Roganic, Marylebone

After another ho-hum meal recently at somewhere that receives nothing but unqualified praise from almost everyone else that eats there (no, I won't name it, at least not today), it got me thinking about how there's a certain element of subjectivity implicit in almost every restarant recommendation, no matter how enthusiastically offered.

We are all of us different, and have different priorities when it comes to spending our money on dinner, and as much as anywhere can be stress-tested and fine-tuned to be as close to the ultimate dining experience as possible, the fact is no one place can please everyone. I'm thinking of a friend I confidently packed off to Quality Chop House only to have them moan about the uncomfortable seating and "weird chips" (I mean, honestly), or even my own experience as seemingly the only sentient being in town not to fall completely in love with Black Axe Mangal. Such is life's rich tapestry.

So this post comes with a disclaimer. I make no secret of the fact that this kind of food happens to chime exactly with what I'm looking for from a meal, and Simon Rogan's style of cooking is everything I find exciting and rewarding about eating out. I was always going to like the latest incarnation of Roganic, and trying to pretend it's any kind of surprise that I'm now gushing about one of the best meals I've ever eaten in London would be disengenuous at best.

But I'm equally convinced there are countless others out that will find Roganic every bit as thrilling as I did. Trying to describe it in too terrestrial a way threatens to spoil some of the magic; "local and seasonal" is too glib - everyone from your local pub to the contestants on Masterchef are cooking local, seasonal food these days. Rogan's cooking is like eating the seasons themselves, like going on a country walk and plucking fruit and berries from the trees, albeit fruit and berries in the form of exquisitely crafted preserved raspberry mini-tartlets dusted with beetroot powder (above).

It's the kind of food that no matter how dazzling the technique or unusual the ingredient (there's nobody more likely to introduce you to an obscure unpronouncable herb or foraged berry than Rogan), the results always make absolute sense, and flatter your expectations of what good food is even if you don't entirely understand how. Obviously flavour comes first - he wouldn't be much of a chef if it didn't - but it's more than that, it's a complete mastery of what people will expect from a meal like this, but then with something else, a touch of extra fairy dust. Like with these little parcels of beef wrapped in pickled kohlrabi, beautiful and bite-sized, which deliver a kind of Asian-influenced tartare effect before an astonishing woodsmoke flavour appears and lifts the whole thing to another level entirely.

A bowl of fermented cabbage kombucha managed to walk that clever line between sweetness, bitterness and vegetal flavour. It not only performed its advertised role as a palate cleanser admirably, but managed also to beguile with a further set of mysterious aromatics, tantalisingly just out of reach of identification, but delightful nontheless.

Next a dish wholly unsatisfactorily described as a "mushroom broth". I mean, technically it was a mushroom broth, insofar as it contained a broth made out of mushrooms, but of course this being Roganic it was a bewilderingly complex liquid, dark with countless enigmatic herbs and essences, with a smoked quail's yolk underneath round it out with an irresistable layer of silky dairy.

If ever a vegetable has the power to carry a main course without having you pining wistfully for protein it's salt-baked celeriac, which even in lesser hands is a dense, richly flavoured root - a highlight of dining in the winter months. Needless to say, Roganic's version is exemplary, matched with a light sauce made I think from whey, and with crunchy grains and crisp-fried enoki mushrooms for texture.

You'll have probably got the gist of the story by now. Everything Roganic do is technically impressive, immaculately presented and - most importantly - profoundly rewarding, not just enjoyable but offering an extra quantity of intellectual stimulation. Fresh crab meat, fluffy and sweet, came on a bed of smoky grilled cabbage and topped with translucent slivers of crisp chicken skin, all of which combined like God's own surf and turf. This, though, was then dressed with a light sauce made out of ramsons (preserved wild garlic) - that all-important sprinking of fairy dust.

Hay-aged duck is, just as in the mothership l'Enclume, the centerpiece of the meal at Roganic. Boasting a stunning intense flavour highlighted by a judicious selection of preserved roots and berries, I was willing to overlook the slight disappointment of a rather flabby skin and make the most of the fireworks elsewhere, not least an impossibly smooth celeriac purée.

In most restaurants, a pre-dessert would be welcome but forgettable, something for you to push about while the kitchen plated the puddings. This, a sorbet made from yellow beetroot and buttermilk, was a talking point in itself, packed full of mysterious citrus notes (no idea) and dressed with something called oxalis. That cute little wooden bowl was left absolutely clean.

