<img decoding="async" class="lazyload size-full-width wp-image-1580562" src="data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAAAAACH5BAEKAAEALAAAAAABAAEAAAICTAEAOw==" data-src="https://observer.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/09/178A9170.jpg?quality=80&w=970" alt="" width="970" height="647" data-caption='Chef Angelo Sato. <span class=”lazyload media-credit”>Humble Chicken</span>’>
Since he was 14 years old, Angelo Sato has had one goal: earn three Michelin stars. It’s a lofty aim for any chef, particularly one who didn’t attend culinary school. But Sato has been fixated on the same dream for the past two decades, and he’s getting closer. He recently reopened his two-Michelin-starred Humble Chicken after a dramatic renovation, with his eye on that elusive third star. And unlike many chefs of his caliber, Sato has been brutally honest about exactly what he’s pursuing.
“If you’re a ship without a destination, where are you going to go?” Sato tells Observer in early September. “We have a destination as a team, so every day it’s about how we can compound our everyday efforts to reach our goal. The restaurant has a clear direction, and we all know what we stand for, what we’re fighting for and what the standard is. It’s my job to make sure all the investments we make in terms of property and ambience and food and policy and staffing and orders match that goal. That’s why I’m so open about it.”
Sato, 32, grew up in Tokyo as part of the controversial cult church Children of God, founded by American preacher David Berg, until he was 14. The church has faced numerous problematic and disturbing allegations in the past, although Sato doesn’t necessarily have bad memories of the time. He tactfully describes it as “growing up in a kind of different environment,” and although it was an unusual upbringing, it did give him an opportunity to cook.
“We all had a role within the community,” he recalls. “When there are 100 people, it’s almost a cafeteria-style space, so everybody needs to provision food. There would just be loads of food. I loved cooking, and I was always going to help chop stuff and cook. It was obviously nothing chef-y at all, and nothing to rave about. But I always ended up gravitating towards the kitchen.”
It may not have been fancy, but Sato took to the job right away. “I would be lying if I said I was an average cook and that people didn’t say I was the best cook in the kitchen everywhere I went,” he admits. “The thing I love most about this industry is it’s so effort-based. It’s almost like going to the gym—you put in the work and the rewards are there. It’s very black and white.”
It was at 14 that Sato began watching YouTube videos of Gordon Ramsay’s TV show Boiling Point. He learned what Michelin was and immediately became obsessed, claiming the goal of three stars for himself. “At that time, it seemed outrageous and so far away and unattainable,” he says. “Which is a good thing, because every day, you could always try for something. Seeing Gordon, someone so passionate and obsessed, and seeing how these people could change their status through the world of food, that consumed me.”
Sato left home at 15 to begin working in kitchens. One of his first jobs was at three-Michelin-star RyuGin in Tokyo. At 17, Sato moved to London and showed up at Restaurant Gordon Ramsay, hoping to score a job. He approached Clare Smyth, the head chef at the time, directly, a move he now says was “pure ignorance.” Still, she offered him a trial, and he stayed for a year before moving on to Eleven Madison Park in New York and then back to London for a gig at Restaurant Story. Not only did Sato never go to culinary school, but he never actually attended any school, and didn’t have reading or writing skills in any language upon arriving in London.
“Coming from Japan to the U.K. was definitely challenging,” he says. “I was completely alone, and I was super unsocial. And I couldn’t read or write. I still struggle now, but back in those days, I was quite embarrassed about that. People would ask me to read recipes, and I would just pretend like I read Japanese. Now, I don’t give a fuck. I can read a basic sentence, but it’s nothing to rave about. I still have to ask the guys how to spell ‘apricot.’”
At Restaurant Story, Sato took a lot of inspiration from Tom Sellers, who eventually appointed him head chef of the two-Michelin-starred restaurant. Sellers taught Sato how to “have so much confidence and belief, and how to be willing to sacrifice financially for the future.” His experience there underscored the importance of a risk-reward approach to being a chef. “All the people I’ve worked for and with, I’ve taken something different from,” Sato says. “If someone’s successful, there’s something to learn from them, period. For me, it was about seeing people achieve things and knowing that it’s possible.”
In 2021, Sato opened his own restaurant, Humble Chicken. It was a casual yakitori grill with a counter top and an open kitchen in the heart of Soho, and it seemed like an unexpected next move for a chef with such lofty goals. He picked the concept because it felt like the right way to secure a central London restaurant, not because it was his ultimate plan. “If I told the landlord, ‘I’m opening a 13-seat counter or a chef table,’ he would have said, ‘No, thanks,’” Sato says. “So that was the strategy of presenting that plan—to get the site and then slowly refurbishing it.”
