Simon Rogan is taking over Sydney with a restaurant residency at Balmoral Beach
Acclaimed chef Simon Rogan is transporting his British take on local food to the exotic shores of Sydney with a restaurant residency that promises to be a revelation.
There could be no greater disparity between the setting of the three Michelin-starred restaurant L’Enclume, located in a 13th-century former forge surrounded by the medieval stone buildings and verdant rolling hills of the tiny Lake District village of Cartmel, and the Art Deco majesty of Bather’s Pavilion, mere footsteps across the sands of Balmoral Beach to the twinkling waters of Sydney Harbour. But British chef-proprietor Simon Rogan remains undaunted. Three years later than planned (thanks to the pandemic), Rogan and a crack team of his chefs, from both his Cumbrian outposts (he has four in Cartmel alone) and restaurants in Hong Kong, will bring L’Enclume’s “cooking the local larder” ethos to Sydney’s North Shore for a five-week residency at Bathers’ Pavilion through July and August.
While not his first time in Australia – Rogan has cooked previously at Melbourne Food & Wine and collaborated with chef Robin Wickens at the historic Royal Mail Hotel in Dunkeld – it will be the chef’s first experience of Sydney. “Everyone has been telling me how amazing it is,” he says of friends such as three-Michelin-star British chef Clare Smyth (whose Oncore restaurant at Crown Sydney has been a huge success). “When the opportunity came to collaborate with Bather’s Pavilion, I grabbed it with both hands.”
Familiar with the quality and freshness of Australian produce – many of the vegetables used in his Roganic, Aulis and The Baker & The Bottleman restaurants in Hong Kong are sourced from Tasmania, for example – the Bather’s Pavilion residency will be an opportunity “for people who might never come to the Lake District, or even England for that matter, to sample some of L’Enclume’s dishes, but cooked with Australian ingredients”
The eight-course Bather’s Pavilion menu, including amuses-bouche and petit fours, will naturally include some of L’Enclume’s famous dishes, from a mouthful-sized pork and smoked eel fritter, made crunchy by its envelope of light, crispy tapioca batter and complemented with teeny dollops of fermented sweetcorn and lovage emulsion, to the silky softness of deer tartare slicked with smoky coal oil, dressed with perfectly toasted sunflower seeds and the daintiest lilypad-like nasturtium leaves.
Working with local producers and farmers, Rogan’s team have diligently sought out equivalent textures and flavours – “working with Wapengo Sydney rock oysters instead of our own natives, Bundarra pork instead of Duroc pig” – to help echo rather than reinvent the restaurant’s ideology. Fraser Island spanner crab, Murray River cod, Dorper saltbush lamb and Thredbo River rainbow trout will feature alongside specially sourced vegetables integral to Rogan’s British dishes, such as Boltardy beetroot, winter kale and Crown Prince pumpkin.
L’Enclume’s guiding principle is indelibly connected to “our surroundings, centred around local ‘sea, land and sky’ produce, much of it grown on what we call ‘Our Farm’ in the Cartmel Valley”, the 56-year-old chef explains. It emanates through every dish, from the delicate lightness of a verbena-infused carpaccio of sweet Gairloch langoustines, laced with buttermilk and the pop of smoked pike perch roe, to a moreish crumpet topped with crispy duck skin that almost steals the show from a vibrancy of winter kale leaves steeped in the richness of duck heart and broth. “It’s about elevating all those flavours to a different dimension,” Rogan says. “Taste is everything.”
While it would be impossible to transplant the physical experience of being in a restaurant nestled near the banks of the gently babbling River Eea, in an 800-year-old village charmingly unified by buildings washed in shades of pale cream, blue and greys from the mottled mix of charcoal and carbon toned local Cumbrian stone and slate, what they can do is “bring our style of food, our style of service, giving people an insight into where we stand in the world now with our food”, Rogan explains.
Hand-thrown ceramics, as used at L’Enclume and all designed to Rogan’s specification, are being reproduced by an expert Australian potter for the Bather’s Pavilion takeover. “Tableware has always been a big passion of mine,” he says of the pleasingly weighty, textured bowls, plates and chargers that accompany each dish at L’Enclume, crafted with “grooves and rough edges to fit our style of food”.
The wine list will be curated by the restaurant’s charismatic twirly-moustached sommelier, Valentin Mouillard – a big fan of seeking out small, niche and family-run producers – and sweet treats will include the restaurant’s signature caramel mousse infused with miso, apple and spruce. Its chocolate seal on the top, stamped with a chocolate enclume (French for anvil), is in ode to the restaurant building’s humble beginnings.
In a career spanning almost 40 years, Rogan first honed his trade working with UK-based chefs such as Jean-Christophe Novelli, Marco Pierre White and John Burton-Race, before learning from one of the great French masters, and a founding father of nouvelle cuisine, Alain Senderens. Since establishing L’Enclume with his wife Penny Tapsell in 2002 – “we literally sold everything to do it – our house, our car – even our stereo” – Rogan has opened a raft of restaurants across the UK and Asia, including the very chic Fera in London’s Claridge’s hotel, where WISH first met him in 2014 (it closed in 2017).