This abstract arrangement of what they called "burned milk" (presumably a kind of custard spread out and baked into crisps but good lord, don't ask me) came perched upon the most insanely rich ice cream/frozen yoghurt and surrounded by at least blackcurrant but also another syrup of luminescent green who-knows-what. One of the hallmarks of a Rogan dish is how they'll often look as dazzlingly beautiful after you've finished eating them, the dabs and swirls of irridescent colour, than before you take your first bite.

There was no sense that the petit fours had been given any less thought and care. Jasmine may sound like a strange flavour to add to fudge, until you try it and realise that it's exactly what fudge has been missing all these years. And don't ask me to relay precisely what was inside these little chocolate swirls - possibly some kind of nut mousse, maybe nougat - but, of course, they were also brilliant.

When all is said and done, posts like these are hardly going to change anyone's minds. Those who fell in love with Roganic as I did when it exploded onto the scene back in 2011 will have already put a mark in their diary to visit the new incarnation, and will no doubt have visited l'Enclume as many times as their bank balance would allow in the meantime. Similarly, those friends (I use the term loosely) who dismissed Roganic as pretentious overpriced nonsense back then still won't be convinced by any of my adoration and will be quite happy continuing to ignore it. More fool them.

But for those lucky enough to be tuned-in on the Rogan wavelength, wow - wow you're in for a treat. Because this, essentially, is why we choose to spend our money eating out; to be dazzled, to be entertained, to be utterly charmed by a team of people who give the impression their entire purpose on this planet is to make you happy. From top to bottom, across every inch of this charming Marylebone location, it is as close to perfect as I can imagine a restaurant can be. Welcome back, Roganic.

10/10

Fera, Mayfair

For some people, this whole food blogging malarkey is simply a means to an end. I'm thinking particularly of the late, much lamented Dos Hermanos blog, whose writers (brothers Robin and Simon Majumdar) often said was less a guide to eating out than a sort of journal of their quest to find The Perfect Restaurant. Simon moved to Los Angeles to be a TV star (as you do) but Robin continued only as long as it took him to stumble across West London restaurant Hedone, and, just like that, all the pieces fell into place. He is still often to be seen propping up the bar at the open kitchen of a Saturday, with a good couple of hundred meals under his belt, and even has a brass plaque with his name on next to his favourite stool. Dos Hermanos quietly wound down, and for Robin, at least, the journey was over.

I have no plans to quit blogging any time soon, you may or may not be pleased to hear, but I do envy that sense of completion Robin must have received from the realisation that here, finally, was the restaurant he'd been looking for all his life. While it may be true that there's no such thing as the perfect restaurant, there must be, surely, somewhere, a place so utterly in tune with your own (necessarily subjective) ideas of what makes great food that to carry on looking for anything better would be more effort than it's worth.

I have not yet found my Perfect Restaurant. At least, I don't think I have. But if I was to pick just one meal in the seven years Cheese and Biscuits has existed that most accurately represents everything that I consider good food should be, it's Simon Rogan's L'Enclume, in Cartmel. Here was a parade of dishes, engineered with consummate skill, produced with flair and imagination, and presented with an artist's eye, on the one hand recognisably Of England but at the same time revolutionary and otherworldly. It was, for me, like they had reached inside my subconcious and given me exactly what I wanted before I even knew what it was I wanted myself. The sign, you may say, of a truly great craftsman.

With all this in mind, and knowing that Simon Rogan's food is perhaps the closest thing I have to a personal ambrosia (that's ambrosia with a lowercase "a", not the rice pudding), I was always going to like Fera. The fact that in the weeks since this grand space in the grandest of London's grand hotels - Claridge's - has opened not every review of the place has been entirely positive, didn't bother me at all because, much as I respect those opinions, I knew Fera, like Simon Rogan's other restaurants, isn't for everyone. It's for me.

I may as well start at the beginning. The very first "snack" was a cracker made of puffed barley, topped with smoked eel and watercress. I think there was also sheep's curd in there too, adding a lovely citrussy, dairy note. Who doesn't like smoked eel and curd, but the puffed barley was impossibly light, like the world's fanciest cream cheese cracker.

This is a little arancini-style crunchy ball of stewed rabbit, with a lovage purée. Lovage is a peculiar herb, very bitter and metallic, but with the soft, salty rabbit it worked incredibly well.

Sturgeon, seawater cream, caviar. Another delicate sliver of light cracker, topped with bouncy fresh fish and a generous dollop of black gold. My favourite of the snacks, but as you can probably tell, it was a close-run thing.

Gorgeous mini scallop shells filled with scallop poached lightly in buttermilk (I think), with pea and pea purée. Great fun to eat, scooping the mixture from the shells with your teeth like you would an oyster.

