Midway through the 10-course tasting menu at Restaurant Sat Bains in early March, a server appears and mysteriously invites our table out to one of the adjacent greenhouses. It’s a surprise course, he explains, ushering the two of us inside, where a small table is holding pizza dough, a blend of cheeses and a vibrant green pesto made with the herbs grown inside these very walls. It’s a casual approach to the experience and unusual for a two Michelin-starred fine dining restaurant—but it works. It breaks up the monotony of sitting for a three-plus-hour dinner and it offers an insider glimpse of what chef Sat Bains is growing in his kitchen garden.
“I never worked for any formal three-star chefs,” Bains, who opened Restaurant Sat Bains outside Nottingham, England, in 2005, tells Observer. “I’ve always been self-taught. I’ve always felt like I have to make things accessible to the customers and also fun. It’s not about holding court. It’s not about being in a cathedral of gastronomy. It is about kicking back.”
He incorporated the unexpected course, which involves the small pizza being cooked in front of the guests in a blazing outdoor oven, a few years ago. Diners are offered a glass of beer to accompany their pizza, which is perfectly charred on the outside.
“We’ve got the lovely greenhouse, so the idea was, ‘Let’s take people out into the garden and make them something delicious,’” Bains says. “It makes it a bit more informal. It breaks all that snobbery. Especially [in] this modern era, people don’t want to sit there, stiff. They want to relax. And people are paying good money, so they should be able to chill.”
These moments of unexpected whimsy make their way through Bains’ menu, including a finale of cotton candy that’s served instead of traditional petit fours. As you bite into the sticky treat, there’s a cooling burst of ice cream—the perfect way to end the meal. It suits Bains, who has never been interested in doing things traditionally. He owns and runs the restaurant and its adjoining seven bedrooms (the destination eatery is billed as a “restaurant with rooms”) with his wife, Amanda, and describes himself as having “complete freedom.”
“I don’t have any shackles in terms of what can be done and what can’t be done,” the chef explains. “I think that’s part of the nature of my cuisine and the location [of the restaurant] and all of the things that make up Restaurant Sat Bains. It comes from being curious. I want to know why something is done that way.”
He adds of his approach, “You’re constantly trying to get the best version of an ingredient, and because I’ve not had that formal training there are a lot of questions I don’t know. But because I’m in a position where I am, I can ask the question and try it and practice it and play with it and enjoy it and not have this horrible feeling of, ‘Shit, I should know this.’ I’m not the best craftsman by any means, but I’ve got a really vivid imagination.”
Part of Bains’ freedom comes from restaurant’s location, outside Nottingham. Guests drive, or take the train and then a taxi to get to the stylish, peaceful restaurant and hotel, which is rather unexpectedly found just off the highway. At first glance, it doesn’t seem like a locale where you would find an established fine dining spot with two Michelin stars and a Michelin green star, but Bains has been there since it was the Hotel des Clos, which he joined as head chef in 1999. He took over the site a few years later and made it his own, establishing the gardens and reducing the number of bedrooms to make them bigger.
“It’s very obscure, but I like the idea of something that’s off the beaten [path] because there’s an element of surprise, but also it makes you try harder,” Bains says. “We’ve got to work harder to get people down the lane. Over time, around 15 years, we’ve slowly incorporated the greenhouses, the gardens, the bees, all the things that you see now.”
Bains, who is originally from Derby, England, didn’t know much about gardening when he opened Restaurant Sat Bains. But he has developed a newfound appreciation for the seasons and how changing weather patterns can impact what ingredients are available. Last summer, for example, was very damp, so Bains’ bees didn’t produce any honey. “We’re 30 kilos down,” he notes. “So it goes to show [how] a wet summer can really affect nature.”
Most of the dishes that appear on the menu at Restaurant Sat Bains incorporate at least one ingredient from the gardens. It can be anything from herbs to vegetables to flowers like jasmine, elderflower and chamomile, which Bains likes to infuse into an ice cream or as a garnish on a savory dish. He’s constantly evolving the menu based on the seasons, although development for a particular dish often has to be done before that ingredient is at its peak. When we spoke in early March, Bains was perfecting an asparagus dish in preparation for asparagus season, which lasts only six weeks.
“What I find fascinating with spring is that the season is quite rapid, so a lot of things are coming in,” he says. “All of a sudden it falls into a very quick sequence of dishes. The sea leek tart was only around for four weeks. Not every guest will taste everything. And we never change the whole menu in its entirety—we add and take dishes away to keep it like a rolling menu. That way you’re celebrating it through the taste and the flavors of that specific season.”
