No pain, no gain: the gym fanatic gunning to be the UK’s next two-star chef

Angelo Sato’s training regime won’t be for everyone, but the results are difficult to argue with. The chef works out twice a day at home, once in the morning and again late at night after he finishes service at his Humble Chicken restaurant in Soho.

“After work I set a 45-minute timer and don’t stop until it goes off. I do abs and cardio every day and spread the other muscle groups across the week,” the 32-year-old says in a manner which suggests he believes all this to be normal behaviour.

On his days off – the Frith Street restaurant is closed on Sundays and Mondays – he hits the gym proper, does yoga and finishes off with a sauna session. This, so far as one can tell, is the only thing Sato does to relax.

Then there’s his diet. He typically eats just one meal a day, subsisting mainly on the protein-rich foods - hummus, eggs – that his maid keeps his fridge topped up with.

“I snack a bit on mise en place but I always eat at the end of the day,” he explains. “I don’t like working on a full stomach. Being full during service is a horrible place to be. When you cook food, you want to be in love with what you’re making. You need to be hungry.”

Hungry for more

Sato is most certainly hungry. Indeed, his desire to succeed is palpable. Two years ago, the Japan-born chef – whose CV includes Restaurant Gordon Ramsay, Eleven Madison Park and Tom Sellers’ Story – switched Humble Chicken over from a yakitori joint to a tasting-menu-only restaurant. A year later, he was rewarded for his efforts with a Michelin star.

Yet he’s not intending to stop there. Far from it. “I believe that I have extreme potential,” he says matter-of-factly. “I want to make sure I can maximise on that. Two stars is the current target, but the end game is three.”

So not that humble, then.

Sato opts to conduct our interview standing up - “I don’t like staying still” - wearing a skin-pink gym vest and a butcher’s apron. It’s a bold choice, not least because on first glance it looks as if he is wearing an apron only.

He has a mightily impressive pair of pecs, but does his extreme fitness regime make him a better chef? “I’ve been working out since I was 12 so it’s difficult to know,” he says thoughtfully. “I think it probably has though. The thought of not being healthy scares me. Even something like a cut on your finger can fuck up your week at work.”

From one cult to another

Born into a cult (his description, his Japanese father and German mother were missionaries) Sato threw himself into the restaurant industry aged just 14 working everywhere from a simple-yet-professionally-run yakitori joint where he learned how to break down a chicken into 30 or so different pieces to internationally-renowned Tokyo restaurants Narisawa and RyuGin.

“We travelled around a lot and were very poor. I learned to provide for myself from a young age,” he says of the experience. “I loved it to the point I could not stop doing it.

“The high-end places were like little cults. The outside world faded away. I became obsessed with learning. I’d go to fish markets in the morning and work in restaurants in the evening. I was very young, but they didn’t ask many questions.”

Japan’s culture of slow progression in the workplace eventually proved torturous for a teenager that struggled to stay still. “There is no cheap labour in Japan on account of their being virtually no immigration,” Sato explains. “There are no kitchen porters. Chefs in Japan spend years on the pot wash and then years doing basic prep tasks. In some places you have to wait a decade until you’re allowed to cook something.”

Chasing Boiling Point

Inspired partly by Boiling Point - the 1998 Channel 4 documentary that followed Gordon Ramsay as he pushed for three stars at his Chelsea flagship - Sato moved to the UK on the day of his 18th birthday.

He turned up at Royal Hospital Road with a suitcase and asked then head chef Clare Smyth for a trial. He ended up moving on a year or so later after having become disillusioned with the training setup of multi-Michelin-starred restaurants.

“The issue is that as a commis the chefs you are learning from are the chefs cooking next to you. Demi chef de parties and chef de parties are usually kids too,” says Sato, who crossed the river to work under Adam Byatt at his Clapham restaurant Trinity.

The restaurant didn’t have a star at the time – it now does and probably should have back then – but Sato found in Byatt a chef that was able to teach him how to cook.

“I heard a lot of chefs talking about how great a chef AB was, and they were right. He was alongside us every day. His passion was infectious. The guy is a craftsman that absolutely loves food. I went from turning carrots to learning how to cook lots of different things. Working with AB was a game changer for me.”

Unreasonable hospitality

After a few years with Byatt, Sato crossed the pond to work at Daniel Humm and Will Guidara’s Eleven Madison Park restaurant in New York. “I was wowed by the cookbook and sent them an email. The food was beautiful but what really stood out was how professional it was. Back then, I was quiet and socially awkward on account of my upbringing. I found the UK’s sarcastic communication style in kitchens difficult. In the US, people talk to you in a more direct and professional way. I try and run my kitchen like that too.”

He returned to the UK in 2013 to help Sellers – with whom he had worked at Trinity – launch Restaurant Story in London Bridge. The restaurant won a Michelin star within four months of being open and not long after, Sato was promoted to head chef.

“I have never been that interested in job titles or climbing through the ranks,” he says. “It happened naturally. My hard work might have benefitted the restaurant, but I have always worked for myself and myself only.”

Towards the end of his three-year stint with Sellers Sato started looking to strike out on his own. A pop-up at Story that saw him combine his Western training with his Japanese heritage for the first time attracted the attention of JKS Restaurants, which was at the time identifying nascent culinary talent having recently backed James Lowe to open Lyle’s and James Knappett and Sandia Chang to launch Kitchen Table.

He says he spent the best part of a year working on a concept, but JKS ended up walking away over – it appears – a disagreement about equity. “I thought ‘I’ve just spent 12 years being someone’s bitch and if I take this deal, I’m going to go right back to that’.”