A morsel of chicken skin, next, with a pretty bowl of thyme and roast garlic dip. Again, everything that makes a great dish - top ingredients (the chicken was particularly noticeable, a shockingly concentrated flavour to it), top presentation, and lovely texture contrasts. It's worth bearing in mind at this point that we were still only halfway through the "snacks" - the menu proper hadn't even started yet!

Winslade cheese, potato and duck heart. The very finest, lightest, smoothest cheesy mash, and if that wasn't enough, some soft chunks of duck heart in a rich meaty jus plonked on top. I am ashamed of the noises I made when eating this.

The freshest crab, topped with slivers of sweet rhubarb and filled out with goat's cheese. There was some foraged herb of some kind on it too, but heaven knows what that was.

There's been an interesting new trend in modern restaurants to present the bread as a course of its own rather than as something to nibble on during other dishes. So here is a fresh, moist house loaf with bone marrow butter studded with bits of some kind of crackling, and a pot of sweet onion broth. We still had not yet started on the advertised 16 course menu by this point so forcing customers to go easy on the bread is probably a very wise move. I was so terrified I wouldn't have it in me to make it to the end of the meal I only had one mouthful of it.

Finally, the Fera tasting menu proper was underway. Beef tartare with smoked broccoli cream was clearly from the same mind as the venison with coal oil at the French, but this was a more subtle, and even more impressive way of adding smoke to tender raw beef. Apple juice added acidity, and scallop roe an enjoyably discombobulating note of surf to the beefy turf. Clever stuff.

Oxalis (a plant. Of some sort) with fudgy slow-smoked egg yolk wouldn't have been the most exciting thing in the world was it not for something called 'duck sweetbread' which were like little meaty flavour bombs. Perhaps I'm just not the world's biggest fan of slow-cooked yolk; I much prefer it runny. Still, objectively an imaginative and attractive dish.

Prawns with asparagus and shellfish butter was another great idea let down by a single duff ingredient, in this case the prawns themselves which were oddly grainy and tasteless. A shame, really, because the shellfish butter was gorgeous and would have really made this dish otherwise.

Fortunately, we weren't off-message for long. If you'd have told me that my favourite dish of a 20+ course tasting menu at any other restaurant in the world would be a salad, then I'd have reacted with some scepticism. But this is Simon Rogan, known for his way with vegetables, and this is no ordinary salad, not by a Cumbrian country mile. Firstly, the greens were crunchy, and smoky from the grill - dry roasted, somehow, to a fantastic delicate texture. Beneath them, and a generous shaving of fresh black truffle, was something called truffle custard, a light cheesy mousse that was like wrapping yourself in front of a thick fur blanket in front of a fire. Made of cheesy truffle. I know I occasionally overuse hyperbole on these pages but there is nothing that could have improved this dish. It was an absolute knockout.

Plaice braised in nettle butter was golden and green and silky, with an array of pretty miniature vegetables and boasting a nice meaty chunk of fresh fish. My favourite element though was a stick of roast salsify, a weakness of mine at the best of times but particularly nice here.

Hogget with pickled tongue and turnips, another glorious plate of food. The meat was perfectly tender, but then you'd expect that somewhere like this. More impressive was the extraordinary flavour, like the most lamb-y lamb with added notes of dry ageing and funky fat. A thick cheffy jus was poured on top, and coiled around the geometrically-cut turnips beneath.

Desserts began with "Pineapple weed, butterscotch and celery", a palate-cleanser of sorts using some weird and wonderful foraged herb next to one of those light mousse-sorbets that only the most experienced kitchens ever seem to be able to pull off.

I still - even despite Simon Rogan's best efforts - have issues with beetroot in desserts. I can kind of see what they're getting for here, with the earthy vegetable put up against another one of those lovely fresh sorbets but even so, I'd rather root vegetables stayed with their savoury friends than creeping their way into cakes and puddings.

This next course, though, was utterly wonderful. A neat row of gently alcoholic cherries next to a cherry "snow", a rich sheep's milk yoghurt which was more like a fresh butter (in a good way) and topped with delicate slivers of pine.

And apologies for the odd photos of this next dish but it was impossible to capture both the blackberry and lemon verbena cracker and the weird Sellafield Tower of sweet sauce it came with in the same focal length. Tasted good though, sharp and sweet and with another one of those delicate crisps that threatens to collapse under the weight of a hard stare.

Dandelion and caramel was essentially a spongecake topped with a sugar mousse, and was very nice too. Incredible colour as well.

