Clos encounters

09 November 2000
Clos encounters

Sat Bains does not think of himself as a serious person, but underneath his jovial exterior is a chef clearly infatuated with the quality of produce, someone constantly striving for perfection, and an individual with an overwhelming desire to satisfy his customers.

Accordingly, he will cook almost anything at Nottingham's Hotel des Clos (where he has just completed his first year as head chef). "If they want an omelette, I'll cook them one," he says, "but I will make sure it's the best omelette they've ever had."

Working in an eight-bedroom hotel on the outskirts of the city, Bains has to be flexible. But his approach is not one moulded for his current place of work - it has always been his state of mind.

"It's all about being realistic and not getting above your station," explains Bains. "And who the hell are you anyway? You're a guy who cooks veg and people pay good money to come and eat from you, but that's all that you are." He pauses, then adds: "My ingredients are more important than me; the pot washer is more important than me. It's not about who you are - it's about what you do, and hopefully, in the long term, you'll get recognition for it."

Winning the 1999 Roux Scholarship catapulted Bains into the media spotlight 18 months ago, not least for the fact that he secured the notable title while he was unemployed. But, more interestingly, he is rapidly gaining a reputation for food that is ranked among the most contemporary served in the UK today.

Among Bains's admirers is Sunday Business restaurant critic Matthew Guarente, who awarded Hotel des Clos five out of five for cooking and four out of five for service in a review featured in August. "Bains has a precise feel and excellent judgement for ingredients," Guarente wrote. "The best chefs extract more flavour from ingredients than the laws of chemistry and physics should allow. This is why the simple, in their hands, becomes the extraordinary. In this respect, most of a recent lunch [at Hotel des Clos] was exemplary."

The 29-year-old chef will not be drawn on the subject of critics, or restaurant guides for that matter, and dismisses the fact that he has been tipped for one Michelin star in the forthcoming guide. "It's not for me to speculate. If they come its because they think it's worth inspecting; if they don't come then they obviously don't."

Bains's upbringing goes some way to explaining his down-to-earth outlook. Although his parents are from Punjab in India and he is Sikh by birth, he was born and brought up in Normanton, Derby, where being street-wise is a prerequisite. His parents nevertheless ensured that he had a positive attitude towards work.

"Being Asian you are brought up with work ethics bred into you," says Bains, who, from the age of nine, was delivering newspapers from his father's shop. "If you look at Asian students today, they are the fastest developing academically and now their parents are encouraging them to carry on with their study."

Developing passion

While he cannot remember what attracted him to cooking in the first place, Bains can recall when his interest in food developed into a passion. "The biggest turning point for me was reading White Heat - it absolutely blew my mind," says Bains, who was 19 at the time. "I remember reading it within an hour of buying it and I still read it today - it's 10 years old, but somehow it's timeless," he says.

"A lot of people knock Marco [Pierre White] - everyone's got their own view of him. But I look at him in awe. I've never eaten his food, I've never met him and I don't want to. I'm glad he has stopped cooking because I've got nothing to compare my ideal to."

Bains got what he describes as his first break at 21, when he was made head chef of Jesse's restaurant in Nottingham. But he quickly recognised that he was out of his depth.

"It's all about self-discovery and that's what I was doing, I was discovering where I was as a chef," he says. "I was nowhere."

One week after marrying his wife, Amanda, in 1996, Bains moved to Oxford as chef de partie for the launch of Le Petit Blanc. He spent a year away from Nottingham, during which time he also spent three months at L'Escargot (seeing Amanda just once a fortnight).

Bains eventually returned home in January 1997 to take up the position of head chef at the Martins Arms in Colston Bassett, Nottinghamshire.

Learning curve

But it was Bains's most recent post before Hotel des Clos that presented him with the greatest learning curve, at the Ashbourne Gallery restaurant in Derbyshire, where he worked on his own. "When you've got a 20-seat restaurant and no one else to look out for you - you've got the petits fours, amuse bouche, starters, sweets, pasta, mains, everything made fresh on the premises - you really learn to cook. That's where I actually started and where I learnt the most about myself."

When the owners of the Ashbourne Gallery were forced to close the restaurant in early 1999, Bains was devastated. He had been shortlisted for the Roux Scholarship final, and as an unemployed chef, was arguably a rank outsider. But every cloud has a silver lining and when his success at the event was reported in Caterer that May, Hotel des Clos owner Dan Ralley just happened to be looking for a head chef.

With the help of his parents, 26-year-old Ralley had bought the property out of receivership and was looking for a young team to help him put the business back on the map. Bains met up with the Ralleys, who offered him the head chef's job, based on character alone. "I didn't even cook for them, but they paid my salary while I was on my three-month scholarship in France (at Le Jardin des Sens in Montpellier) - they've been so good to me."

Despite their risk-taking, Bains's cooking has exceeded the Ralleys' expectations. "We joke about it today," says Ralley, "but we took Sat on because he spoke with such passion. We didn't even taste a stitch of his food. It didn't matter that he was going off to spend three months at Le Jardin des Sens - I knew the significance of him winning the Roux Scholarship award and it was too good an opportunity to miss."

Although Bains has had no formal training in Michelin-starred restaurants, his time spent at Le Jardin des Sens and two visits to El Bulli in Cala Montjoi, Spain, has no doubt taken his cooking to another level. "Visiting three-Michelin-starred places such as El Bulli and Le Jardin des Sens makes you a little bit more experienced so you can push the barriers a bit further."

The recipes featured here are all taken from the tasting menus (£33, seven courses) at Hotel des Clos, which are chosen by 75% of diners.

"I suppose, subconsciously, the degustation idea comes from my first visit to El Bulli and it was extremely popular at Le Jardin des Sens. The beauty with it is that it is so accessible. I'm not into the novelty value, I just want to excite people with food."

But perhaps what delights Bains the most is finding out what ingredients diner's really enjoy. "If a customer tells me that they really love fish, I will say to them ‘next time you are coming in, give me a couple of days' notice and I will do you a degustation menu featuring five varieties of fish'. All of a sudden, that customer feels part of the restaurant and that is exactly what a restaurant should be about. It's not about protocol - the essence of a good restaurant is about making people feel that they belong."

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