Northern Focus: Simon Rogan at the L'Enclume, Cartmel

23 March 2006
Northern Focus: Simon Rogan at the L'Enclume, Cartmel

When Simon Rogan and his partner Penny Tapsell moved north three years ago and opened L'Enclume in the Cumbrian village of Cartmel, many people said it wouldn't work. In a region where fine dining traditionally means racks of lamb in country house hotels, Rogan's witty, convention-defying and occasionally odd style of cooking, focusing on eight-, 14- and 20-course tasting menus, wasn't exactly what folk were used to.

One Michelin star later, plus a Newcomer of the Year Catey and a rarely awarded 10-out-of-10 from Times restaurant reviewer Giles Coren, the couple might well feel like sticking two fingers up at the doom-mongers. But despite the accolades, there's an uncomfortable feeling that they could just be right. In the run-up to Christmas, usually a period of maximum coffers-filling for restaurants, the business was uncomfortably slow.

"Turnover has gone up in the three years we've been open," says Rogan. "But then November, December and January were dead. It means all the profits we've made are propping up the quiet months."

The problem is one of local trade. "There's a lot of money around here," says Tapsell. "But food doesn't seem to be a priority." Rogan is less diplomatic. "A lot of people round here think we've got three heads," he says. "Everyone was talking about us when we opened and I thought curiosity would win over the locals - but no one ever came. We had very little local business and that still hasn't changed."

So what does this mean for L'Enclume? After three years of building up the business, are they about to give up on their northern adventure? Not a bit of it. There's a stubborn streak about Rogan, which means he does things his own way, evidenced as much in the food he cooks as where he chose to open. The fact that he and Tapsell have had to overcome adversity seems only to have made him more determined. "The last thing I want to do is jeopardise L'Enclume," he says.

In fact the couple are now going one stage further. L'Enclume is to be given a complete refurb, with a freshened-up interior designed to keep pace with the menu. "The next menu is the most striking visually, the most modern," says Rogan. "The restaurant has got to be about the whole experience, so we want to move away from our more traditional smithy look and make it more contemporary."

The restaurant's spring clean is also part of a wider push by the couple to maximise their growing empire's potential - in a way it hasn't yet done. As well as the seven rooms above the restaurant, the couple acquired Bluebell Cottage in the summer of 2004 - despite the name, a rather large property in the village. The owners of L'Enclume, two local antique dealers, also own the freehold to this building, and in a clever partnership have furnished both the restaurant's rooms and Bluebell Cottage with beautiful pieces from their stock.

Luxury hideaway Rogan has also set up a cookery school in the Bluebell kitchen, meaning the cottage can be marketed as a corporate weekend away for city slickers, which would include cookery lessons, trips to his organic herb grower and foraging expeditions in the surrounding countryside. He's also selling it as a luxury hideaway for guests who can hire the whole property for private parties, including a package with meals at L'Enclume.

To help develop these possibilities, the couple have just taken on a new Manchester-based agency to look after both PR and, more importantly, marketing - an area the couple admit they have neglected. The new strategy will involve tightening up the restaurant's branding with a new design, logo and website, and chasing the right type of business for both the restaurant and Bluebell Cottage.

"We received so much attention nationwide after we opened but we didn't have a marketing strategy for when we got the PR - so there was a lot of misrepresentation of our identity," says Tapsell. "It's partly our fault because we simply didn't have time. But it's not rocket
science, just making sure you identify what product appeals to what market and when."

The couple have also now employed a restaurant manager, Frank Deletang, who previously worked at Michel Roux's Suffolk outpost, the White Hart. He has raised the front-of-house service experience and provided an extra pair of shoulders for the
couple to rely on. Importantly, his arrival has also freed up more time for Rogan and Tapsell. "He was just the person we'd needed for ages," says Tapsell.

With this flurry of activity you get the sense that, despite the lows, Rogan is now more optimistic about the business - and the place. "Ultimately I love it here," he says. "It took me a while to explore at first because I didn't have much time, but when I did it blew my mind."

In fact, Rogan and Tapsell are planning even more for Cartmel and have found a site for a bistro-and-bar operation in the village. The regular locals L'Enclume does bring in tend to come for Sunday lunch, when there's a more simple (and less expensive) menu, so they think they can attract these clients and those who currently don't visit the restaurant at all with a more casual offering. "We're certainly not looking to scale down in the area or turn our backs on it," says Rogan.

Nonetheless, the stress they suffered to get this far - Tapsell recalls a time before the restaurant received its Michelin star when the pair of them looked emaciated and Rogan was on 40 fags a day - has caused both to do a degree of soul-searching. Sure, the restaurant, and Rogan in particular, got plenty of praise from reviewers, but he still feels that not enough people have sampled his food. One idea Rogan has therefore given serious attention to is a new fine-dining restaurant somewhere in the South. "It seems you get success and recognition a lot quicker in the South," he says. "Chefs who've worked here and then gone south have told me that the head chefs in places like the Square and the Vineyard haven't even heard of L'Enclume."

Deciding factors If he did open a second fine-dining restaurant he says it would be near the M25 or Surrey. London, though, is out of the question. "We'd need countless backers," he says. "We've always been able to make our own decisions, so I don't want partners I have to answer to now."

