It is a mark of Sat Bains's commitment that, as soon as we tell him that he has won OFM's Best Restaurant award, he in turn tells us that, with huge regret, he won't be able to collect the trophy in person. 'We're only open for five dinners a week,' he says, when I go to meet him. 'If I'm not here to cook, then we close.' His wife Amanda, who oversees everything outside the kitchen, puts it bluntly. 'It's his name above the door and when people come here they expect to see him.' She laughs and says, almost conspiratorially, 'Actually if he passes through the dining room they do go a bit giddy.'

It has been like that for a while now, the 10 or so tables booked solid for nine months ahead. They both think they know why. 'It's the power of television,' Bains says. Last year one of his dishes was a winner of BBC2's Great British Menu, scoring a maximum 10 out of 10 from all three judges. His combination of braised peas with a duck egg cooked slowly at 62C until the yolk was a luscious jelly, and served with a slice of melting Jabugo ham and a quenelle of sweet minty pea purée sorbet, was judged to be perfect. 'I didn't invent it for the show,' Bains says. 'We'd had it on the menu here for a long time. It just seemed right.'

Sometimes television exposure can mislead. One great dish can underpin a menu - indeed a restaurant - of mediocrity. But what the people who then crowded into Restaurant Sat Bains found - what so many of you, our readers, found - was an extraordinary place of rare character and individuality serving up platefuls of intense but perfectly measured food. For a start there is the unlikely location: to get there you have to turn underneath a motorway flyover on the outskirts of Nottingham and drive through an industrial estate, to arrive at an enclave of civilisation and luxury, all red brick and classy slate floors and gashes of modern art.

But most of all there is the character of the chef himself, a big burly bloke of Indian descent, who throws expletives into his chatter like he's punching up the seasoning of a butch ragu. Ask him about the location and he'll say, 'I love it. It's like finding a diamond in a piece of turd.'

Curiously, for a country as ethnically diverse as Britain, Bains is pretty much unique. There are other Asian chefs in this country with Michelin stars - Vineet Bhatia, for example, or Atul Kochhar - but they are cooking high-end Indian food. Bains is the only one we know of cooking at this level in the modern French idiom. Do not go looking in his dishes for bursts of Indian spicing, culled from his parents' native Punjab, or witty takes on jalfrezis or biryani. Come here instead for robust dishes involving hare or the cheaper cuts of rabbit re-engineered into something luxurious.

For the impact of his Indian heritage, which he says has gifted him much, you have to dig deeper into the man himself. Sat Singh Bains was born 36 years ago in Derby, to Sikh immigrants not long arrived from India. Today his dad works at East Midlands Airport but when Bains was a kid he owned and ran various shops. Bains, like many Indian children, was soon put to work. 'I was working in his shops from the age of 13,' he says, 'and I think that gave me a serious work ethic.' He recalls one day being given a bike. 'I thought it was a really nice gift from my dad, until I realised he'd given it to me so I could do the newspaper round.'

Was food big in his house? Well yes, of course, he says: 'We're from the Punjab.' Punjabis care about what they eat. So what did his mother cook? I expect him to talk about samosas and dark intense stews spiked with fiery chillies. Instead, he says, with a big grin, 'My mum and my oldest sister cooked fairy cakes on a Saturday.' He laughs. He loved those fairy cakes. Most of the time, though, it was vegetarian food. 'Except at weekends when we'd have a keema curry, a mince curry. I always knew it was special because of the effort that had gone into it.'

The easy assumption is that it was in this close Indian household that he caught the cooking bug, but Bains says not. 'I wasn't the kid who stood at the apron strings learning how to cook. I never envisaged myself as a chef. For me food in the house was about family. It was about the relationships.' He acknowledges, however, that, as the only son, he had a special position. Many evenings the house would be full of family and friends, the men in the living room, the women in the kitchen. 'I was able to float between both rooms. In the front room the men drank and I'd be the one to fetch the ice and lemon. In the kitchen the women gossiped.' The women always asked him if their husbands were drunk. 'I always said no, even though they often were.'

He left school at 16 and went to college where he took a catering course but only, he says, because there were lots of girls in the queue waiting to sign up. 'I still didn't fall in love with food.' That didn't happen until a few years later when, working in a local restaurant, he met a man called Mick Murphy. 'He was an old-school chef. Looked like a tramp, mind. Big beard, unkempt, but he talked so passionately about food. He was the one who ignited the spark. He awoke this desire in me to cook to the best of my abilities.'

