When Michelin-starred UK chef Heston Blumenthal turned to skinny jabs to lose weight, his appetite evaporated and he realised the popularity of such medications risked biting into restaurant sales.
So he devised a menu-lite, offering small plates of his star menu -- “The Journey” priced at £350 ($467) per person -- at his Fat Duck restaurant in the village of Bray, west of London.
His website describes the new “Mindful Experience” menu launched in October, costing £275 per person, as “a journey into the culinary creativity and Wonka-like wonderment of Hestonland”.
It says the menu is “a scaled-back version of each dish”, allowing diners to explore “mindfully, slowly savouring every mouthful, taking the time to detect flavours, textures, aroma”.
Following the United States, injections to treat diabetes and weight loss soared in popularity in 2025 in the UK, where they can be bought after consultations at a high-street pharmacy or even prescribed by doctors.
There are no official UK figures for the use of the new generation of such appetite-suppressing drugs called GLP-1 agonists, which include the brands Ozempic, Wegovy and Mounjaro.
But some studies say more than 3.5 million Britons could be using them.
“It’s only just started. It’s just beginning,” the 59-year-old Blumenthal told AFP.
He opened The Fat Duck in 1995, which nine years later was crowned with three Michelin stars. His other restaurants in Dubai and London have also won Michelin accolades.
But the celebrity TV chef, known for his playful and innovative creations combining food and science, has openly talked about his struggles since being diagnosed with bipolar disorder two years ago.
The medication he was prescribed led him to gain weight -- some 40 kilograms (88 pounds). His doctor proposed weight-loss drugs.
“When I first started to take it, I was not hungry at all. It was bizarre really. It didn’t put me off eating but it was just I was full without being feeling full,” Blumenthal said.
He lost 20 kgs in three months but happily the jabs did not kill his tastebuds.
But the chef “realised that there’s a danger for restaurants”.
“This is going to have a huge impact on how we eat, on eating out in general.”
He saw it as “a big challenge but a thrilling one -- an opportunity to rethink, re-examine, reinvent”.
His smaller plates menu starts with a “Nitro-poached aperitif” -- a lime and green tea mousse created with liquid nitrogen which melts in the mouth in seconds.
A signature dish, “Beside the Sea”, transports diners to the seaside through taste, sound and smell. While customers dine on edible sand and a crab ice-cream, they listen to seagulls and the sounds of the waves through headphones.
UK government figures show that nearly two-thirds of adults are either overweight or obese, and the National Health Service is staggering under patient demand for the jabs.
Faced with long waiting lists, hundreds of thousands have flocked to UK pharmacies prepared to pay upwards of £175 for a month’s worth of jabs, with the costs rising for higher doses.
Blumenthal’s smaller menu has been a huge success, with only one of the first 80 customers saying they were not full after eating.
The chef -- who these days finds himself spending 10 minutes chewing on a raisin, analysing the taste -- said he does not think he could now tuck into a full plate. “It’s too big,” he explained.
“When there’s less food you can value it more.”
“There’s something about taking a mouthful and really concentrating on it which changes the way your body is receiving it.”
Blumenthal is not the only chef to realise tastes are changing.
Indian chef Atul Kochhar told Britain’s Channel 4 TV outlet that he had launched a smaller plates offering.
He “knew there would be an impact on our business” of the skinny jabs, he said, adding “I’d be lying if I was saying I wasn’t worried”.
“A lot of people were saying, ‘It’s a bit too much of food, we won’t be able to eat it, we don’t want to waste it’. So we decided to come with a kind of miniature plate.”
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