This reminds him of one of the deciding factors for choosing Cartmel in the first place. "The original money was from a loan, but the owners didn't ask us to pay a premium rate for the restaurant - almost as an incentive for moving north," says Rogan. "We just wouldn't have been able to do all this in the South." They certainly wouldn't have been able to add rooms, Bluebell Cottage and be looking to open another restaurant so easily either. "

Many others visiting what they have established already would be very jealous, too. Cartmel is a picturesque village, with a beautiful priory, and L'Enclume and Bluebell are two very desirable properties. If their new marketing strategy is right, they have the foundations in place to bring in plenty of business.

As for the customers, it hasn't always been a case of them and us. The couple tell the story of a night the restaurant was full and there was a flash flood, leaving the flagstone floor under six inches of water. "There were five minutes of absolute shock," recalls Tapsell. "But no one offered to leave."

The kitchen was left without electricity, but everyone just got on with it, sitting cross-legged and gratefully receiving the revised menu the brigade delivered. Rogan must have approved of their stubbornness.

The Empire

  • L'Enclume 40-cover restaurant with seven double rooms; 14 members of staff.
  • Bluebell Cottage Home to the cookery school and four double bedrooms.
  • Second Cartmel restaurant Arriving this year

L'Enclume Restaurant with Rooms, Cavendish Street, Cartmel, Cumbria
01539 536362
www.lenclume.co.uk

The Food Rogan has never thought of himself as part of the chef establishment, and is as likely to turn to the latest Screwfix catalogue for tableware inspiration as to ring up the usual plate suppliers.

His menus are no different, starring dishes entitled "Razor Reversal" (where razor clam is cooked and placed in an eggshell, the yolk and white from which have been cooked and presented in the clam's shell) or the enigmatic "Foie gras cubism to realism, lemon cake, star anise and verjus reduction".

Fittingly, Rogan says the chef he most admires in London is Pierre Gagnaire, and when you consider how even cosmopolitan Londoners have a problem with the French boundary-pusher's more fanciful compositions, it's easy to see how folk in Cartmel might react as they do.

Another hero is Marc Veryat. Rogan and some of his brigade once made a 24-hour dash from Cartmel to Veryat's remote restaurant in Megève, France, before returning in time for service. And he says his next trip will be to Chicago to eat the food of trailblazers Homaro Cantu (at Moto) and Grant Achatz (Alinea).

But Rogan is adamant he's no molecular gastronomist. This label got fixed on him quite early on, after the Independent‘s Tracey MacLeod wrote that he was inspired by Ferran Adrià. "She probably thought she was doing me a favour," he says. "But I've never even been to El Bulli."

Rogan prefers using ingredients that appear in the countryside around him, especially wild herbs. His real experimentation comes in presentation and flavour combinations. "Above all, the most important thing is to have fun," he says.

Other dishes on the gourmand (20-course) menu

  • Pea and cassia cream, almond froth, Jabugo on toast.
  • Squab breast less than 60°, blackcurrant and Darjeeling.
  • Diver-caught sea scallop, buckwheat and bacon flavour, hot violet mayonnaise.
  • Fried beer, ploughman, in pudding form.
  • Scottish langoustine cooked in clay, spiny artichokes, spicy butter.
  • Beef fillet, passion cannelloni, hazelnut pavlova, fennel coulis.
  • Expearamenthol frappé.
  • Unbranded cola meets cherries, the cubist fights back.

What the Critics Said
Giles Coren, The Times, 2004 "In Britain, L'Enclume is comparable only with the Fat Duck at Bray. The difference here is that while you leave the Duck full of the memory of fireworks and trickery, freezing nitrogen and space dust, you leave L'Enclume remembering sea bass, John Dory, brill, pigeon and lamb. The Fat Duck is the best restaurant in Britain, but there are those who will prefer l'Enclume.

"Best of all, perhaps, were four ‘burnt cream pots' flavoured, respectively, with wild mountain sorrel, red pimento, verbena and saffron honey. That I will never encounter them for the first time again is truly a cause for regret."

"Ferran Adrià changes the menu at El Bulli once a year. Nobody who cooks like this changes the menu four times a year. Nobody. I don't know that Simon Rogan is not the best chef in the world."

Tracey MacLeod, The Independent, 2003 "L'Enclume's Simon Rogan conjured up the gastronomic equivalent of a son et lumière display in the shadows of the old Priory. Inspired by Ferran Adrià at El Bulli, Rogan's playful creations (langoustine, truffle and artichoke cooked in clay with mad barberry bark infusion, for example) only tip occasionally from eccentricity into chaos, with their foams, jellies and test tubes."

Matthew Fort, The Guardian, 2003 "Some of those combinations may sound bizarre, but on closer inspection turned out less so, either because they tasted tickety-boo or because the less expected item was not so dominating as its billing suggested. There were several examples of spumy sauces. There were slashes of sauces and geometric arrangements and odd-shaped plates. To the eye, the dishes dazzled.

"Rogan is a talented chef with a sound grounding in the grammar of French haute cuisine and a vision of much originality. It was early weeks at L'Enclume, and so perhaps unfair to expect the kitchen to be in top gear. However, full prices were being charged. Now, that's £56 a head, which is an ambitious price. I'm not saying that it isn't worth it - it is. I just hope there's enough business to sustain it."

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