As with all the most seductive ideas, Sat Bains imagined his restaurant long before it became true. He was in his early 20s, working in a hotel in his hometown of Derby when he first started reading the Caterer magazine “and about Nico Ladenis and Raymond Blanc, all that”, and the idea formed. He thought: “I want to get a Michelin star, but I want to get it not in Mayfair or in Oxford but in a place some people might think of as a shithole. I want people to be drawn to my restaurant for the food, nothing else.”
It took him until he was 28 to find the place. In 1999 Bains, unemployed at the time, won the annual Roux scholarship, and for the first time in his life, job offers came in. He was approached by Raymond Blanc himself to work at the Manoir aux Quat’ Saisons but, with his original idea in mind, the offer that intrigued him came from some blokes in Nottingham who had just taken over a hotel that had gone into receivership. They had read about his Roux award in the local paper. To Bains, looking back, it felt a bit like fate.
Bains is telling me this in the bar of that hotel, which now not only bears his name but also, for the last eight years, two Michelin stars. He is a big, heavy-shouldered man with a blunt accent, and a natural intensity. “When I came out here, there wasn’t any kind of road to this place, it was just like a track of potholes,” he says. Even better, for the purposes of his perverse plan, the track began at an easily missed slip road off the six-lane A52 in and out of Nottingham. At one end of it was the vast and crumbling John Player cigarette factory and a warehouse retail park. At the other end, under the expressway flyover, beside a rough municipal golf course and a redundant Victorian canal was a red-brick motel built in the 1980s on the site of a compulsorily purchased farm. The motel had a French bistro attached to it, with stencilling on the walls, velvet curtains and thick carpets. Before it went bankrupt the previous owner had vainly tried to keep his punters happy by emerging from the kitchen to play the piano in one corner. For Bains it was something like love at first sight.
He took the job of head chef in the small kitchen, quickly became a partner in the business, and then, within five years, with his wife Amanda, bought it out. He still relishes the absolute incongruity of the location. He jokes that he would burn out a car every six months on the lane to the restaurant “for ambience”, but some of the time he didn’t have to bother. He reckons, in the past 18 years, they have had on average about four tables a year of passing trade – “I never like to ask where they are passing to down here,” he suggests. “I assume they are going dogging and have got peckish.” Otherwise, his restaurant, perhaps more extremely than any other, anywhere, fulfils the official rubric of the Michelin two-star description: “excellent cooking, and worth a detour”.
Like the rest of his customers, I’d come here on something of a pilgrimage myself. I’d never eaten at the restaurant, but over recent years, talking to and interviewing some of Bains’s peers, I’d noticed how often his name cropped up as a kind of benchmark of dedication. Great chefs are rarely strangers to obsessive commitment. Even so, those with formidable self-made pedigree themselves – Jason Atherton, Claude Bosi, Tom Kerridge, Heston Blumenthal – would reference their friend Bains as a one-off. I was struck by how many discussions of the state of the nation’s gastronomy ended with the phrase: “Then, of course, there is the amazing stuff Sat is doing in Nottingham …” And I’d think, “What exactly can Sat be doing?”
The answer to that question has been roughly the same for the last 18 years. While other Michelin chefs have sometimes appeared intent on world domination, Bains has been working in his kitchen (now with a team of 38) under the flyover, evolving and perfecting a 10-course tasting menu that has become a sort of personal holy grail. Try as he might, and in the face of most sane business advice, he’s never been able to offer à la carte cooking – “There is just too much chance of someone matching the wrong starter with the wrong main,” he says. He admires some of the globetrotting ambition of his friends but knows it is not for him. “I am not interested in gathering restaurants, or any of that,” he says. “My ambition is just for everyone who travels here to feel that they have eaten something really unique; that they know who I am through my cooking.”