Close to five years in the relative wilderness followed during which Sato set up a succession of grab-and-go and casual restaurant formats, none of which worked out.

These included a bento box business run from his flat that closed within three weeks; another bento box business called Mission Sato; Bermondsey rice bowl and noodle concept Omoide; and food hall-based katsu sandwich specialist Yatai.

Some were partnerships with other people, others were self-funded. All of them were created - ultimately – to fund a project that was more in line with his multi-Michelin star background.

“I don’t come from money; I don’t have any money really and I don’t have any property, which means borrowing significant amounts of money is not an option. The strategy has always been to try and stack small things to create opportunities,” says Sato, who had his fingers burnt once again just a few years ago when he tried to relaunch Yatai in Fitzrovia (which he says cost him the best part of £250,000).

Becoming a chick magnate

Launched in 2021, Humble Chicken ended Sato’s losing streak, scoring a glowing early-doors review from The Observer critic Jay Rayner. But while the original iteration of Humble Chicken was much more of a proper restaurant than anything Sato had done previously - alongside the grilled chicken were a selection of ambitious dishes that would not look out of place on his menus today - Sato says he never wanted to cook at a yakitori restaurant, at least not on a long-term basis.

Competition for the site – which is best known as the original home of Sam and Eddie Hart’s Barrafina - was intense. Doubtless correctly, Sato was concerned that a business plan that detailed a 20-cover tasting menu-only restaurant would go straight to the bottom of the pile.

“I’d already developed a yakitori concept, so it was good to go,” explains Sato, who runs the business with his brother and front of house counterpart John Paul. “Humble Chicken was extremely successful from day one and worked well financially but it wasn’t something that I personally wanted to be doing day in, day out.”

About a year in the landlord stopped checking in so Sato thought “fuck it” and closed for two months before relaunching as a tasting menu restaurant early last year.

Inspired by his Japanese heritage but also his time working in the West, Humble Chicken’s 17-course £185 menu is a take on omakase sushi service, but the food is Japanese-European.

“It’s how I like to eat. I love how they do things in Japan, but I appreciate Western fine dining too and that is what I have mainly been trained in,” he says.

Snacks on the current £185 menu include pork-filled bao buns that resemble little pigs; a striking single mussel stuffed with strips of avocado finished with kosho ponzu; and a clever dish of persimmon with foie gras and hazelnut.

More substantial items include a dashi of wild black sea bream with seaweed and shiitake; a selection of sashimi; sukiyaki (hotpot) of short rib with Cévennes onion and crispy egg; and a multi-element bread course that explores the German side of Sato’s heritage.

Unsurprisingly, Humble Chicken is a fast-paced, energetic experience.

“It’s how I like to eat. I get bored when I go out to restaurants where there are big gaps in-between courses. I don’t like waiting for things. I need tempo.”

Flying by the seat of his pants

Sato would have ideally changed the name to reflect his change of direction, but he could not afford the costs associated with rebranding so stuck with the restaurant’s original moniker. “It wasn’t loads but I chose to invest in the R&D and giving the team a bit of a break instead”.

The turnover at Humble Chicken is now much higher than at its original iteration, but so are Sato’s costs. Very unusually for a chef of his level and at this stage of his career he has no investors.

Humble Chicken should have required £350,000 but Sato managed to get it off the ground for less than a third of that by convincing his key suppliers to defer their invoices for a few months.

“It was a huge gamble. If we hadn’t been busy from the off, I would have been fucked. I would not have been able to pay people back and I wouldn’t have had anything for payroll or any working capital. But I’d been trying to open a proper restaurant for a long time. When you have nothing, you have nothing to lose.”

As a yakitori restaurant with relatively few staff Humble Chicken generated a decent return, but things got a lot tougher when Sato relaunched.

“With the exception of money-printing places like Mountain and Dorian, a Michelin star requires a big investment. You need the staff and the ingredients, but you can’t charge Michelin prices. It was almost impossible for us to make money during that period. When the star did come all I felt was relief.”

This financial cycle is now beginning again as Sato pushes for a second star. “We’ve had a good 12 months so we have been able to set some money aside, but it will still be tight,” he admits, saying he will soon reduce the number of covers the restaurant does each night by 20%.

At present, Humble Chicken does 30 covers a night by seating 10 guests each at 6pm, 7.30pm and 9pm sittings (the seats inhabited by the first wave of guests are turned to allow for the final seating of the night). Under the new regime, the restaurant will offer only two seatings at 6pm and 8.45pm to a dozen or so diners. Only serving around 12 people at any one time will allow Sato and team to make the food more intricate.

Ripping it all up and starting again

That’s phase one. Phase two in operation two stars will see – subject to ongoing negotiations with the landlord – the restaurant reconfigured.

“The plan is to knock it all down and start again,” says Sato looking round the small space, which hasn’t changed that much since it was Barrafina (the counter is the same one the restaurant launched with nearly two decades ago). “As things stand this place doesn’t look like a two-star restaurant and we also need more room to work. That said, I do like working in a small space. Big restaurants are expensive and we’re only open in the evening, so we don’t need loads of prep space.”

Humble Chicken will retain its counter seating setup, but the kitchen will be expanded by knocking through into a prep kitchen and wash-up area that is currently hidden.

“I want it to happen now. The hardest thing for me is to be patient,” says Sato, who is now reaching his limit having had to stay in one place for nearly 40 minutes as we chat.

“But I don’t want to emotionally destroy the staff by putting them under pressure in an environment that is not ready to match the level we are cooking at.

“I’m also aware that over the years I have lost a lot of money by rushing things.”