Angelo Sato: the Michelin-starred chef who grew up in a religious cult
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It’s mid-morning at Humble Chicken 3.0, the chef Angelo Sato’s 13-seat, two-Michelin-star restaurant in Soho, London. Sato, heavily tattooed and with a mohican, is wearing chef’s clogs and an apron over shorts and a vest. His team of four sous-chefs are calmly prepping the lunchtime omakase menu, 16 chef-selected courses that today features hand-dived scallop and chawanmushi (a savoury steamed custard) alongside the enigmatic likes of “humble pigeon” and “picnic”.
The meal costs £235 a head. For Sato, the aim is to win a third Michelin star, an accolade only ten restaurants in the UK possess at present. “That’s been the goal of my lifetime,” he says, grinning.
Michelin status aside, Sato, 32, has overcome extraordinary circumstances to become one of the UK’s most exciting young chefs. The son of a Japanese father and German mother, both missionaries, he grew up in Japan in the Children of God, the cult church founded by the rogue American preacher David Berg, which has historically faced allegations of physical and sexual abuse of children, although Sato is making no such allegations himself. “For me, my childhood was normal,” he shrugs calmly and cheerfully when he has finally been persuaded to sit down with me at the counter where customers eat, rather than stand on the other side in his precious kitchen. “Although I don’t really know what normal is.”
The cult, which was later rebranded as the Family International — and at its peak numbered 15,000 members around the world, including the families of the actress Rose McGowan and the actors River and Joaquin Phoenix — was founded as a reaction to the Vietnam War. “It was the hippy era, when everyone was looking for purpose,” Sato says.
Berg preached communal living, so Sato’s earliest years were spent living with about 300 other people. Members followed the Law of Love. “Even if you were married, you were very much encouraged to sleep with other people as a way of showing Jesus’s love through you, as if you were a vessel,” he says. “Condoms were a big no-no. It meant there were a lot of half-brothers and half-sisters. Later in life we’ve identified a lot of people, even my friends, who hooked up with some of their half-siblings without realising.” As well as his four siblings — who he says “are the most important people in the world to me” — he knows of two half-brothers “from different mums but I’m not as close to them”.
Content retrieved from: https://www.thetimes.com/life-style/celebrity/article/angelo-sato-interview-kdr8hjbz2.
