Roganic

Headed up by Simon Rogan, who also owns two-Michelin-starred L’Enclume in Cartmel, Cumbria, this compact Marylebone restaurant serves up exciting and innovative food.

Rogan is an avid champion of humble vegetables, choosing to grow much of the produce that makes it to his restaurants on his own farm in The Lake District. This respect for homegrown goods translates into dishes that are thoughtfully executed with vegetables front and centre stage.

Forcing you to surrender yourself to the better judgment of the kitchen, the menu choice here is limited to two tasting options: a full or a short one (although the short still comes in at seven courses).

A piece of baby gem is treated like steak: marinated and cooked on a plancha grill before being dressed with truffle and house-pickled mushrooms. This unique handling gives the whole thing an unexpectedly robust and meaty feel.

Elsewhere there’s blushing duck with crisped skin, precisely laid out on an earthenware plate, accompanied by intensely earthy duck hearts and a sharp gooseberry sauce. A pre-dessert took Tunworth cheese and whipped it into an almost-mouse-like consistency that fell somewhere between sweet and savoury and came swirled with cherries and topped with crushed hazelnuts. A cheesecake, of sorts, that bridged the gap between mains and desserts and left us confused and contented in equal measure.

Drinks flights for each of the menus feature a selection of biodynamic, natural and English wines, and if you’re not drinking alcohol there are seasonal softs on offer. On our visit it was a lemon verbena spritz, all floral and fizzy. Staff are welcoming and deliver each course with an in-depth explanation (which is in contrast to the menu that comes sealed in an envelope and mentions a maximum of three ingredients per dish).

A little taste of the restaurant is offered to take home following your meal; the Cartmel classic of sticky toffee pudding with caramel sauce, for instance, in a classy iteration of a party bag and demonstrates the generosity of spirit which sums up the restaurant’s warm ambience.

Chef Simon Rogan’s two London outposts take in his Soho chef’s table Aulis and this resurrection of his much-lauded pop up Roganic, which ran for two years in 2011 and takes some elements from the chef’s two Michelin-starred L’Enclume in Cumbria.

Roganic’s focus is on supremely fresh ingredients, often sourced from the chef's own farm in Cartmel, with head chef Oliver Marlow (part of the original Roganic line-up) overseeing tasting menus of dainty but dynamic plates.

Everything is near perfect, from the intensely creamy starting snack of a preserved raspberry tart rooted with an earthy beetroot base, to a dessert of apple slices caramelised into a bundle of sweetness that is almost too pretty to eat.

More unconventional dishes include ice-cold scallops which first freeze the mouth before giving way to a topping of sour apple and gooseberry chunks, and a ramekin of unassuming-looking custard, which surprises with its savoury, saline notes of seaweed and caviar.

France leads the European-focused wine list (good luck finding much below £45), while wine flights are supplemented by a dozen by-the-glass options, and there are also Cumbrian beers and gin. Service is positively warm and friendly.

The restaurant’s understated interior (complete with 80s-style cane Cesca chairs) may not be to all tastes – not least given the not-very-understated prices – but Roganic excels at remixing the fine-dining of old in an exciting, and most importantly delicious, way.