Two years later, Sato introduced Humble Chicken 2.0, a tasting menu experience for 13 guests at the chef’s counter. The restaurant earned its first Michelin star in 2024 and its second in 2025. The quick success encouraged Sato to take the next step: a full-scale renovation of the restaurant. In February, shortly after gaining the second star, he closed Humble Chicken and borrowed half a million pounds from the bank. Sato did most of the design himself, putting in months of effort to ensure every detail felt perfect. Overall, the restaurant was closed for four months, with £1 million put into the renovation.
“Like most restaurants, it was extremely delayed, and I was running out of money like you wouldn’t imagine,” he says. “That was probably the longest six weeks of my life pre-opening. Opening a restaurant with your own money is the hardest thing you’ll ever do in your life. You’re paying everyone, everything’s going out, nothing’s coming in. So many things are going wrong. You have to be mentally ready for that. But the only way out is through, and I was already in it.”
Despite those challenges, owning his own restaurant has its perks. “It feels good that I can do whatever I want,” Sato notes. “And there’s not a single person in this world that can tell me what to do at any point. I always knew that for the restaurant to get three stars, it had to be an independent restaurant.”
Humble Chicken 3.0 debuted in June. The space is sleek and thoughtful, with artful flourishes like handmade crockery from local artisans and a tall fermentation wall for pickles, soy sauce and koji. The lunch and dinner tasting menu, which costs £235 per person, spans 16 courses, many of which draw on Sato’s Japanese heritage. Some dishes, like the avocado-stuffed mussel snack, have been on the menu since 2023.
“It’s simple, but it takes a long time,” Sato says of the dish, which is presented on a bed of rocks and seaweed. “A mussel is a humble ingredient that we spend probably six hours a day on. Everyone does something for it, and by the time it arrives on your plate, it’s beautiful, it’s delicious, and it’s humble. That’s one of our signature things.”
Seafood is at the core of Humble Chicken’s offerings, including an elegant prawn toast, an oyster and o-toro served with sweet corn. For Sato, the goal is a layering of flavors and a refinement of the technique. When I dined, the main course was a whole Anjou pigeon that had been dry-aged for two weeks, cured in koji, bathed in oil and then slowly grilled over charcoal throughout the meal. The legs were perfectly tempura-ed, and the liver adorned an accompanying bowl of rice. The dish exemplifies Sato’s interest in celebrating an ingredient.
“For us, it’s like, ‘How do we utilize every single ounce of this bird without throwing anything away?’” the chef says. “Everyone cooks pigeon, and they always drown it in a sauce or a puree, which is delicious. It’s not doing anything wrong with it, but I love the flavor of the grill and charcoal. If it’s an amazing ingredient, that’s what I want to taste. I wanted to serve just the pigeon.”
Because Humble Chicken offers two seatings per night (one at 5:45 p.m. and one at 9 p.m.), there is a real choreography in the kitchen. There’s no room for error—every dish has to be presented with timed precision to ensure every guest gets the complete experience. To help with the timing, Sato serves the desserts over two courses: First, a lighter strawberry offering, and then a decadent array of six pastries and desserts that are displayed in front of the diners all at once. “Instead of ending the meal in a mellow way, it feels like an assault from the pastry chef,” Sato says. “It ends you on a complete high.”
As Sato and his team continue to refine the dishes, the chef remains focused on the overall experience. It’s that aspect that he feels will net him the third star. The service is attentive but not overbearing, and guests can ask questions or interact with the servers and chefs. “It’s almost like a first date,” Sato explains of their approach. “It’s how fast can you break that barrier between guest and server for it to become more of a personal relationship. I made a conscious effort to hire people whose number one passion in life is making people happy, as opposed to having a more technical ability. Everything feels genuine.”
One of those hires was restaurant manager Aidan Monk, whom Sato met at Evelyn’s Table. “I went there three or four times in the span of a year,” he recalls. “And I was wondering, ‘There are so many good restaurants and I can go anywhere, why do I always go back to this restaurant?’” Sato began asking himself why people generally return to a certain restaurant. “It’s not really the food,” he says. “The food’s important, but people go back to restaurants based on how you’ve made them feel when you were there. The food is obvious, but what else is there? How do you make someone addicted to coming back?”
Although Sato has always had a natural instinct for cooking, he views his career as similar to that of an NFL player. It takes work and drive to succeed, as well as sacrifice. For Sato, it’s three stars or bust.
“I’m not focused on anything else,” he admits. “People have invited me to every single island in the world you can possibly imagine to cook for a day, and I have said no to every single thing that’s not related directly to helping us achieve our goal. And that’s strategic. Because all these things that are offered now, if we did have three stars, I would be charging 10 times more for the exact same thing. It’s emulating Tom Brady’s career, where he took less money in the beginning, and now he’s printing money. It’s betting on yourself.”
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