While the decision to cook with only locally farmed and foraged ingredients arose more from necessity in L’Enclume’s early days – “the ingredients up here were rubbish and cost a fortune” – it has since made Rogan one of the UK’s most ambitious farm-to-fork pioneers. His vision also drew heavily on the influence of French chefs such as Marc Veyrat and Alain Passard “championing wild herbs, flowers and a natural way of cooking”, says Rogan. “Every element of our restaurant is now deeply rooted in nature. By growing our own produce and respecting our environment, we have gone far beyond the basic concepts of sustainability, always trying to push further our reduction in carbon footprint and empowerment of local farmers and craftspeople.”
Rogan had worked with various organic farms in the area before establishing his own 12-acre farm a decade ago, on the fringes of Cartmel. Created with help from his then right-hand-man, chef Dan Cox (now running his own Cornish full-circle farm, whose restaurant Crocadon just received a Michelin guide Green Star; Rogan has two), it is now overseen by head farmer John Rowland, a veteran of growing fruit, vegetables, herbs and edible flowers for many of the UK’s leading chefs.
When WISH visits, the farm is a hive of activity despite the below-zero temperatures and flurries of snow. Rowland and his team have been busily expanding the array of tunnels, raised beds and exposed plots to aid them in a constant program of experimentation to meet Rogan’s desire for near- perfect produce. “It has become an obsession of quality, quantity and sustainability, doing the right thing and always trying to make things better,” says the chef.
There are tunnels filled with row upon row of micro herbs – including celery leaf, pea shoots, red-veined sorrel, various varieties of mustard leaves and mizunas, Red Ruble kale and Borretana onions (perfect for pickling) – and pots of Jazzy and Charlotte potatoes and Chinese artichokes (looking somewhat like witchetty grubs) being sewn in weekly succession to ensure an ongoing supply of and grown to the size of a thumb nail or length of little finger.
L’Enclume’s chefs come every morning to take away trays of cress to be harvested just before service, ensuring they stay as fresh and zingy as they can be. Pots of Oxalis Burgundy, one of Rogan’s favourite plants for the citrusy, almost apple-skin flavour of its cheerful yellow flowers and edible leaves, are surrounded by wild sprouting Chickweed (another Rogan favourite), its leaves lending a flourish of green on the plate. The electric shades of purple and white Peacock kale, grown for their very fresh, tender tips, bring added vibrancy to winter dishes; while the abundance of the prettiest edible flowers – including Calendula and Tagete marigolds, sweet Alyssum, chrysanthemums and nasturtiums – provide the essential finishing touch to every dish.
Outside, cages of blackcurrants, raspberries and sweet Hinnomaki Red gooseberries lead to patches of Duncan cabbages, beds of root vegetables such as carrots, turnips, radishes and beetroot, teepees of peas and beans and rows of Elder trees (grown for their flowers as well as berries). An infant orchard has been planted with apples, pears and plums and a new wildlife pond is fostering families of helpful snail- and slug-eating toads. Everyone, from the accounts team to front of house staff, comes to help on the farm, from digging new areas for growing to harvesting the bountiful crops of strawberries (integral to Rogan’s summer menu).
A new private dining area with a barbecue pit, surrounded by dry stone walls, will be this summer’s perfect spot for exclusive masterclasses and grazing feasts with produce picked straight from the farms, while the farm’s flock of laying hens cluck around the space freely. They grow more and more every year, to feed not only L’Enclume but the other Cartmel restaurants, Rogan & Co, the six-seater Aulis chef’s table and the more casual Henrock. “Last year we focused on composting, setting up a series of new Rydan machines to take all our organic matter, including meat and fish; this year is going to be about wind and solar power as we’re completely off grid,” Rogan enthuses.
With not only eight restaurants in the UK and Asia – and a ninth to open soon in Malta – and a small hotel (with 16 stylishly contemporary rooms dotted around Cartmel), Rogan also has a booming business in three-course home delivery kits, the most delectable shop in the centre of the village (purveying the restaurant’s jams, oils, relishes and salts, as well as kitchenware, books and decorative ceramics by local artists such as Eryl Fryer, also seen on L’Enclume’s walls) and a new apprenticeship academy. “I’m very content with what I’ve got and where I’m going,” he says. “I have a wonderful team around me, I’m under no pressure, and we’re just doing what we believe in and keeping things pure.”
The Bather’s Pavilion residency marks a poignant turning point in Rogan’s career. “We’re now into our third decade and our plan for the future is to go off and do funky things around the world like this,” he says. “We’re coming to Sydney to enjoy ourselves, because it might possibly be a once-in-a-lifetime thing. Well, never say never, but we’re coming with that attitude.
“We’re going to do our best to make it an experience guests will remember for the rest of their lives, and hopefully we’ll all have a lot of fun while we’re there too … because Aussies like to have fun, right?”
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