Simon Rogan is not the Claridge’s type. His casual manner and blunt style might be reminiscent of Ramsay, though without the four-letter words, but he never aspired to be head chef at the posh London hotel.
Known for his two-Michelin-starred L’Enclume in the Lake District, in mid-April he moves to the role occupied Gordon Ramsay for over a decade, though possibly without the permanent suite which Ramsay was said to make use of frequently. The hotel decided not to renew his contract when it expired last year—and redesign the space, but also seek to change the restaurant’s atmosphere. Instead of traditional fare, Rogan’s new eatery will feature local, organic ingredients, sustainable cutlery and health-conscious food options like gluten-free bread. Service will be less formal. “It’s not there for people with bags of money or people who want to be seen,” he says.
Rogan’s populist turn is odd as Claridge’s is top drawer.
In Cumbria, Rogan serves only local British ingredients, such as the herbs sweet cicely and good king Henry. He refuses to use even lemon, instead replacing the non-native citrus with vinegars made in his on-site research lab. At Claridge’s, he will compose English ingredients in new ways, serving dishes like “grilled salad” smoked over embers with Isle of Mull cheese; Hogweed shoots with “smoked yolk” and juniper cream; and dishes topped with apple and violet flowers.
Part Wylie Dufresne and part Willy Wonka, Rogan wants to give diners a glimpse of what goes on behind the scenes. As at L’Enclume—where there is no wall or door between dining room and kitchen—guests will be able to tour the kitchen.
As a self-declared “southern lad” from Southampton, England, Rogan says he never intended to plant roots in the north. Now, he has a mini empire there, with two restaurants near his L’Enclume flagship as well as two others in Manchester called the French and Mr. Cooper’s House & Garden. He grew up watching his father work in the wholesale fruit markets serving freight and cruise ships, which brought in produce from around the world. His father would bring home exotic offerings—star fruit, kiwis—that weren’t available in grocery stores at the time. Still, no one in the family knew what to do with them, and they would be left in the refrigerator for Rogan to ponder. “I just didn’t want to see them go in the bin,” he says. That curiosity, paired with a crush on his home economics teacher—”there was a higher percentage of boys in the home economics class than normal”—kept him drawn to the kitchen.
At age 14, he took a job at an upscale Greek restaurant on nights and weekends, mostly so he could afford to buy clothes and records by bands like The Clash and Echo and the Bunnymen. “It was 24 pounds a week, which was an absolute fortune,” he remembers. “I was probably the highest-paid person in my year.” Rather than attending university, Rogan enrolled part time at Southampton Technical College, where he took cooking courses. “I suppose at the time it was more the money I liked rather than the cooking,” he says. Afterward, he worked at a hotel kitchen in New Forest and then for a series of restaurants in the south, where he was an apprentice for high-profile chefs such as Marco Pierre White and John Burton–Race. He later spent two years at the three-Michelin-starred Lucas Carton restaurant in Paris.
Rogan opened L’Enclume in 2002 in part by default. He had wanted to open a restaurant closer to Southampton, but after a recruitment consultant contacted him about the Cartmel property and offered its lease at a discount, he agreed to relocate. But a year before he and his business partner, Penny Tapsell (who is also his romantic partner and the mother of his son), arrived, foot and mouth disease broke out, adding gravity to the already gray atmosphere. “It’s quite desolate up there and sometimes quite bleak,” says Rogan. For the first few months, he says, “We were asking, ‘What have we done?’ ”
Rogan soon realized that the ingredients and flavors that came out of the land up north were unlike those in any other place he’d worked. He eventually decided to eliminate all foreign goods from his menu and focus on purifying each ingredient by bringing out its essence. Before, he says, “I was a chef full of testosterone: I wanted to cook what I wanted to cook, not what my customers wanted to eat,” he remembers. “That’s a stage most chefs go through at some point in their career, but you come full circle and you become more of a businessman and more mature.”
Rogan is well aware that when it opens in April, all eyes will be on the restaurant; and he expects they’ll see a striking contrast to what was there before. “I remember walking into the kitchen here for the first time and thinking it’s very oppressive, very traditional,” he says. When he saw the first rendering of his own space, he recalls, “It was quite an emotional moment for me—I got quite a lump in my throat and a tear in my eye.”