Spruce drops - chocolate truffles flavoured with pine, a thin crust containing a soft centre.

And then we were done, the final petit four being "smoked meringue", little macaron-shaped things with a dairy filling, perfectly constructed and easy to devour.

So yes, I was always going to enjoy Fera. I am a shameless Simon Rogan fan, loved all his other restaurants and I consider this to be, while not quite on the level of the peerless L'Enclume, which has time and location on its side, still one of the few genuinely innovative and idiosyncratic restaurants in London. Relentlessly experimental, aiming for (the) stars with feet firmly planted in the sourcing (and growing) of exceptional ingredients, Fera is a towering achievement.

But the Perfect Restaurant? Not quite. At least, not yet. Simon Rogan may be better placed than most to eventually open the kind of place I'd happily spend the rest of my days, with my name on a brass plaque next to my favourite chair and the priority reservation number on speed dial. But today is not that day. And besides, there's the little matter of another restaurant I visited on a whim over the weekend that may have an even closer stab at the title. But I'm getting ahead of myself. Watch this space.

9/10

I was invited to review Fera

The French, Manchester

Anyone who has been following this blog for long enough will know that I consider Simon Rogan to be one of the most talented chefs working in Britain today, and that my meal at l'Enclume is unlikely to be superceded any time soon as the best meal I've ever eaten. I realise labelling anything the "best" is fraught with problems, especially with anything so subjective as restaurants, but much as I try to avoid quixotic praise, the more I think about that afternoon in Cartmel, in that bright conservatory overlooking the garden, the more I realise how special it was. Sixteen courses of love and joy, and edible pebbles. What more could you want?

It is probably due in part, then, to this hopeless fanboyism that I and a friend were invited up to Manchester last weekend to sample his latest ventures (more on his more informal spot, Mr Cooper's House and Garden, from Lizzie in due course) at the Midland hotel. The chances of my not having a great time at a Simon Rogan restaurant are so slim that the PR powers that be clearly decided that it was worth putting us up in this swankiest of city centre hotels and letting us loose on a ten-course tasting menu, for which we are of course very grateful. So after a morning swim in the basement pool and a brief wander around Manchester in the rain (I believe this is Manchester's default weather setting), we settled in for the midday sitting.

Much like the way things kicked off at l'Enclume, the dazzling selection of amuses that preceed the menu proper at the French are each mini works of art. Crispy kale, chicken skin and horseradish bore a certain resemblance to a similar creation at l'Enclume but substituting the cracker for a sheet of crispy kale was a stroke of genius, and having it all dissolve in your mouth into a riot of animal fat and cream was quite the sensation. Cute little crab and sorrel canapés, too, played with contrasting textures thanks to a crunchy, puffy base laced with seaweed (I think). And 'Rye, mustard and linseeds', spiked with pickled red cabbage, was fresh and invigorating, the seeds toasted just to release a bit of smoke and oil. The only not-entirely-successful item was a black pudding and sage croquette thing which should have been right up my alley but turned out to be rather bland and pappy. Or maybe it was just suffering in contrast to everything else.

Plenty to discuss, then, and we hadn't even reached course one. That arrived next in a little stoneware pot, and consisted of two impossibly sweet new potatoes covered in a rich cheddar sauce. Toasted bread added crunch, and chives colour. It was all very comforting and autumnal, a cheese and potato pie gone posh.

"Grilled radish, leek and watercress" doesn't sound like the most amazingly interesting dish, does it? Except there is nobody who can do vegetables like Simon Rogan, and thanks to a range of techniques and some incredibly fresh ingredients, it was an absolute dazzler. A young leek, gently charred and tasting of wood smoke, was draped around a couple of pieces of rich, salty ham in an ever-so-slightly gelatinous sauce studded with mustard seeds. A fresh radish on top added a bitter crunch to compliment the salt and soft notes elsewhere, and another type of cooked radish was so sweet and smoky and had a flavour so arresting it could have won Best In Show on its own.

And so, just as had happened at l'Enclume, that course kicked off a run of five that could each barely be faulted. Take each of these ingredients in isolation and tell me you don't want to smother yourself in them - mushroom broth, salt-baked swede, smoked yolk, truffles. Now imagine all forming part of one extraordinary dish, rich and soothing, like wrapping yourself in a blanket in front of a log fire in an old thatched cottage.

Then the ox in coal oil dish, much discussed by others as a highlight of their meal at the French but supremely impressive even despite all the hype. On the one level, it's a steak tartare, prettied up with neat little balls of kohlrabi and toasted pumpkin seeds. But the coal oil adds a bewildering extra dimension, the flavour of a charcoal-charred steak without the char.

