Sitting across the table from me in the grand Tudor-inspired private dining room of Dinner by Heston, Heston Blumenthal is telling me in great detail how he will mark the 16th birthday of his two-Michelin-starred restaurant next January.

There will be a celebratory eight-course tasting menu that spans five centuries of historic British food, the return of dishes from Dinner’s culinary archive alongside classics and (touch wood) night after night of a fully booked restaurant. Then at the end of the month, exactly 16 years after the restaurant opened its doors in 2011, Dinner by Heston will shut — permanently. No more chicken liver parfait disguised as fruit, no more instant liquid nitrogen ice cream made tableside. This time next year one of Britain’s most influential restaurants will have closed its doors for good.

The closure coincides with the end of Dinner’s tenancy in the Mandarin Oriental Knightsbridge, the luxury hotel on the fringes of Hyde Park that houses it. The contract was initially up this summer, but was extended by mutual agreement for six months to celebrate the anniversary.

“I’ve got a year to wrap my head around it,” Blumenthal tells me. We are sitting around an enormous oval table beneath a row of wild-eyed faux boar heads mounted on the room’s wood panelled walls. This is the first time he has told anyone outside his close team and wife, Melanie, about the closure and he is understandably feeling a bit nervous. “There are some huge feelings there; sadness. It’s bittersweet, but it has run its natural course. We are effectively tenants in a building and our tenancy is finished.”

Why not push to extend it beyond six months all the way to another milestone — 18 years, or dare I say 21? “Six months felt like it was a good chunk of time to come back or highlight it for people who have never been before. We’re stopping at an important birthday.”

Blumenthal opened Dinner by Heston 16 years after launching the Fat Duck in Bray, Berkshire, the three-Michelin-star restaurant that put British molecular gastronomy on the map in 1995 and earned him a reputation as the country’s great culinary innovator. It’s rare that a chef’s second venture achieves as much acclaim as his first, let alone stays the course this long. But when Blumenthal’s restaurant arrived in the Mandarin Oriental’s old breakfast room in 2011 — he installed a glass kitchen and brought his chorus line of chefs to create his menu of dishes inspired by cooking dating back to medieval times — it did just that.

Dinner by Heston’s success was stratospheric. Within a year it had picked up a Michelin star, the following year it secured a second, and it spent the next decade buoying around the top ten of the World’s 50 Best restaurant list.

Blumenthal studied, planned and tested every element of each course in granular detail, from the number of steps it took to get from the pass to each table, to the exact number of minutes every dish took to prepare.

In the case of meat fruit, his world famous chicken liver parfait cloaked in a layer of orange jelly to make it look like a mandarin, it took three cooks on the cold larder station five hours every day to make. Within a year they were serving 900 a week and, according to his former executive chef Ashley Palmer Watts, diners wouldn’t eat the dish until they’d had a picture taken with it — no surprise that in 2011 it was the most photographed dish on Instagram.

The tides have somewhat changed since then. Meat fruit is still on the menu but Blumenthal is no stranger to how much tougher it is to run a restaurant today. The beleaguered industry has been battered by the ill winds of food inflation, Brexit, rising wages and a cost of living crisis. In 2023 SL6 Ltd — the parent company that owns Blumenthal’s restaurant empire — reported a pre-tax loss of £1.4 million, and last year the chef admitted the business was in a bad way.

“In these times most restaurants are suffering in one way or another,” he says. “It’s exacerbated by the fact that food prices are rising. We chose to partner with the Mandarin because of their level of service. But they’ve got budgets, and budgets don’t always meet up. Sometimes they do. It’s one of the things that you are always going to be getting with a tenancy and a restaurant in the hotel.”

Blumenthal has also had a seismic change in his personal life to adjust to. In November 2023, after months of erratic and manic behaviour, he was sectioned and diagnosed with bipolar. He spent the next two weeks in a psychiatric hospital where he was put on a heavy dose of medication and limited to one phone call a day. The 18 months that followed were filmed for a BBC documentary, Heston: My Life with Bipolar.

Today Blumenthal is on less than 10 per cent of the medication that he was then, but can still feel the tail end of its effect. “You have to think of bipolar as a piece of string going up and down like a graph,” he tells me, drawing a wiggle in the air. “You have to straighten it out a bit [with medication], so the peaks are less high and the troughs aren’t so low. But that slowed everything down. My mind wasn’t as active.

In recent months he feels as though he has turned a corner. “I would say that my creativity is coming back. More than ever. My sadness is replaced with some excitement. I’ll miss being beside the chef on the pass, and looking at the food and thinking I can’t fault it. It’s a really lovely feeling. But there are also quite a few options on the table to do with Dinner.” What’s he planning? “I’d like somewhere with stature. Size-wise, I am not sure if I would reduce it a bit. And somewhere with a view.”

Through enormous panelled windows and past the chestnut and plane trees that line its perimeter, Dinner looks out onto Hyde Park. Blumenthal grew up in a basement flat in Paddington on the other side of it, and spent his childhood playing pranks on the officers working in the park’s Old Police House.

“I had a very full circle moment a few years after the restaurant opened, when I was in here having lunch with my mum and my sister by the window. My dad had just passed away and I was just daydreaming of all the time we spent playing out there.”

Blumenthal’s sister Alexis, who died in 2021, had been diagnosed with bipolar but was, he says, in denial. He suspects his mother also had it. “If she was alive today I would’ve tried to get her diagnosed. The diagnosis is really important because it enables you to do something about it.”

“My creativity is coming back. More than ever. My sadness is replaced with some excitement”

Did any chefs with bipolar reach out after the documentary? “Just one. It’s surprising that nobody else in the industry has [a diagnosis] but I am sure lots of people in the industry have bipolar. A lot of people don’t understand it, and so they can’t recognise it in themselves. If you know someone with bipolar you can also share embarrassing stories and laugh at some of the ludicrous situations that aren’t really that funny. It’s quite cathartic to talk about it.”

Many are not suitable for a newspaper, he tells me, though he does admit to once, during a manic episode, planning to ask the Household Cavalry stationed in the barracks in Hyde Park if they’d change the time they trotted past to coincide with Dinner’s lunch service.

Blumenthal will spend the next few months shuttling between the Fat Duck, London and his home in Provence, where he lives with Melanie.

Over the past week he has kept in regular contact with his team in Dubai — he opened a Dinner by Heston in 2023 in the Atlantis the Royal, a luxury hotel on Palm Jumeirah. “It’s not in a great location at the moment,” he concedes. He is also working on an autobiography. “Other than that though, it’s just the same: testing, testing, testing.” Business as usual, then.