There’s something a little weird when you walk around the kitchen garden at Restaurant Sat Bains. It isn’t the unusual plants; it’s not even the rabbits hopping around your feet. After a few minutes, you realise it’s the constant background noise of cars zooming across the motorway above – the last thing you expect to hear whilst in the middle of such tranquil surroundings.
But it’s that contrast between an urban setting and a picture-perfect garden that Sat Bains loves so much. His restaurant is almost as famous for its unlikely location as it is for its food, and for the past eight years Sat has been gradually transforming the building’s garden from a patch of unkempt grass into a sweet shop of weird and wonderful herbs and vegetables. ‘We had a few things growing, but then we got a gardener called Ken Holland to come in and build some vertical beds on the walls and give everything a bit more structure,’ he explains. ‘After that came the greenhouses – we’ve got a growing greenhouse for herbs, and then a finishing one when they’re ready to harvest. We’ve now eliminated any transport of herbs which is great – they’re so easily damaged in transit and come packed in plastic or polystyrene, sweating away in the lorry. To be able to cut herbs to order in the kitchen is amazing.
‘We’re not trying to become self-sufficient and I don’t think we’ll ever aim to do that – but it just makes sense to plants the things we can grow like herbs and interesting ingredients. We’ve got wild oyster leaves, wild garlic, broad bean tops – the teardrop peas were given to me by Bruno Loubet when he visited.’