The night before I talk to Bains, I experienced how that felt. I come from the Midlands myself, and was aware that an east Midlands crowd is not necessarily the easiest to win over with avant-garde cooking. Most of Bains’s sold-out Wednesday customers have come for anniversaries or birthdays. First-timers tend to raise an eyebrow at the menu and the price – £110 for 10 courses – and at the artful opening salvo of Isle of Skye scallop with pig’s trotter fat and lentil dahl with a lemongrass veloute. And then you watch the Babette’s Feast moment when they put a forkful in their mouth, and everything sparks. “We have to win people’s trust here with flavour,” Bains says. “Once you’ve got that you can take them with you.”
The 10 dishes (there is a seven-course option for the fainter-hearted) come fast and with precise seasonal surprises; by the time you have had pot roast turnip with chestnut and parmesan, and pigeon with dates and radicchio and Moroccan spice, you are pretty much prepared to follow Bains anywhere. Towards the end of his feast he offers a version of a rocky road pudding called Lenton Lane, after the pot-holed track to his restaurant. There is hit of tobacco flavour in the chocolate, that locates the half-demolished John Player factory; a mild shock of sorrel that grew in the hedgerow, and cherries that nod to the trees on the golf course. “We want to change that frame of reference you had when you arrived,” Bains says, “make it entirely delicious.”
His own journey to this place is itself a similar shift of expectation. People find it hard to place where he comes from; some people look at his surname and think it is French. In fact, Bains is a second-generation Sikh-heritage Brit, whose parents settled in Derby in the 1960s. He imbibed some of his ferocious work ethic from his father, who ran newsagents and off-licences. If he had an advantage as a cook, he says, it was that he always knew taste went beyond French gastronomy. “I had my Punjabi heritage. I’ve stayed away from those ingredients and influences mostly, because it would have been too easy to pigeonhole me as an Indian chef – and I’m not. I wasn’t a cook as a kid, but I was a keen advocate of the importance of sitting around a table and eating and talking. There were six in our family, but probably 60 or more relatives living round about so it would be total carnage at weekends.”
His growing up was also pretty brutal in terms of what was expected of him by his parents. At 13 he would be up at 4.30am doing the paper rounds, then after school doing cash-and-carry runs, the evening paper round, then locking up. His mates would knock on the door at six or seven o’clock on a Sunday evening and he would already be in bed, the curtains drawn. “I would lie there and hear a ball bouncing outside. The embarrassment of it tortured me until I was 16 or 17.”
His old man was a hard taskmaster. “He would never physically attack me or anything like that, but he would give me a lot of verbals and I got to the point where I was getting bigger and decided I wouldn’t take it.” He smiles. “I remember one day he was given me a hard time and I picked up the clothes prop, you know for the washing line and said, ‘You talk to me like that again I’ll knock you out.’ That was that.”
His parents had a life mapped out for him, managing the shops, arranged marriage, but it was not the life he wanted. He took a job as a commis chef; Amanda was the restaurant manager where he worked and when his mother found out he was seeing a non-Indian woman his sister met him with two bin liners of clothes and told him the family didn’t want him to come back home. “I knocked on Amanda’s door with these bin bags – we’d only been going out a few months but I had nowhere else to go. We have now been together 30 brilliant years – though I can’t say I’m the ideal partner, half the time I’m a fucking lunatic.”
The family gets on fine now. His parents are proud of what he has achieved and have been in a few times to eat. Still, though it didn’t seem like it at the time, the best thing that his parents did for him, he says, was to kick him out at 18. “If I had stayed at home I’d have been a bum,” he says.
You have the sense, talking to Bains, eating his food, that it is a full-time job containing his energy. He gives Amanda, who runs the front of house and much of the business at the restaurant, most of the credit for that. They don’t have children; they dote on two pet rabbits. Bains says he is not much use on his own; thoughts crowd in on him. He uses exercise as therapy, “to stay fresh, euphoric”. After service the previous evening he had gone for a 5km midnight run, he tells me. Then he was up at 6.30am to do an hour with his trainer at the gym. “I like the contrast of being told what to do. It makes it easier to tell people what to do myself.”
