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Cumbrian venue nabbed the top spot in annual top 50 ranking with cuisine that is 'not science but nature'
If cod "yolk", oyster pebbles or sandwort are to your taste, and distance is no object, it would be wise to book now for a table at L'Enclume restaurant, as it has just been judged the best in the UK.
Chef Simon Rogan's riverside restaurant in Cartmel, Cumbria, has taken top spot for the first time in the Good Food Guide's annual top 50 ranking, pushing Heston Blumenthal's The Fat Duck at Bray, Berkshire, into second place.
The two Michelin-starred restaurant, which was featured in The Trip, a 2010 BBC comedy starring Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon, was awarded the No 1 spot for Rogan's "fantastic way with seasonal ingredients from the Cumbrian land and coast that are a joyful celebration of this country's magnificent diversity".
The Good Food Guide, which was first published in 1951, was bought from Which? by Waitrose earlier this year. Some expressed concern this might result in bias, as the upmarket grocer uses Blumenthal in its advertising campaign and he has created a ready-meals range for the supermarket.
Clearly not so. The independent inspectors, who secretly review the restaurants, gave both a perfect 10 cooking score – L'Enclume for the second year in a row and The Fat Duck for the sixth year in a row. But the guide's consultant editor, Elizabeth Carter, said: "Rogan rightfully takes his place as leader of the pack when it comes to modern British cooking."
Rogan, who trained under Marco Pierre White, said: "This is something we have always dreamed about. We have received this accolade because of our focus on both the food product and the customer – keeping it natural and fresh in the kitchen, and friendly but professional in the dining room."
Until recently Rogan was of a Hestonian persuasion himself, deconstructing and reconstructing in his own culinary lab.
Although having always labelled the cuisine as "not science but nature", the restaurant switched in 2010 from the molecular to the earthy, with seasonal, but still unusual, farm produce.
Each day the spontaneous menu is based on the availability of vegetables, herbs and edible flowers sourced from Rogan's 12-acre organic farm, and served in the converted 800-year-old smithy.
Taking advantage of the Cumbrian soil, he often places vegetables at the centre of his creations: "A [vegetable] dish shows far more skill and imagination than turning out meat and two veg".
Food critic Jay Rayner has said Rogan made his name with his "small, precise and complex plates". There is no à la carte, just a choice of tasting menus of between eight and 12 courses – with prices ranging from £45 for a lunch menu to a dinner tasting menu of £120.
Typically the first eight courses to come from the kitchen are smaller snacks, with the rest resembling proper "dishes" and other smaller dishes to finish. Unlike a lot of other leading restaurants, L'Enclume, meaning 'anvil', doesn't have a three-month waiting list, and occasionally has "free-for-all" tables.
Reviewing the restaurant in 2011, Rayner wrote: "L'Enclume gets much of its ingredients from its own farm and while there is nothing rustic about Rogan's food – it is modernist and unashamed about its interest in process – it does show a commitment to the good stuff. Indeed, the whole enterprise is defined by self-confidence."
He added: "Service is slick, and the wine list doesn't make you feel like you are being punished for a nameless crime. But let's not pretend it's cheap, or even on nodding terms with cheap. It costs and big time. It's the kind of expense for which you would make a special trip; the sort I should have made years ago."
The 2014 edition sees all 10 restaurants from 2013 hang on to their top 10 ranking, with Cornish favourite Restaurant Nathan Outlaw rising to number three. Restaurant Sat Bains in Nottinghamshire and Restaurant Gordon Ramsay in London are at numbers four and five.
L'Enclume Menu on 3 September 2013:
Small plates
Oyster pebbles, Radish and perilla vinegar, Cream cheese wafer, Smoked eel with ham fat, Chicken skin and black pudding, Ragstone, malt, artichoke, Kales in hyssop, egg, ox tongue, Pea, calamint, crab sacks.
Mains
Cod 'yolk' with watercress, runner beans, salt and vinegar, Atlas carrots, chicken of the woods, truffle, nasturtium, Valley venison, charcoal oil, mustard and fennel, Grilled scallop and cauliflower with strawberry, raw scallop with wood sorrel, Potatoes in onion ashes, lovage and shoots, Wild bass, sandwort, thyme, grilled courgette with cockle, Reg's duck, sweetbreads, beetroot, fat hen, sweetcorn, elderflower vinegar, Blackberry, gooseberry, honey wine, Plum with malt, brown sugar, Anise hyssop, raspberry, milk skin, Meadow sweet, blueberry, bucklers sorrel, walnut, Sea buckthorn, sweet cheese, woodruff, Apple marigold fizz.