Chef Simon Rogan on Sustainability, Success and How Radishes Changed His Career
Many chefs are still navigating how to incorporate eco-friendly practices into their restaurants, but not Simon Rogan. The British chef and restauranteur, best known for L’Enclume and Aulis, puts sustainability at the forefront of everything he does, from sourcing ingredients to creating dishes.
Rogan launched L’Enclume in Cartmel, England in 2002 and its neighboring Our Farm in 2011, both under the concept of using local, seasonal produce as much as possible. Being able to grow his own vegetables and fruit at Our Farm has been game-changing.
“In the city, you order broad beans and you get the broad beans,” Rogan tells Observer. He’s just returned from Asia, where he was visiting Aulis Phuket and Aulis Hong Kong, but despite the jet lag, Rogan is good-natured and generous with his thoughts. “We get the raw beans, we get the broad bean stems, we get the broad bean leaves, we get the broad bean flowers. We look at the plant not just for one element, but for how every bit can be utilized. There are so many different elements, and that drives creativity.”
Rogan, who grew up in Southampton, has always been interested in produce, although he never saw himself as an actual farmer. His father worked at a wholesale fruit and vegetable market, which helped to inspire Rogan’s love of ingredients. Rogan, who considered becoming a soccer player before moving into the culinary world, got his start at places like Rhinefield House Hotel, Geddes Restaurant and The Savoy. By the time he opened L’Enclume, which now has three Michelin stars and a Michelin green star, Rogan was fully immersed in the practice of foraging. He picked Cartmel, located in Cumbria, for its natural flora.
“When we opened the doors, I always envisaged having a growing operation,” he recalls. “And that was really accelerated because of the poor quality of ingredients that were on offer to us at that time. We couldn’t get anything as simple as a perfect radish, which is really easy to grow. We started working with a small farm, and then we gradually took it over. We started growing radishes ourselves.”
He adds, “I always credit radishes as the thing that got us going in farming. And then we moved on to carrots and turnips and lettuces, and things steamrolled from there.”
Eventually, Our Farm expanded so much Rogan and his team had to move to a larger site, where it’s currently located. Today, it boasts an impressive growing operation that is entirely biodynamic (a step up from organic farming in terms of sustainability). Rogan has a full-time head grower and there’s even a focus on aiding wildlife to populate the farmland.
“When we first opened, we had lots of beautiful beds and beautiful pathways and little picnic areas for staff to have their lunch and for guests to come and sit,” Rogan says. “That’s all gone now. It’s absolutely intensive farming. We use every centimeter. It’s probably tripled in the size of growing space in the last five years. We reintroduced a massive pond that we had near the farm to encourage frogs and other friendly species that help us protect our valuable crop. It’s the most fulfilling thing I’ve ever done in my life. It’s the place I prefer to be anywhere in the world. Beaches in Phuket and downtown New Hong Kong; they’re very exciting. But I’d much rather be on my beds, watering and weeding and hanging out on my farm.”
It’s the farm that has pushed Rogan to develop his signature cuisine, an approach to British cooking that emphasizes simplicity and flavor. The chef acknowledges that in the past, he has been guilty of “overcomplication and deconstructing things and then reconstructing things in 15 different ways.” But over the past few decades, Rogan has distilled his dishes down, both at L’Enclume and his other restaurants, which include four outposts of Aulis, the two Michelin-starred ION Harbour in Malta and Roganic HK in Hong Kong. Aulis London, located in Soho, is a standout experience with only 12 seats spread around a horseshoe counter, where guests watch the chefs unveil a three-hour-plus tasting menu.
Rogan admits that his explanation of his ethos changes every time he’s asked about it, but it always involves natural, organic cuisine using the best seasonal, local produce. “We’re creating food in a modern style with lots of technique and creativity running through the cooking,” he says. “It’s very flavor-focused. And I know that sounds obvious, but it’s not. At the end of the day, flavor is everything to us. Of course, we want things to look pretty and elegant and precise, but if it hasn’t got that flavor, then you failed.”
“As we’ve gotten better at growing these amazing ingredients, then the food style has gotten a lot simpler because we’re trying to respect that ingredient and treat it in a way to deliver that [flavor] to the guests in its purest form. The easiest way to do that is eat a raw carrot or something like that. But obviously, we can’t just give 15 plates of raw food. So there’s a lot of technique that goes into the food, but it’s very understated.”
Rogan and his chefs do that by elevating the ingredients without masking them. He describes it as adding “that extra dimension” with umami, salt or acid. Because the restaurants don’t buy foreign ingredients—including the other outside of the U.K., which also work with local farms—Rogan has to get creative. For example, Our Farm doesn’t grow lemons, so Aulis London doesn’t have anything on the menu that uses citrus. Instead, the chefs have developed a fermented courgette juice that offers the exact same effect.
“We couldn’t just come up with a totally new cooking style overnight and get rid of everything we’ve always used,” Rogan explains. “So we gradually got rid of lemons by using a lot of vinegars and a lot of natural acidity and berries and stuff like that. A lot of people thought I was mad at the time, but that’s actually driven us to where we are today.”
These days, Rogan tends not to be the one cooking, but he’s always in a kitchen somewhere. He travels frequently, often visiting his other restaurants away from the U.K., because he enjoys working with his trusted chefs on evolving menus and dishes.
“Every day, we look at how we can make something better,” he says. “There’s this constant quest for improvement. Every day, I’m normally somewhere on a pass. Our guests are always surprised when they actually do see me, and they catch me in one place at a certain time, but I have a normal chef’s life. And I try to share my love equally between all of the restaurants.”
Rogan’s ethos spreads across all of those restaurants, as do many of the dishes, which are sometimes tweaked based on the local ingredients. The innovative and memorable cheese course at Aulis London, a frozen Tunworth cheese served with cobnuts and roasted spelt grains, is a variation on the one offered at Aulis Cartmel. Aulis Phuket showcases a similar course of frozen Chiang Mai sheep’s yogurt with cilantro, aerated lime and leaf top oil.
For Rogan, all of his outposts are an extension of L’Enclume.
“I’ve really now tried to maneuver it so that no matter where you are in the world, you can get a flavor of L’Enclume,” he explains. “It obviously won’t be prime Cumbrian ingredients, but it will be prime ingredients from around where that table is. Carrots grow everywhere—a Chinese carrot or a Thai carrot works like an English carrot. But we’re always basically using the recipes of L’Enclume.”
Going forward, Rogan hopes to continue expanding. Roganic HK is a revival of one of his formative concepts and he also plans to bring back Roganic London, which was shuttered during the first Covid-19 lockdown in 2020. He teases that there are “a few things on the fire,” including potentially a third Roganic.
Despite his global empire, Rogan says success isn’t financial or based on accolades. Instead, it’s how he leads by example.
“When I trained and went through the ranks as a young chef, things were a lot less attractive,” he remembers. “It was very hard. Long hours, hot kitchens, no money. I did it because I wanted to get to the top. But when I started L’Enclume, I knew there had to be a better way of doing this. When I got my first Michelin star, I was cleaning the bathroom in one of our [hotel] bedrooms. I feel like more of a dad as a chef. I’m the old man, and I’m the one that they look up to.”
Hospitality overall has changed in recent years, but it remains important to him to be a good role model and to train his younger chefs with kindness. “I want to be known as someone who really made a difference, someone that inspired,” Rogan says. “Hopefully, I’m nearly there, because I haven’t got many years left in these old bones. But that drives me on. I want to inspire the next generation of chefs to go off and do even greater things and do things in the right way. Our growing operation has been very important on that journey, and now lots of other people are doing the same thing [with sustainability], which is beautiful.”