A kitchen workshop at Restaurant Sat Bains – culinary genius, Derby lad

Nestling beneath a concrete underpass, just beyond the tobacco factory, around the bend from a large electricity pylon, on the banks of the river Trent, lies two Michelin starred Restaurant Sat Bains.  It’s taken me a while to post anything about Sat Bains.  Mainly because unusually, I find myself relatively inarticulate when describing how exciting I find eating at his restaurant.  As a foodie holic, noting memorable dining experiences since 8 years old (seriously), I’m rarely lost for words about food.  One word summarises the experience: joy.  What follows borders on evangelical enthusing, but I don’t care.  Here are a few of the reasons for my joy at the experience of visiting his restaurant, leaving me enthusing like Tigger.

Joy 1. Sat Bains is invariably present during service, friendly, generous with his time and willing to engage and entertain guests.

Joy 2. Eating there makes me feel less food geeky as I’m able to talk to any of his team with every question my heart desires. Responses are thought provoking and given with the greatest of enthusiasm and patience, which alone is admirable because this all happens mid-service,  and

Joy 3. This occurs whilst served plate after plate of  bewilderingly creative, seasonal, sensory and sometimes challenging food from one of two tasting menus – seven or ten courses depending on your choice.  I’m left with a multi sensory imprint of each course and can still close my eyes, visualise and taste courses I ate five years ago.  A culinary flashback.

I’ve eaten at Restaurant Sat Bains  four times since 2008.  The first in the tasting room, a private dining space, allowing guests a voyeuristic slice of kitchen theatre as sliding doors reveal the main kitchen and pass to diners. The other visits were in a more recently built part of the restaurant, the kitchen bench, located smack bang in the middle of the pastry kitchen.  Perched on bar stools at a high dining table during service, diners are able to interact with staff, ask questions about their food, the prep, anything.  At the start of the night, if I needed another reason to be impressed (I don’t), either the Head Chef, John or Sat, will ask what we’ve eaten the previous times to ensure we eat different variations within the tasting menu for that service.  So each course is exciting and new, every time.  Now that can’t be bad, can it?

Treacle bread. Lots of the little blighters. Incredible, soothing, highly yomp-able. Served with two butters, home made and Lincolnshire poacher

 

The kitchen bench is like being in your own episode of Masterchef without the chef’s whites and edited montage sequences cut to breakbeat.  Absolute foodie heaven. Each time we’ve eaten here our foodie dinner companions have left suitably satiated.  But this goes beyond the experience of eating the food.  Along with providing diners with total food recall of multiple courses months after the event, I think it’s the fine dining/ kitchen hub bub food ‘fix’ which is makes foodies rave about this place and want to return.  Each dish is detailed on a personalised menu, but with only basic description of ingredients, and indications of flavour range:  dishes are indicated with the five coloured dots of salt, sweet, sour, bitter and umami , the only tantalising clue of what what will be served. It’s a magical mystery tour for each course, enough to leave anyone with a  fascination and enthusiasm for food clapping their hands in anticipation like a character from Enid Blyton’s Famous Five – or maybe that’s just me…? Back to the food though, and my worrying LSD-esque flashback foodie recall for some stand out plates. Below are a selection of pictures from visits:

Ham, duck egg slow cooked, braised peas, pea sorbet.

 

Ham Egg and Peas – the signature dish placed on the menu following Sat Bains’s success in the Great British Menu finals 2007.

 

 

 

 

Loch Duart salmon, pickled sea vegetables

Loch Duart salmon cooked sous vide with pickled sea vegetables, herring roe, parsley and oyster sauce ,May 2013.  Cooking sous vide creates the most perfectly cooked, sweet, melting piece of salmon complemented by a slightly salt sauce which envelopes every mouthful. Freshly green and sweet, I can no longer order salmon at any other restaurant as it will disappoint.

 

Squid, textures of tomato, tomato gazpacho, radish

 

Grouse sausage roll, red cabbage ketchup

This was offered as an extra little something course after a crab satay dish.  The gazpacho was a clear consommé of tomato which had been filtered rendering it clear, freshening the palate, a reminder that summer was imminent.

 

 

 

Grouse sausage roll.  Another little extra something offered as I was basically perving it on a visit to the main kitchen.  It was a pre-cursor to a grouse main, but as that wasn’t featured on our particular menu, Sat let us try it anyway. This was the start of the shooting season for grouse and was presented on a sliding tray with feathers, pine needles and berries to illustrate the land from which this grouse met its untimely demise. Really tasty with the ketchup.

 

Barbecued duck, roasted and raw melon, feta, roasted carrot rolled on ash (smoked burnt leeks)

Sous vide cooking is pretty much a given in the kitchen.  There’s always someone tinkering with it behind you if you sit on the kitchen bench.  When you cut into a piece of meat for any main course, it’s easy to taste why.  The ash rolled roasted carrot was sweet and mildly onion from the burnt leeks.

 

 

 

 

Roe Deer, mushroom, pine mayonnaise, lichen, tartar, venison sausage, pine smoke.

Having observed the processes involved in making the pine oil  mayonnaise accompanying  this dish I was particularly looking forward to trying it.  A few minutes prior to serving a small casserole of smoking pine needles arrived at the table creating a wooded backdrop aroma for the course.  Accompanied by pine mayonnaise, roe deer tartar, venison and pork sausage, mushroom and lichen, this is a game lover’s dream.

The crossover course is always on Sat’s menu and varies seasonally, but has consisted of a sorbet lollipop. It diverts the palette from the  savoury, acting concurrently as a palate cleanser and pre cursor to the first of usually two to three desserts.