It’s a cliche to suggest that success lies in never forgetting what failure tastes like, but you do believe that in Bains’s case. When he won the Roux scholarship he had just lost his job at an art gallery cafe. “We were in the shit financially. Amanda was working, we had a mortgage. When I was told the gallery restaurant was closing, we just cried. My only thought was: I have to win this scholarship. I got through the regionals and in the national final they gave us a dish, very technical, saddle of lamb, French trimmed, pommes Anna and an artichoke dish. I looked around and there was a sous chef from Gordon Ramsay, all these guys who had done five years in Michelin restaurants, and me. I thought, ‘Fuck ’em.’ I had been in bed the night before reading about the two things I had never done, which was prepare skate and prepare artichokes. I thought, you are never going to beat these guys on skills, but make the lamb the best-seasoned lamb the judges have ever tasted.”
In the moments before the announcement, he was sitting with his head in his hands, feeling a fraud in a tall chef hat, praying over and over: “Say my name, say my name.” And then it came: Satwant Bains. “I knew as I walked up to the stage this was the chance. It wasn’t going to happen to me and Amanda again. I had to do something with it.”
The thing he had to do, he decided, was his own thing. “I felt free from the start here. Heston calls the Fat Duck his sandpit, and that is how I feel. This is my sandpit.”
Partly in order to attract the best staff, he took the risk three years ago of only opening four nights a week. They have four tight kitchens, “one prep, one nucleus, one pastry, one the main savoury kitchen, I can just go into each and be myself”.
Part of that self-knowledge has been to accept as the price of sanity a small level of compromise. Bains has, he has calculated, done a million hours in this kitchen, but he has learned to work to 90 or 95%: “That way I can let my suppliers, my customers, my staff have a little bit of leeway. I know that if I pushed it that extra 5% I would be completely intolerable and no one would ever be happy.”
Just as he wants to and believes he can get fitter as he gets older – “no doubt” – so he believes that he can keep perfecting his menu further. The cloud on that horizon, he believes, is the difficulty of continuing to get the right people around him, by which he means young chefs who share his vision, who aren’t in it for a shot at fame, but to get things right.
“In my opinion, the gastronomic restaurant will decline in the next 10 years,” he says. “It took me four and half hours to make a really good monkfish sauce last week. Reducing, nurturing, straining, tasting, refreshing, seasoning. You can’t rush that, and it is hard to find people who don’t want to rush it.”
He fears Brexit as a potential “nail in the coffin” of magpie British food culture. “All this anti-immigration stuff is total bullshit,” he says. “I’m from an immigrant family; I know how immigrants work their nuts off for this economy. Front of house here, we have two English people, the rest are all overseas, because they truly look on this work as a profession. You try to get English kids to think of it like that …”
Though he is at pains to suggest that his determination is all his own, you wonder how much was ingrained in those 4.30am teenage starts. He is distrustful of anything that doesn’t sound like proper work – he turned down a co-presenting slot on Mary Berry’s new show, he hardly ever takes up lucrative offers to guest chef abroad (unless he can take his team), he doesn’t drink at all in the week, and though he will happily sign menus for customers in the kitchen, you won’t see him gladhanding. “We are a working-class two-star restaurant,” he says. “That is what we will always be.”
Bains is 47 now, I wonder how long he intends things to be this way? “I have no exit plan. My only plan is to enjoy creating here. Without that I’d be lost, floundering.”
Boredom is never a factor, he insists, the seasons make sure of that. “There is going to be the odd day where it’s not as exciting,” he says . “But then I think now we are coming into spring, I get little sparks – you know, my God! Wild garlic flowers! We have got spring lamb coming in May and we will think about the garnish for that.”
As he talks you begin to see why other chefs might envy what he has made in this most unlikely place, and how it satisfies him. His unabashed desire for “nuance, for that little edge of caper” is as present in his person as in his food. He seems unusually – and genuinely – not to crave affirmation other than the standards he sets for himself. “I can’t take praise very well – I will say thank you, we have a great team.” He smiles. “But I do know why I am doing what I am doing.”
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