You are here: Home

Need Acrobat Reader for PDF documents?

Restaurant Sat Bains in Nottingham

To celebrate my 65th birthday on the 18 January 2008, I managed to grab a room-and-dinner package at Restaurant Sat Bains, Nottingham. This gave us an overnight stay from the 17th to the 18th, with Sat’s renowned Tasting Menu. We are thrilled to bits that Sat has won the Best Restaurant category in The Observer Food Magazine?s 2008 Readers? Awards. Richly deserved!

Sat, who was a winner in the BBC’s Great British Menu with his very different take on the breakfast classic bacon and eggs, is a friend of Heston Blumenthal, at whose restaurant, The Fat Duck, we celebrated my 64th birthday last year. He is very much part of the same movement in restaurant eating (along with Ferran Adria in Spain and Thomas Keller in the USA) and we were really looking forward to comparing his tasting menu with Blumenthal’s.

We had a superb meal, and Sat was kind enough to annotate a copy of the tasting menu we’d eaten before we left because, again, it’s very difficult to remember all the details of meals like this. Unfortunately I left this at the house of a family member, and by the time I got it back my memories of the meal had got a bit hazy! You can probably fill in some of the gaps by visiting and reading Matthew Norman’s review and a related article by Matthew Fort on the Guardian’s website.

Getting there

What is it with Nottingham postcodes? One of the Nottingham practices for whom I provide a Sites4Doctors website has a postcode that leads my satellite navigation system onto the wrong street. Sat’s butcher, JT Beedham & Sons, has one that puts you not only on the wrong street but on the wrong block! And Sat’s own takes you deep into an industrial estate and invites you to turn left where no turning exists! Consult the map on the restaurant’s website, though, and you discover you should have turned left, down a very insignificant-looking lane, much sooner. It’s the mapping system that contains the errors, because they’re the same if you use Multimap or Google mapping.

Having finally located Beedhams en route, and promised ourselves a visit the following day, we got to the ’restaurant with rooms’ (same excellent idea as Fischer’s Baslow Hall in Derbyshire, where we got married) at around 3:30pm. It’s actually very easy provided you turn left onto Lenton Lane immediately after leaving the roundabout, but blink and you’ll miss the turning. From a scruffy, unkempt - and, on that day, intermittently flooded - little road, we turned into the elegant gravelled and block-paved courtyard of what we decided must once have been an old farm, almost knocking Sat himself over on the way in. He greeted us with a cheery wave and, a minute later, was in reception to check us in.

The experience

We were really pleased to find another Michelin-starred chef (the restaurant has one, like Fischers, where Max himself helped carry our luggage back to the car the morning after oiur wedding) who is totally unpretentious and - as we soon realised - totally hands-on. We had a chat with his wife, Amanda, before we left, and she told us how difficult he was finding it to resist the various book and TV offers he’s had since Great British Menu. Long may he continue to do so, treading the fine line between celebrated chef (the ones famed for their cooking) and Celebrity Chef (the ones famed for everything but). There are enough Ramsays (Gordon has now moved right out of our sphere of interest) and Olivers (Jamie hasn’t, so more power to his elbow).

We were shown to the Madame de Pompadour suite, just across the courtyard, by a charming young man in an immaculate white apron. We had a lounge, complete with a leather two-seater settee and a flat-screen TV with Sky. One door led to our bathroom and a second onto a small terrace with a table and two chairs - not, sadly, much use on a soaking wet January Saturday, but it would be wonderful later in the year. An arch led to our bedroom, with a magnificent antique bed (very comfortable) and a huge walk-in wardrobe complete with iron and hairdryer. On the dressing table was a room directory full of information written in a very friendly and welcoming way. This drew our attention to the many nice little touches, such as a torch in a drawer and a big old-fashioned two-bell alarm clock (which, if the ticking was too loud, we could replace with the quieter one in the drawer - in the small hours, kept awake by a full stomach, I did find the ticking obtrusive and consigned the clock to the bathroom!).

After settling in, we decided to order some tea, but were unable to contact reception on the phone. We walked over and decided to have tea in the lounge. I also mentioned the phone, and the fact that the radiators in the suite weren’t very hot. After a pot of delicious Assam and friendly greetings from the many staff who passed through, we went back and found that the heating had been sorted out (this was their first day after annual holidays). We didn’t need to phone again.

We returned to the lounge just before our 8pm booking to find the place transformed, buzzing with diners and staff. The same young man in the immaculate apron served us Champagne and shrimps in tempura batter (included in our package), apologising that the promised oysters had been found ’not up to the mark’ when delivered earlier. We’d eaten some oysters (delivered from the Loch Fune Oysetr Company as a birthday present) the night before, and the shrimps with their little puddle of intense dipping sauce were delicious, so we had no complaints here - though I’d like to know how they serve their oysters, as many people find huitres nature a bit challenging...

At one point, Sat strolled out of the kitchen briefly, carrying a bowl and whisking its contents. As I say: hands-on!

The meal

As I said at the top of the page, I didn’t get access to the annotated menu provided by Sat until a couple of weeks after the meal, so even with this to refer to my memory of the details is a bit confused. It could be that the Champagne and the two bottles of wine, of which I drank the lion’s share, have something to do with this.