His progress after that was a wandering affair from local Derbyshire restaurants to a branch of Le Petit Blanc; from L'Escargot in London to winning the Roux Scholarship and work experience at a Michelin three-star in France. But all the time he was reading, first the works of Escoffier, then the Roux brothers and Pierre Koffman. Finally he stumbled upon Marco Pierre White's seminal cookbook White Heat, as so many young chefs have, and decided that he wanted to be like the wild man in the pictures. Back then he even had a mass of wild hair to match, sacrificed now to the clean-shaven look. 'My ambition after that was simple. If you mentioned my name, I wanted you to think of good food.' The final piece of the jigsaw came courtesy of a meal at Spain's El Bulli in 1999. 'I went, Woo! What a rollercoaster.' His eyes light up as he talks about dishes of caramelised bone marrow with caviar, or ravioli made from cuttlefish with a liquid centre of coconut. The Sikh boy from Derby had found his calling.

That year he arrived at the Hotel des Clos in Nottingham as head chef. He won a Michelin star in 2003 and in 2005 took over the business and changed the name to Restaurant Sat Bains. And all that time, Amanda had been at his side. They had met while he was still in his teens, when she already had a thriving career in the restaurant-management business. Not that his parents were impressed. They didn't want their Punjabi boy with an English girl. 'They chucked me out of the house,' Bains says, 'which forced me to grow up a bit. I was a right waster back then.' It was a bonding experience for Bains and Amanda. They don't have kids (though they do have a couple of rabbits, who live in a courtyard at the restaurant) and have dedicated their lives to both the restaurant and each other. And now? How are relations between his wife and his mum and dad? 'Oh Amanda and my mum are the best of friends.' He regularly cooks for his parents.

Lucky parents. The restaurant does not serve lunch. There isn't the time to get themselves organised to the level he wants, Bains says. Today though, he's making an exception, just for me. I am installed at the chef's table, a high, solid, oak affair, built for six, just off the kitchen. From there I can watch everything going on. There is a rich foamy soup of Jerusalem artichokes with, at the side, what he calls 'tinned tuna'; in reality diced tuna sashimi in a bright light spicy sauce of yuzu and soy, served in the kind of round can used for caviar. He gives me the duck egg with pea sorbet and it's as good as the BBC judges said it was, rich and comforting and graceful. There's a wonderful scallop dish, their surfaces coated with crunchy praline, and paired with crisp fresh apple. There's an amazing plate of rabbit belly, pressed and salted, with brown shrimps and langoustine and, underneath, a smear of bitter grapefruit reduction. Hare, the very gamiest of meats, comes with a comforting stew of pine nuts and sultanas in a fabulous jus, and there's an amazing piece of beef with pearl barley and ceps.

Almost as intriguing as the food is the theatre of the kitchen. Bains is big and tall, all limbs and elbows. He flies around the kitchen, spooning, tasting and swearing with enthusiasm rather than anger. 'My food's individual because I'm self-taught,' he says at one point. Or, 'I've not got any baggage.' Or, 'I don't really care how food looks. I don't tell chefs how to dress plates.' And I believe him, even though the dishes are very pretty to look at. What matters here is flavour.

He's also not precious with ideas. Just outside the kitchen is a white board and he insists that his tight brigade of young devoted chefs scribble up possibilities for dishes, whether they are certain they'll work or not. So someone has scrawled, 'Almond, cherry, black olive' and someone else - not Bains - has written, 'Scallops, Indian spices, cauliflower samosa'.

Will all these dishes be tried? Probably, he says. And how will he know if they've worked? 'If the plates come back empty. I listen to my customers.' It is, he says, why this OFM award means so much to him. 'I don't get excited by a listing in the Good Food Guide or the AA Guide,' he says. 'But an award from your readers is totally different. That's down to all the people who have eaten here.' So be assured. He may not have been there to collect the trophy. He may have been too busy cooking for that. But we can all be certain the award you have given him will be treasured for a long time to come.

· Restaurant Sat Bains, Lenton Lane, Nottingham, 0115 986 6566, www.restaurantsatbains.com