Having celebrated its 25th anniversary last year, Restaurant Sat Bains has firmly established itself as one of the finest high-end restaurants in the country over the years
It won its first Michelin star in 2003 and the second in 2011, which it has held ever since. The restaurant is famously located next to A52 flyover in Nottingham, and before we arrived we had visions of eating with cars streaming past the window. But in reality, it’s actually located down a quiet lane right next to the River Trent (admittedly the flyover does pass over here near the restaurant) but it’s much nicer than people say! We arrived on a sunny afternoon and had a beautiful walk along the river for a couple of hours before dinner. Gotta get those steps in you know….
The restaurant is a pretty intimate affair with just 28 covers and seven bedrooms. There’s also a small courtyard garden (which makes for a perfect place for a pre-dinner glass of champagne when the weather’s nice), and a kitchen garden and greenhouse growing vegetables and herbs that supplies about 40% of the kitchen’s needs in that department.
For dinner there’s a choice of two tasting menus: Prelude (£199) or the longer Overture (£249), which we ended up going for to get the full experience. The menu obviously changes a fair bit with the seasons but is always wide-ranging in its influences and styles, whilst still being grounded in classical technique – this is a restaurant where flavour comes first.
To give a taste of what to expect, the highlights for us included the beautiful Cornish crab topped with caviar, served on a warm crab bisque and dashi jelly; the fresh asparagus, served both raw and barbecued, topped with near-translucent strips of melting lardo; the incredibly tasty mushroom topped with sour cream and wild garlic; and the duck agnolotti in a haricot bean broth.
After this course, we were taken to the greenhouse where Anna, one of the young chefs, cooked a fresh flatbread for us in the wood-fired oven, which was topped with wild garlic pesto and served with a crisp, cold beer. A lovely interlude.
Back at our table, we finished with aged turbot alongside ajo blanco, grapes and olives; and beef with pepper cream and nasturtiums. Then, a couple of excellent desserts, including the white chocolate with yuzu, pine, and Szechuan pepper, and the rhubarb with hibiscus and toasted milk. And for the very final act, we were invited into the kitchen for petits fours and a nice chat with Sat, who is quite the entertainer.
To drink, there’s the option of three different wine pairings, going from the standard one to ‘next level’, and ‘off the chart’ if you’re really going all out. We went for the regular pairing, which gave us lots of interesting wines from around the world, from an Italian white pinot noir and Polish dessert wine, to a classic Rhone red and textbook New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc.
We were staying over in one of the lovely bedrooms, but you could just about make it back to London the same night if you had an early dinner booking. The restaurant does one lunch service per week on a Saturday, with a special lunch menu at £145, so that could also be a great way to do it as a day trip from London.
The benefit of staying over of courses are plenty: the 30 second walk to bed, and the prospect of breakfast the next morning, including freshly made crumpets, an excellent Full English fry up, and the ’Satshuka’, Sat’s own spin on a shakshuka. An epic brekkie that more than set us up for the walk back to Nottingham station and the train ride home to London.
Key Information
Address | Lenton Ln., Nottingham NG7 2SA
For more information | restaurantsatbains.com