New restaurant awards in Nottingham
Nottingham is to hold its first restaurant awards this year, spurred by the city's booming economy and a doubling of its number of restaurants and bars over the past five years.
Awards organiser Jocelyn Platt said that Nottingham was ready for the awards because of its "meteoric expansion".
The city has been awarded more than £206m of regeneration funding from the European Union alone, and is now home to 400 restaurants, bars and clubs.
The awards event, sponsored by law firm Berryman Shacklock, has 10 categories, from Best Service to Best Non-European restaurant, to be voted on by the public over the coming months. Voters simply fill out a form in local newspapers or on a website, naming their favourite restaurant in each category. The awards ceremony will be held on 21 May.
Sat Bains, whose Nottingham restaurant Hotel des Clos won a Michelin star last month, launched the awards yesterday.
He said he supported the awards because he thought it would put ethnic and smaller independent establishments in the spotlight, and give press and media coverage to those establishments without large marketing budgets.
He was also pleased that the awards would be voted on by the public. "The public are the people who go out and spend the money, so I'm not going to argue with that," he said.
"A lot of restaurants in Nottingham are shit," he added. "They claim to have fine-dining menus, but customers end up paying high prices in big 90-seat places where they are very often moved in and out in one-and-a-half hours. Hopefully, the voters will be discerning."