Caramelised cabbage - ah, you had me at "caramelised cabbage" - scallops, herbs and smoked roe had the trademark Rogan way with smoke and vegetables, with some lovely sweet little Scottish scallops boasting a golden brown crust. I wish I'd known that the roe was quite so punchy before I downed a whole puck of it in one, though - it was so powerfully salty my squeal of surprise turned heads from more than one neighbouring table.

Next was one of Rogan's famous salad explosions, consisting of at least fifty or so separate elements and presumably having taken some poor bugger the best part of the day to put together. I won't even begin to remember everything that went into it, but it was great fun to work our way through, and was interesting seeing how it had evolved from a similar dish I tried at the Electrolux Cube when he was cooking there last year. Just as pretty, though.

Plaice with carrots was a dainty arrangement of bright-white, superbly-timed fish and carrots done caramelised/roasted and as a little purée. Whether it was because it was towards the end of the savoury dishes by this point or just my delicate stomach, I'm afraid neither of us really much enjoyed the deep-fried nugget of bone marrow that topped the fish; it was rich to the point of defeating. Nevertheless, it's always nice when a top chef turns his hand to a fish like plaice - you rarely see it looking and tasting this good.

Middlewhite pork belly was just about the nicest bit of pork I've enjoyed in a very long time, the flesh hammy and bouncy and edged with a thin layer of golden crackling. The accompanying veg - blewits, turnip and mugwort - had the added benefit of sounding like something from Hogwarts' Advanced Potions class as well as tasting earthy and mysterious. A pork jus poured on top made some popcorn crackle like breakfast cereal.

Apples, woodruff (wiki here, I had no idea either), sweet cheese and hazelnut was a pleasant if unspectacular introduction to the sweet courses. Even here, though, despite rather muted flavours, there was some interesting technical skill on display in the form of some nitro-frozen, apple-flavoured meringue things which completely disappeared in the mouth like cold candy floss.

Then a marvellous course consisting of toasted oats, raspberries and hyssop where the fruit had been teased into a thin sheet of translucent raspberry-flavoured candy, and the medicinal, minty hyssop came in the form of a crumbled sorbet. As you may have noticed by this point, there's always plenty going on in terms of technique, but never at the expense of enjoyment.

It was all, of course, as it was always likely to be, a joy. Opening Manchester's first fine-dining restaurant in its most grand and classical old dining halls is a pretty serious achievement in itself, but to do so while sacrificing so little of the charm, inventiveness and fanatical devotion to detail that made l'Enclume so special has not just created the first high-end restaurant in Manchester worth visiting, but another regional destination restaurant, a jewel in the crown of the north that deserves to draw in visitors from all over the country.

I hesitate to mention the dreaded M-word but enough people have made comments to the effect of "if it's so good, why didn't it get a Michelin star", and enough Mancunian pride has been hurt by the omission in this year's guide that it probably deserves addressing. Firstly, and most importantly, Michelin are an ignorant bunch of foam-frotting dinosaurs who wouldn't recognise a good meal if it was tied to a brick and flung in their faces. The briefest of glances at the awards as they currently stand nationwide reveal no obvious pattern other than that if you are connected in some way to a famous name treading water in the Michelin comfort zone (Ducasse, Gagnaire, Robuchon) or are at least serving the kind of dishes they recognise from other restaurants they've awarded (the Greenhouse, Gordon Ramsay, Le Champignon Sauvage) then you are likely to do well. Other than that, you may as well be pulling names out of a hat. The dreadful Ametsa gets a star and not the Clove Club? The gimmick-fountain that is Bo London is awarded, and not the refined, innovative Kitchen Table? It's a crapshoot, in all senses of the word.

So the fact that l'Enclume is "deserving" of two stars and the French not even one says nothing - absolutely nothing - about the quality of the food at either restaurant but everything about how risk-averse, unpredictable and utterly irrelevant the Michelin guide is. Simon Rogan's crafted, intelligently seasonal, creative dishes in the heart of this grand old hotel may not have been deemed as good as somewhere in Mayfair charging £80 for an edible used condom but nobody - not him, and certainly not you - need to worry about that. One day the Michelin guide will be a forgotten relic of a time when the wrong people valued the wrong things about eating out and we will laugh about how chefs would drive themselves loopy to win their favour. Until then, just know this - there are few better restaurants than the French.

9/10

I was invited to the Midland to review the French