A chef who started up a curry kit delivery service with his mother to keep himself and his staff busy under lockdown has seen his restaurant declared the best in Britain in a leading poll of diners.
In its 31st year, Harden’s Best UK Restaurants 2022 (ISBN: 978-1-9160761-3-6, price £16.99) places Restaurant Sat Bains in Nottingham at the top of its ‘Harden’s Top 100’ list of the UK’s best dining destinations.
Ratings and reviews in the guide are based on 30,000 reports from Harden’s annual survey of 3,000 regular diners. The guide is the most comprehensive print guide to UK restaurants with approaching 3,000 entries. (Content is also available online and as apps for iOS or Android.)
Opened by Sat Bains and his wife Amanda 20 years ago in the unlikely setting of a converted red-brick motel tucked away under a flyover off the A52, Restaurant Sat Bains attracts food-lovers from near and far to sample his adventurous 10-course tasting menus – and young chefs from around the world seek work in his kitchens.
The Harden’s guide says:
“Just outstanding in every way. It is testament to Sat Bains and wife Amanda’s hospitality that they have created one of the country’s best-rated gastronomic destinations in a former motel on the outskirts of an industrial estate. Once you find it, you will keep going back for more – superb cuisine and correspondingly varied wine list, full of surprises.”
For all the refinement of his menus featuring caviar and other luxury ingredients, Bains – who grew up in Derby in a Punjabi Sikh family – describes his venture as a “working-class restaurant”. During lockdown he launched a home-delivery curry-kit service with his 72-year-old mother, Tarsem, called Momma Bains. Bains said: “The curries have been flying out. They’re what she cooks at home and what I grew up eating – nothing like what you get in your local curry house.”
Peter Harden, the co-founder of the guide, commented:
“Sat Bains has been a leader of the national restaurant scene for more than a decade now, and his lockdown curry service is a superb example of the resilience and creativity demanded of the sector to survive the pandemic –qualities the best restaurants still need as we emerge from this national trauma.”
Purnell’s, under an hour’s drive away in Birmingham, is No 2 on this year’s ‘Harden’s 100′, evidence of the Midlands’ high level of culinary achievement. Alchemilla also in Nottingham, Adam’s and Opheem in Birmingham and Hambleton Hall in Rutland are also ranked in the top 100.
Edinburgh takes the crown as the UK leading city beyond London for general culinary excellence, with 14 listings in the top 500, followed by Brighton with 11, Birmingham with 9 and Manchester with 7, while North Yorkshire tops the list for counties with 17 top 500 listings.
Greater London counts for roughly half the total entries in the Harden’s guide, and a similar proportion of the ‘Harden’s 100’, reflecting both the wealth and population of the national capital and its status as a centre for international business and tourism.
About a third of the establishments in the guide list their cuisine as “modern British”, a catch-all description that reflects the fact that techniques and ingredients from every corner of the globe may be found in the contemporary restaurant kitchen.
Among significant changes since the last Harden’s survey in 2020, the number of “fish & seafood” specialists rose from 151 5o 158, possibly reflecting an interest in lighter and healthier cooking; likewise, “Japanese” establishments increased from 73 to 85.
In the London section, the guide hails the rise of African cuisine as a new basis for fine dining restaurants in the capital, hailing a trend similar to the rise of the ‘nouvelle Indian’ at the end of the 1990s. It notes: “… it feels like London may again sit at the forefront of a trend to take a family of cuisines mostly celebrated for their humble, homespun qualities… and reposition their flavour palette as the basis for luxury openings globally.”