Although Bains is a well-established chef with plenty of accolades and TV appearances, he doesn’t want to rest on his laurels. He likes keeping a few classic dishes around, but he prefers to continually develop. He sees complacency as “a sign of death in any business” and affirms that he believes “you have to keep pushing.” Each dish begins with flavor.
“It could be like, ‘I really want to work on elderflower,’” he explains. “That elderflower could be a dessert, it could be savory, it could be a little piece of jelly that goes along with something, it could be a little dusting of the dried flowers that goes on a beautiful wild salmon dish. It’s endless. It’s about where to put that flavor in the menu in sequence that fits in just right.”
Although the dishes I ate at Restaurant Sat Bains were visually striking, particularly the sea leek tart and the squab, which was served with pear, the chef doesn’t overemphasize visuals. It has to taste amazing first and foremost, he confirms, which means not being too obsessed with how it will appear on Instagram.
“I always believe food should look good, but taste better,” Bains shrugs. “I’m a visual learner and a practical learner, so I know visuals are important to me. But I would rather something looked a little bit scruffy, but tasted incredible.”
To underscore his point, he opens his notebook, revealing sketches and drawings of potential dishes. He “doodles” dishes out before he ever cooks them, a practice that stems from being passionate about art before he was ever passionate about food.
“I’ve probably just changed my medium to food so I still have the desire for artistic expression,” Bains says. “One of the dishes we’ve done before is this beautiful, almost burgundy rose colored gel that goes over beetroot or beef tartar. It’s inspired by one of Anish Kapoor’s abstract paintings. I always send a little picture of Anish Kapoor’s painting to the table with it. He’s never come to eat it, but one of his managers did.”
He adds, joking, “I don’t know if he knows about it, because he’d probably start charging me.”
Despite Bains being physically removed from the London restaurant scene, the chef keeps up a lively camaraderie with many of his fellow British chefs. He recently started inviting chefs to Restaurant Sat Bains for collaboration dinners—something he hasn’t previously done at the restaurant—and everyone from Clare Smyth to Gareth Ward to Daniel Clifford has joined him in the kitchen. More chefs, including Angela Hartnett, are on the docket.
“There’s a nice group of chefs who share like-minded views and ideology,” Bains says. “We’ve been around a long time. I’ve been a chef 37 years, so we’ve seen a lot of cycles of recessions and boom and bust. There are times where you’ve just got to hold your nerve and if you can ring a friend and say, ‘How are you doing? Are you as quiet as we are?,’ it helps. By having a connection with each other you can get through it.”
Bains takes advantage of his days off to explore the U.K. and its burgeoning restaurant scene. He recently went to chef Aktar Islam’s Opheem in Birmingham, which he describes as “beautiful, very intelligent Indian cuisine with beautifully nuanced spices.” Coming from Punjabi heritage himself, Bains particularly appreciated the fine dining approach to Indian dishes.
“It was things I remember from being a kid done in such a beautiful way that fitted a perfectly balanced tasting menu,” he says. “It wasn’t overdone. Everything was balanced, everything was light, everything was perfect. That was a revelation for me because I’ve known Aktar a long time. It was a brilliant interpretation of his heritage and culture.”
The chef also regularly hops on the Eurostar alongside Claude Bosi, a French chef who has several restaurants in London. “We go two or three times a year to eat at all of the three star [restaurants] there,” Bains says. “If you see us, you’ll have to excuse all the swearing.”
Imagining these two storied chefs hanging out on the Eurostar helps to dissipate the pretension of fine dining—something Bains is keen to do. He is constantly making changes at Restaurant Sat Bains to improve the experience of the guests, including swapping in new dining room chairs next month to make the seating more comfortable. The restaurant is also offering a less expensive three-course menu that is more accessible, costing £145 (approximately $189) as opposed to £249 ($324) for the longer tasting menu option. “The [hospitality] climate’s tough at the moment, so we’ve got to be adaptive and also think on our feet,” he explains.
Everything goes back to Bains’ desire to push himself. He describes himself as “very self-motivated,” which includes waking up early today to go to jiu-jitsu.
“Success is scary,” the chef admits. “It makes you comfortable, and I think comfortable is scary. I think you’ve got to work hard in your field. You’ve got to keep pushing and evolving, and I think your team will benefit from that because they’re growing with you. My friend who passed away a few years ago, always said, ‘Life is a journey, not a destination.’ And I want to enjoy the journey. I want to enjoy the process of each day, trying a little bit harder, trying half a percent harder. Not to get anywhere in particular, but to make sure you put some effort in.”
