Mr. Rogan, apparently when you first opened your three Michelin star restaurant L’Enclume, you had a team of just five people. Did you ever imagine then that you’d be where you are now?
No, not at all! Our only aspiration around the time when we opened in 2002 was that we would make enough money to buy some new crockery or be able to hire an one extra staff member. We just wanted to try and up the standards a bit more. The restaurants we have around the world, I never thought we would have that, of course not. It’s just been a bit of a bit of a roller coaster, really — but we wouldn't have it any other way.
Are you ever nostalgic for the challenge of those early days?
You know what? I do miss it. There's no doubt about that. It was such an enjoyable time for me because I was in the kitchen so much. I realized this during Covid, which was obviously a hard time for us and the food industry in general, all of a sudden we had to close. No one knew what was going to happen. When we finally reopened, the staff was there, ready to work, and I was there, cooking with the team side by side for nearly two years. For the first time in a while, I felt really present in the kitchen, rather than travelling around, taking care of our other restaurants and opportunities. And to be honest, I think that helped carry us over the line in getting our third Michelin star in 2022, because I think a chef proprietor really needs to be in the restaurant for a good period of time for that accolade.
“Of course, I love to be in my restaurants and my team loves to have me there, but that’s just not realistic anymore. So I have to trust them implicitly. You have to have an amazing team around you.”
It does seem like your team plays a massive role in the success of your restaurants; ensuring that your standard is set in the kitchen, even though you can’t be in all your restaurants at once.
Yeah, absolutely. For example, I mean, I've just been away for nearly three weeks; I travel a lot, I'm going around the world to promote my team, my restaurants because the best restaurant is a busy one. Of course, I love to be in my restaurants and my team loves to have me there, but that's just not realistic anymore. So I have to trust them implicitly. You have to have an amazing team around you, and that’s not just your kitchen staff, it’s your suppliers, front of house, the senior team that works behind the scenes, it’s a huge operation. And everyone together has just as much passion and love for what they do as I do.
Where did that passion stem from for you?
I’d had a job at a local Greek restaurant, I was making lots of money, and I was doing something that I loved, that I didn’t find a chore. But then I decided to go to my local college and get my degree — you know, I had all this experience already, so I thought it would be a walk, that I’d be top of the class with no issues whatsoever. First day, I’m surrounded by people who were working in hotels and restaurants, and I was absolutely rubbish. I was nowhere near as good as them. That ignited the competitive nature in me, I didn’t want to settle for that. So I left my little restaurant job, took a job at Rhinefield House working under a really incredible head chef. We used to work together all week on the dishes I was studying at college, so I’d come in and I knew all the moves already! I pretty quickly got to the top of the class, and I was head over heels in love with what I was doing.
But you’d always loved food and cooking, even as a kid?
Well, the way the spark got ignited for food was that my dad was a fruit and vegetable salesman, so I used to go and visit, or go and wait for him to finish work. I always remember being sat on the crates in the warehouse, watching all the forklift trucks driving around with pallets of produce. I remember the smell of the place, it was very distinctive. And I just loved being down there and watching what was going on. One of the perks of his job was each week he'd come home with a bag of produce. A lot of that stuff in there, I didn't have a clue what it was, this is when starfruit and kiwi had just sort of appeared, they look liked they’d come from the moon or or something! Sometimes the more strange produce got left to waste, and that’s when I started cooking because I hated seeing all that waste. That’s when I started to become really inquisitive about food.
That’s definitely reflected in your menu. Your farming venture Our Farm, which supplies all of your nearby restaurants, has grown really unique produce like Japanese wineberries, elkhorn fern, and buckshorn plantain.
Sure, we have grown and used our share of challenging ingredients. But to be quite honest, when we first opened L’Enclume, I was heavily into foraging, and looking back, you know, you're young, you want to make a name for yourself, you try to impart your will on your diners. You try to challenge them, but maybe it doesn’t taste that great. I guess I was trying to be clever. But as you get older and wiser, we know what works and what doesn’t, what tastes good and what doesn’t. Flavor is everything, and we don't want anything that's not up to that standard.
But that kind of experimentation and creativity is still at the heart of what you’re doing as a chef.
Oh yeah, we're constantly experimenting. I used to spend loads of hours on my own, trying to think up ideas. But I’ve learned that the best breakthroughs now are when we work together as a team. And it starts with Our Farm. We’re guided by seasonality, by what’s available and when it’s at its best. We discuss the ingredients as a team, work out what we're going to do for them, and then the team gets to work on them. And I think as Our Farm ingredients have got better and we got better at growing, for us, less is more. We’re just looking at the integrity of those ingredients and not messing around with them too much. Again, as a young chef, I was certainly guilty of getting a carrot, deconstructing it in about four different ways. (Laughs) But we all have to go through that phase.
It seems like these days, you’re more interested in pushing the boundaries of quality, rather than pushing the boundaries of creativity?
Absolutely, yeah. We’ve literally got some ingredients coming out of the ground half an hour before it's going on to the plate. You really have that freshness, you can pick the size you want, when you want, it's the ultimate control, and it drives creativity as well. When you grow your own produce, you've got the stem, the root, the leaf, the flower, the seed. You've got all these different parts that you wouldn’t get if you bought from the supermarket. So that's where the creativity comes in, it’s about using it all up and finding ways to keep your waste at a minimum.
It seems like a less flashy process, but one that’s more sustainable and stable for your future as a restaurant.
Exactly, and that’s how we’ve been doing it for ages. We’ve always been doing things quite sustainably, especially since we started Our Farm, and that’s incredibly rewarding. We took a massive risk in opening up L’Enclume in the middle of nowhere, where there was no restaurant scene, we invested in our restaurant and our farm, we got to know and supported the local community in the Lakes District and created that sound footing. We look after our staff and we pay well. We’ve never had a rich investor, we’re a family run business. A lot of other three-star restaurants, I think, are just in it for the amusement of their rich backers, but I think we’re a bit more real. We worry about every penny. It might be slower, but we’ve always loved doing it in this way.