Classics Revisited: set your sat-nav for Restaurant Sat Bains, where sublime cookery goes the whole ten courses

If ever a restaurant were worthy of the Michelin Guide’s definition of two-star status – "excellent cooking that is worth a detour" – then Restaurant Sat Bains is it.

You won’t reach it via a meandering pootle down a winding country lane. Instead, take a sharp left down a slip road off Nottingham’s ring road where, in the shadow of the bridge that takes the dual carriageway thundering over the Trent, you’ll find a post-industrial Manoir aux Quat’Saisons, a Brookside new-build with a kitchen garden for growing vegetables, a greenhouse for herbs and a state-of-the-art composter that transforms all of the kitchen waste into nutrient-rich plant food.

Rather than a canopy of leaves stretching over the conservatory dining room, there’s a forest of electricity pylons overhead.

Bains chose the off-piste location in 2002 because it was near his hometown of Derby and also because there was no other reason to come here – if the chef was going to put himself on the map, it would be for the food alone. And on the map it very much is – these days, brown tourist-attraction road signs point to Restaurant Sat Bains to reassure diners they haven’t taken a wrong turn.   

It is an extraordinary setting for some extraordinary food. There is only one choice, between a seven or a 10-course tasting menu. (If you opt for 10, go easy on the deliriously good butter and soda bread; both will turn up again the next morning, along with squishy homemade crumpets, in a breakfast of champions.)

In case you can’t remember what’s coming up, the menu is printed onto the table lamp, colour-coded with dots to indicate the balance of salt, sweet, sour, bitter and umami in each dish. But touch and sight are just as important to Bains as taste.

Take the shards of crisp chicken skin rubbing up against silky-smooth smoked eel like gravel on a riverbed. Or a rough-cut tartare of 140-day aged beef jumbled under a wave of beetroot jelly, designed to look like the crimson disc of Anish Kapoor’s 1991 artwork ‘Untitled’. The old cliché of art on a plate has never been so apt.

But ultimately, it really is all about taste. Velvet-soft sweetbreads are brought to the table in the pan, luxuriously bathed in buttery juices, before being transferred to a plate with broad beans, mint and toasted hay, each mouthful delivering offal richness and garden freshness.

A new potato is poached in kombu butter then smoked over embers before being plated up with a blob of cream cheese and a spoonful of caviar. It’s a lot of effort to lavish on what is fundamentally a baked spud but it tastes sublime, hot and cool, starchy and salty.    

Then there’s a dessert called ‘Lenton Lane inspired by the rocky road’, although the street outside is pothole-free these days. It gives off a waft of sorrel from the hedgerow and a wisp of tobacco smoke that evokes the old John Players factory nearby. But mostly it’s just a really delicious chocolate pudding.

Only a whimsical green curry ice cream wrapped in candy floss seems to belong to another menu – the sort of meal to admire rather than enjoy and where 10 courses becomes an endurance test rather than an experience to send you to bed beaming from ear to ear.   

We’re absolutely in special-occasion territory here; I spotted at least two tables of fidgeting couples who looked like the question was as ready to pop as a Champagne cork. But there are no nerve-inducing airs and graces, pomposity or pretension. A stack of cutlery instead of a place setting means you could eat the entire meal with a spoon, should you wish.

And while the tasting menu comes with the inevitable interruptions that so many explanation-heavy courses require, the young staff pull it off with the happy charm that comes from working at a restaurant that is only open four days a week. Worth a detour it may be, but don’t drop in without checking what day it is.   

Who to take:Someone you know well enough to spend the night with in one of the eight bedrooms

What to order: Choose between the seven (￡95) and 10 (￡110) course tasting menus  

Restaurant Sat Bains, Lenton Lane, Nottingham, NG7 2SA; restaurantsatbains.com

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