Under a flyover off the A52 you’ll find Michelin-star chef Sat Bains. Here he talks about his Punjabi heritage and why Brexit might be the ‘nail in the coffin’ of British food culture
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.
I’m from an immigrant family; I know how immigrants work their nuts off for this economy
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