Restaurant Sat Bains ranked number one in Harden’s Top 100

Harden’s Best UK Restaurants 2022 has placed Michelin-starred 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, now in its 31st year, were based on 30,000 reports from Harden's annual survey of 3,000 regular diners.

The restaurant was opened by Sat Bains and his wife Amanda 20 years ago in a converted red-brick motel tucked under a flyover off the A52. The guide said: “Once you find it, you will keep going back for more – superb cuisine and correspondingly varied wine list, full of surprises.”

Peter Harden, co-founder of the guide, added: “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, was ranked number two.

Edinburgh took 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 nine and Manchester with seven, while North Yorkshire topped the list for counties with 17 top 500 listings.

Greater London accounted for roughly half the total entries in the Harden’s guide, and a similar proportion of the ‘Harden’s 100’.

About a third of the establishments in the guide listed their cuisine as ‘modern British’. Since the last Harden’s survey in 2020, the number of fish and seafood specialists rose from 151 to 158; likewise, Japanese establishments increased from 73 to 85.