All are memorable.  The white chocolate coated beetroot sorbet with freeze dried raspberry chips (2008) made me question my hatred for beetroot.  I hated the stuff.  But somehow combining the sweet earthy quality in a sorbet and covering it with sweet white chocolate works with the tart acidity of freeze dried raspberry.  I am a beetroot convert and have consequently roasted and smoked it,  it features regularly alongside mackerel or duck salads at my table now.

Beetroot/ raspberry and curried mango sorbet

Other cross over lollipops: Curried mango sorbet covered in candied fennel (2013) and lime sorbet coated with chocolate and liquorice with candied fennel seeds (2014).

 

 

 

Desserts usually start with something unusual , then a chocolate dish, and usually something light to finish.

Miso caramel, sweetcorn parfait,ground popcorn dust and passion fruit

Rice pudding, sake granita, strawberry jam, crispy salted caramelise rice crispy. Ooh la la!

There’s something deeply ‘umami’ about caramelised miso.  This is possibly one of the most challenging desserts to date, mainly because you don’t expect it to be so moorishly marmite yet sweet from the parfait.  Cementing  a little pot of passion fruit in its own shell with more caramelised miso to add an acidity draws this together.

 

 

This is the best vanilla rice pudding I’ve tried. The creamiest rice, jammiest strawberry jam to get tastepuds punching the air.  The caramelised rice crispies add toffee and then a sake granita, added smoking on top at the point of serving, karate chops all memories of a traditional English pud.  In a good way.  Ka-pow!

 

 

Aerated white chocolate,, chocolate coffee beans, chocolate crumb, tiramisu elevated…

Tiramisu taken somewhere extraordinary.  White aerated chocolate is usually too sweet for my palate, but the little towers of soft meringue are bought into line by the strength of the chocolate coffee beans.  This is the best tiramisu I will probably ever eat.

 

 

 

Italian cream meringue, granita of strawberry, cream and tarragon

Then ultimate palate cleanser comes in the the form of re-work classic strawberries and cream, with tarragon.  Underneath piles of a nitro granita of each lies a perfect little pile of macerated strawberries and meringue.  The ‘green’ fresh light aniseed of the tarragon tickles the other elements and reminds that you’re in Sat Bains.

After all of this comes coffee and the digestive chocolate log.  Instagram feeds from the development kitchen indicate that these paper ‘leaves’ of chocolate slotted into specially made pieces of carved wood have just undergone a renovation.  New flavours on the horizon.   Our visits featured chocolate blended with lemon and ginger, cardamom, hibiscus, fennel and cumin, flavours designed to aid digestion.  New  flavours include, chai, matcha, jasmin. The log defeats me every time.  I am done for my this point in the evening.

Having witnessed the evolution of Sat Bains’s dishes over a five year period, the ultimate gift was to attend a kitchen workshop.  To spend a morning watching his team prep for service prior to a seven course lunch is the stuff of foodie fantasy.  I don’t wish to give away too many secrets and surprises here as I would hate to spoil the experience for others fortunate to attend the workshop.   At the end of the morning, Sat Bains scooped up a fillet of beef being filleted by his sous chef, Reuben and he waved it in my face ‘can you smell that?’ he enthused,  ‘it’s a beautiful smell of cream soda!’ at this point he passes it to me to smell.  It has a faint whiff of summer afternoon fizzy pop.  He continues,   ‘Have you learnt lots this morning then?’  Where to begin?  What I’d learnt is, despite sounding like an amateur cook starting out on a ‘culinary reality journey’ a la Masterchef, is how very little I know about the preparation, terminology and skill involved in any professional restaurant, let alone that of two Michelin stars.  Whilst his team never let me loose on the Loch Duart fillet of salmon (and having performed some fairly shoddy pin boning I can well understand why), I was constantly invited by each member to observe the preparation of many of the dishes I would later eat.  I learnt the sorbet recipe for the signature ham, egg and and peas,  I observed the vacuuming procedure for the aerated chocolate dessert course, I have the recipe for a sublime treacle bread which fills diners’ noses with warm welcoming toffee notes as soon as they enter the restaurant.  I learnt about foraging for wild leaves – what I’d previously classed as weeds for one of the early starters named after the restaurant postcode, NG7.

Foraging for Herbs, flowers

 

Foraged leaves for NG7, taken back to the kitchen, washed and plunged in ice water to freshen. Yarrow, rape seed, chick weed, dead nettle, ground ivy.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Havig dined at a few Michelin starred restaurants over the past decade in and outside London,  I still rate Sat Bains as the most impressive. Following him on Instagram enables real-time snooping of what’s being cooked up in the development kitchen – usually 2 -3 new dishes in various stages of development, due to seasonal changes, or for sheer creativity and evolution and experimentation of his culinary style.

It’s tricky to go to any fine dining restaurant following a visit to Sat Bains and not be slightly disappointed.  That’s not to discredit other restaurants, it’s just that the whole experience of  food is somehow amplified when you’ve experienced a Sat Bains tasting menu. Other fine food and dining is a little…flat.  The combination of  enthusiastic but never intrusive front of house and kitchen staff, the chef team’s unerring discipline but enthusiastic interaction when questioned, is something which humanises a fine dining experience enabling it to be far more accessible to those who may feel otherwise daunted by the prospect. Then there’s the food.

I’m gushing now, but bloggers, food writers, any amateur food personage who thinks they know something about eating out, I emplore thee –  you may think you know tastes, you may have a sous vide parked on your kitchen counter, and quenelle with one spoon blindfolded, but if you have the opportunity to extend your foodie fascination to observe a prep and service, do so at restaurant Sat Bains.  It’s a very special thing.  I can close my eyes days later and replay sequences of my morning foraging, filleting, watching the creation of a chocolate aerated dessert…..just go and do it.  You will be humbled, amazed and elated by being able to experience a small part of this.