Interesting piece in the Paper yesterday about Heston Blumenthal. It talked of course about his imagination and inventiveness, the bacon ice-cream and snail porridge and his huge success as owner of world-famous Fat Duck, and now as a celebrity TV chef. But while his crazy culinary creations are well known I was surprised to find that his approach was less about a maverick’s vision, creativity and imagination and more about an applied and almost academic approach to fixing the problems that hinder perfection. Problems as he sees them of course – not problems visible to others. It was actually a kind of stubbornness that struck me.

It wasn’t really mentioned as such – rather as attention to detail and dedication. But to me it seemed that his fierce concentration, his almost ruthless commitment to a single idea means that he is prepared to sacrifice almost everything else in pursuit of perfection. In the early days it was absolute a fixation and focus on solving a single problem: “The first recipe I came up with was triple-cooked chips. I got completely focused on this one thing, cos I got obsessed with why chips went soggy.” Which has evolved into a slavish devotion to perfecting an idea that almost means he forgets all else. He says he has the attention span of ‘a gnat’ for things that don’t interest him but when it’s a recipe or an idea he will perfect it at all costs – not eating, not ironing clothes, not noticing the wider world around him while he is in his bubble. Like the recent gastro-celebrity Oscars party where he served dishes he had been “researching, devising and perfecting for several years” with such single-minded obsession” and “ microscopic attention to detail” that of course he “didn’t eat a thing” himself. For anyone who has been luckily enough to eat at The Fat Duck it’s no surprise that Heston’s restaurant was named best restaurant in the world in 2005, that it has three Michelin stars and has up to 32,000 unanswered calls a day for reservations at the £160 per head tasting menu. His food is unimaginably perfect and too delicious to describe. But of course Heston is still not satisfied and continues to make incredible sacrifices in order to improve his menu including the ultimate sacrifice for any business owner – the deliberate decision to sacrifice profit. Despite all seemingly sensible advice Heston has cut down his number of tables at The Fat Duck over the years and is now only able to serve 42 diners an evening. Given that a table for two brings in revenue of £250,000 a year, you’d think that Heston would want to increase this number. “It breaks all the rules of running a restaurant” he says and yet “with fewer covers we can pay more attention to detail”. And Heston is stubbornly obsessed with detail. Not the strawberry swirl known as detail in any other restaurant but the micro make-up of every ingredient, of every flavour, of every texture. The Duck is about the pursuit of perfection and Heston feels that it is his duty to stubbornly serve this ideal. “Everything I do is to pay the Duck back and protect it. Everything else I do – all the other areas of the business – are all about protecting the Duck”.

Heston’s three essential ingredients for innovators? The pursuit of perfection. A focus on Fixing. And some Stubborn Magic.