
While Roganic has always been termed the sister restaurant to the award winning L'enclume, Simon's redevelopment of the Roganic menu takes the restaurant just that little bit closer to it and since L'enclume is our favourite restaurant in the UK, there should be little surprise on anyone's part that we found the new menu at Roganic exceptional. It is worth noting too, and we've said it before in our recent L'enclume post, that Simon has increasingly built a highly accomplished team around him that includes Roux Scholars Mark Birchall and Dan Cox. In turn, this means that there's a deep talent pool to draw on for L'enclume and Roganic maintaining the standard for both restaurants at all time.
Foodwise at Roganic, much is familiar to the returning diner: there's a couple of little amuses including a brilliant smoked pork and eel croquette, and first class breads which have been changed now to include onion & thyme and wholemeal & ale alongside the long standing favourite pumpernickel, while the butter, a product of Cartmel, is exclusive to Rogan's restaurants. It's bread that you really could enjoy all day but with the full tasting menu to follow, it didn't seem wise to fill up too early. There's milkshake and a doughnut at the end too.
In between though, the menu is signature Rogan: well known and familiar ingredients perfectly done (there's five flavoured monkfish, lobster, lamb), the farmed and the foraged (meadowsweet, coastal herbs, hedge garlic, sweet cicely) and the funky (a golden egg filled with chicken sauce, beef tongue in coal oil, dehydrated sponge). Most importantly though, non of it is simply for show, or indeed showing off, it all works on pretty much every level: the technique, the flavours and the sheer joy of the meal. Our meal at Roganic was today, as we have found all of Simon Rogan's food to be, faultless.
The pictures below tell the story.
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Related links
Roganic website
CC post Roganic March 2012
CC post L'enclume