One of the questions I'm most often asked, when I tell people I review restaurants, is, 'Where have you been lately that's really special?'. And it's a difficult one to answer. The truth is, there aren't many places out there that really are that special. For every Fat Duck, there's a lot of ugly ducklings.
But now I have an answer to the question: Roganic. It's original, ambitious, artistic and rather bonkers. And it's certainly special.
It's the first London opening from Simon Rogan, the wildly inventive chef/proprietor of L'Enclume in the Lake District. If Heston Blumenthal is the king of avant-garde cooking in this country, Rogan is the prince in exile, with a fabled domain in Cartmel encompassing two restaurants, a hotel and an organic farm.
TV audiences got a glimpse of Rogan's style in The Trip, in which L'Enclume was the setting for Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon's exchange about foam. The good news about this new restaurant is that not only are there no foams in evidence, but it's geographically more central than L'Enclume, occupying a short-lease site in Marylebone.
They're calling it a pop-up, though with a potential life span of two years, it's more of a stay-up. The slender, storefront dining room has been tastefully refurbed on a shoestring, with Deco-ish pendant lights, turbulent black abstracts, and moss-green wainscoting which chimes with the foraged, herbivorous theme of the menu.
Never in the field of human dining have so many obscure herbs and sea vegetables laid down their lives in the service of a tasting menu. Chenopodiums and buckthorn, blite and Sweet Cicely – the menu should come with a copy of The Observer's Book of British Plants (not that Roganic offers anything as workaday as a printed menu).
Read more at http://www.independent.co.uk/
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