For instance, the multi-sensory experience he calls Sound of the Sea is seafood, seaweed, kelp arranged to resemble a strip of beach, accompanied by an iPod in a conch that plays beach sounds as you eat. On MasterChef, he’d turn up with a disarming smile and lift the cloche off what looked like the perfect orange but turned out to be a four-hour recipe involving mainly meat.

He continues to redefine how we think about what we do in the kitchen, as well as what we’re willing to try, even if just once.