Angelo Sato: the Michelin-starred chef who grew up in a religious cult

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”.

Sato’s parents believed in the Y2K “prophecy” that the world would end in 2000. “We were trained to be the Lord’s end-time warriors,” he says. The world outside the cult was called “the system” and its occupants “systemites”. The aim was to convert them, with Berg sending many female members to seduce potential converts, a practice known as “flirty fishing”. Instead, with other “children” he’d ask strangers on the street to pray with them in return for a donation, with the promise that would save their souls.

Children received no education. Television was banned. Everyone in the group was assigned different roles. “Some were cooks, some cleaners, some looked after different ages of children,” he says. “My dad was a musician, I played drums and my brother played guitar, and we went out on the streets playing as part of the fundraising crew.”

Sato often found himself in the kitchen, “chopping something or testing out something else”. His ingredients were random, begged from shops and market stallholders. “We’d be sent to tell them about our work and ask them to donate any leftover food — it actually makes you realise how genuine people are and how much they love to help.”

The family moved on every 18 months or so, joining other communes all around the country. By this point the cult was dwindling in power, as the first generation born into it began questioning its ideals. “My family was fortunate in the sense we were in the cult at the end of it, when things about it were more public, life was harder for people who’d been in it in the past,” he says. “The government cracked down on the kids’ lack of education, there was what we called persecution, social services took a lot of children away from these homes. So as I got older the homes we went to got smaller until we were at a point when it was just three or four families together. Then, when I was 14, it finally became just our family.”

Sato was 15 years old when his father died. “It was a bit of a shock because we’d been completely isolated, in our own world. From then on there was no kind of structure, no control in a bad way any more. There was just freedom. I wanted to cook so I left home and started cooking.”

He found a restaurant job but, before a shift, would work for free from 3.30am to 7am at the Tokyo fish market to perfect his filleting skills. “In cooking I found community and a safe space. I was really awkward growing up and really not smart, with no education, which a lot of [my peers from the cult] struggle with now in the real world. I couldn’t really read or write — I still can’t but now ChatGPT helps me out — but luckily I fell into an industry where education means f*** all and that’s why this industry is so beautiful. If you work hard you see results and that just compounds over time.”

Sato worked away, spending three years at the three-Michelin-star RyuGin in Tokyo. In his spare time he obsessively watched the 1994 Channel 4 Gordon Ramsay documentary series Boiling Point on YouTube. “I saw a man with a mission, obsessed with getting three Michelin stars, and that idea drew me in,” he says. “I latched on to that, put on my blinders and it gave my life direction.”

Aged 18, Sato bought a ticket to London and — aided by a scribbled paper map copied from television — headed directly to Ramsay’s flagship joint in Chelsea, west London.

“Ignorance is bliss. I knew nobody in London and once I changed my money at the airport I had about £430,” he says. Clare Smyth, now chef-patron of the acclaimed three-Michelin-star Core, then Ramsay’s head chef, arrived on her Vespa. “She saw this chef from Japan with his suitcase and said, ‘Come in for a trial.’”

Sato became a commis chef while at the same time trying to navigate the confusing world of national insurance numbers, bank accounts and accommodation. “I was really scared and didn’t want to say anything to anyone in the restaurant, but for the first five months I was just surviving, crashing in the basement of an internet café. Basically I was homeless and very cold.” He considered returning to Japan. “But I didn’t want to give the people who said ‘he’ll be back’ gratification.”

Working at Ramsay’s, he says, “was like being a Navy Seal. It was this tight family. At the same time one wrong move from someone could cost the lives of everyone else, that was the level of intensity and responsibility everyone had.” As the youngest in the kitchen he was picked on relentlessly and became frustrated that he was surrounded by other juniors and couldn’t learn from the masters. Eventually he had enough and walked out, moving on to the smaller restaurant Trinity in Clapham, south London, where he worked side by side with the head chef Adam Byatt, gaining the insights he craved.

From there he moved to the acclaimed Eleven Madison Park in New York, then back to London for his first head chef job at Restaurant Story. All the while he was investigating solo opportunities. “For six years I was epically failing at multiple businesses,” he says. His break came in lockdown, when he acquired the lease for his Soho premises. Humble Chicken opened as a yakitori grill in 2021 to rave reviews. “Luckily it took off right away.”

Yet, characteristically, after 18 months Sato wanted to push himself to the next level, “to chase those stars”. Humble Chicken 2.0 launched two years ago with a tasting menu and within a year received its first Michelin star. “From then we just doubled down,” he says. Four months ago it gained the second star. Instead of rejoicing, within a fortnight Sato closed the restaurant for four months for a £1 million refurbishment to add those finishing touches he hopes will clinch the all-important No 3. “We were booked up anyway but two stars was not the destination,” he says.

Having recently ended a relationship, he lives in Camden, north London. Only in the past couple of years had he allowed himself time to return a couple of times to Japan to his beloved siblings (one brother works with him in London), all of whom have left the church. “Last time I went back I rented a big house and had us all sleep in one big room on mattresses on the floor because that’s what we did growing up.”

Sato says he’d like to support his mother but knows it’s pointless. “She’s one of those amazing people who joined the group specifically because she’s selfless and dedicated her life to helping people. So if I send her £100,000 now she would give away £99,900; if I sent her an iPhone she’d sell it and donate the money to Africa. Obviously she has her beliefs, and we all have questions about that, but at the same time she has a heart of gold.”

In 2020 the Family International responded to the allegations that physical and sexual abuse took place in the church of the Children of God, stating, “The Family International has had a zero-tolerance policy in place for three decades for the protection of minors. Regrettably, prior to the adoption of this policy, cases occurred where minors were exposed to sexually inappropriate behaviour. This was addressed in 1986 when any contact of a sexual nature between an adult and a minor (defined as any person under 18 years of age) was officially prohibited and subsequently in 1989 declared an excommunicable offence.

“The Family International has expressed its apologies on numerous occasions to any members or former members who feel that they were hurt in any way during their membership. We continue to extend our sincere apologies to anyone who experienced anything negative or hurtful during their childhood or time as members of the Family International. We wish them well in every way.”

Interior view of Humble Chicken restaurant's kitchen and counter seating.

Lunchtime is approaching, but before he returns to his happy place behind the counter, Sato reflects on what his childhood gave him. “Growing up with not a lot and being really uncomfortable paid massive dividends in the sense I’ve got an extremely high risk-reward tolerance. I didn’t have a lot to lose so I’ve always gone for it. My story shows anyone can come from anywhere and every day get a little bit better.”