First, it’s important to say that, although they are culinary soulmates and good friends, Sat’s tasting menu was quite different from Heston Blumenthal’s at The Fat Duck. A lot shorter, for a start, and ’less like theatre - more like food’ as I summed it up to Amanda the next morning, but no less enjoyable. The waiting staff were excellent, especially the Head Waiter/Maitre D, James - tall and elegant in his grey suit, who spent quite a lot of time chatting with us. There was obviously less for them to explain, but some were rather quietly-spoken and the acoustics could use a little attention - or was it just our ageing ears?

Our package included a bottle each of a powerful Barossa red (from Chile, I think) and an English white that started out tasting quite light - even a bit thin - but became fuller and fruitier as the air got to it. As I have said, I had to do the lion’s share of the drinking, and although we donated the last quarter of the red to the staff my memory became less reliable as the meal went on (perhaps unwisely, I’d decided not to take notes as I did at The Fat Duck).

For me the most memorable dish was ’Foie Gras Royale’. I don’t normally like my foie gras messed about, preferring it either served at room temperature straight from the jar or quickly seared, but this really was amazing: a deep dish, with the foie gras diluted (in cream, perhaps?) to a smooth broth, but somehow thicker at the bottom than on top. Floating in this were several kernels of sweet popcorn, and to one side was a ball of rich, sweet vanilla ice-cream. I can’t imagine how anyone came up with this idea, but for some reason it worked fantastically - clear evidence of Sat and his team’s out-of-the-box thinking. The portion was generous for something so rich, but I was still left wanting more.

Halfway through the meal I asked James if we were getting the ’Duck Egg 62°C’ with which Sat had won the starter course on Great British Menu. He said this was not included in our package, but he could ask Sat if he had any left. Thankfully he had, and we were able to add two to the meal for a supplement. The Great French Chef who had hugged Sat and congratulated him on ’a triumph of taste and technique’ in Paris was right: the egg, cooked at the advertised temperature for two (I think) hours was wonderful, with a tender white and a wonderfully thick, rich yolk, and it was perfectly complemented by the thin, crisp wafer of air-dried ham (from Beedhams) and the intense pea-and-mint sorbet.

Oh yes - the bread! Two kinds of small rolls - buttermilk and treacle. I loved the rich, dark treacle bread, made with real black treacle so it was subtly sweet and as gooey as old-fashioned malt-loaf.

Between courses, James asked if we would like to visit the kitchen after the meal, and this happened before coffee. We had about ten minutes chatting to Sat about the meal, the fact that he’s a Derby lad (I lived in Derby for over 20 years), his butcher - and his postman, who grows many of the vegetables and salad ingredients used in the restaurant on his local allotment (we even had a little tasting). I hope I didn’t bore him with the Derby bit - if I did, I blame the wine!

In every way, another stunning meal - and made all the better by the warm welcome we received.

Our menu

This is the full list of courses, both printed and added in pencil by Sat.

  • Smoked eel croquette, parsley soup
  • Marinated yellowtail tuna, [something indecipherable in Sat’s handwriting, which is worthy of a doctor’s prescription]
  • Scallop, pickled vegetables, cauliflower, peanut
  • Foie gras ’royale’
  • Monkfish ’carpaccio’, avocado, almond, belly pork, smoked roe
  • Duck egg 62°C, peas, ham
  • Warm quail salad, Pont l’Eveque, truffle
  • Poached fig, pine nut, aged Parmesan
  • Passon fruit, butterscotch, marshmallow, liquorice
  • Chocolate, muscovado, coconut, lime
  • Rhubarb ’cheesecake’, apricot, violets

At the bottom Sat has written TASTE - TEXTURE - TEMPERATURE. The menu is a lot about unusual combinations, as you can see from the lists for each course

The rest of the experience

The ’restaurant with rooms’ idea is a brilliant one, and one which Sat and Amanda have implemented really well. I can’t imagine having to drive home (we live a good hour away) after a meal like this - though it would limit my drinking and might therefore keep the memories a bit sharper! We were able to amble across the courtyard to the suite and, as the rain had finally stopped, I could have a short stroll down the lane with my cigar. Then all we had to do was to fall into bed.

After an excellent shower, with masses of hot water, breakfast was in the conservatory (watching the rain on the roof). Real freshly-squeezed orange juice for both of us. Various toasts. And for me (alas, I didn’t dare try the Full English Breakfast) French toast with crisp streaky bacon (Beedhams, of course) and maple syrup.

After checking out - not quite such an assault on the credit card, even with the room, tea, the £15-a-head supplement for the duck eggs and breakfast - we set out to find Beedhams the butchers again. And we did. And we had another wonderful experience - a fitting finish to a terrific 65th birthday celebration...

Personal site for Paul Marsden: frustrated writer; experimental cook and all-round foodie; amateur wine-importer; former copywriter and press-officer; former teacher, teacher-trainer, educational software developer and documenter; still a professional web-developer but mostly retired.

This site was transferred in June 2005 to the Sites4Doctors Site Management System, and has been developed and maintained there ever since.