Reaction’s Summer Supper Club: L’Enclume

After months of home-cooked meals and disappointing Deliveroo’s, the hospitality industry is back in business. This Saturday, restaurants around England will be laying tables, firing up ovens and opening doors to welcome in a new era in eating-out; social-distanced dining.

Covid-19 has forced the hospitality industry to make huge changes in the way it functions and all eyes are on Super Saturday to see if re-opening pubs and restaurants is safe and viable.

Loyal fans of farm-to-fork pioneer Simon Rogan will be anxiously awaiting the reopening of his collection of restaurants; L’Enclume and its sister bistro Simon and Co. in Cumbria, Roganic in Marylebone and Aulis London in Soho. L’Enclume is held in particularly high regard amongst diners, with two Michelin stars and the title of number one restaurant in the UK by The Good Food Guide 2020. Rogan’s Managing Director Sam Ward describes the peaks and perils of reopening his venues.

When are your restaurants reopening?

We are opening up L’Enclume and Rogan and Co. tomorrow, and there will be a July opening for Aulis in Soho; they’ve pedestrianised Soho so we think we can do something great there. We are looking at a September opening for Roganic, but I am still a little unsure about the London market.

On any given day in our restaurant in Marylebone, there’s a big chunk of people who do not live in London. People are not flying into the country and won’t be for a while, the reasons you would travel to London are drastically limited. Businesses are either giving up their London offices or a bit tight on money, and the first thing to go is corporate lunches. There are so many reasons why the market for high-end dining in London won’t be the same.

How are you implementing social distancing measures in your restaurants?

The beauty of dining at L’Enclume is, even before COVID you weren’t crammed in like sardines, the social distancing rules don’t change much there. We’ve had to drop a table or two. We have built some walls into the building to separate tables. I like them; I think they offer some privacy to guests that we didn’t have before. We are also fumigating restaurants to disinfect the rooms and sealing each room with tamper-proof stickers, you have to break a seal to enter so you know that each room is safe.

The key thing to remember is, hospitality hasn’t changed. The principles are the same: make somebody feel comfortable and then deliver them beautiful food and service. But what makes people comfortable has changed. Now what is important is restaurants don’t try and squeeze what they can in based on social distancing regulations. They should work to make the customer feel at ease.

How is the industry feeling about the sector reopening?

Tentative. The truth of the matter is, diner confidence isn’t there and a huge proportion of our markets aren’t there. We have a long-standing name of 19 years behind Simon Rogan so there’s a vote of confidence that comes along with that, for newer establishments that haven’t had the chance to build that up, I would say it is going to be tough. I’m not worried about the next three months, but I am worried about getting through to next year.

What issues has the crisis illuminated within the industry?

Hospitality runs on a knife-edge. For me, all of the issues that are represented in the hospitality industry; long hours, mental health issues, not being able to drive a career forward, all stem from a simple problem – razor-thin margins. You put business owners under pressure with high rents and high VAT, then they look inside their business and think- where can we squeeze it? Other countries have given the hospitality industry a VAT holiday, if our government was willing to help us out in that way it would make a big difference. The hospitality industry is an elastic band that’s stretched to its limit. Something like covid-19 comes along and it just snaps. You saw that with companies doing mass redundancies days, hours, after Boris Johnson’s announcement in March. We didn’t do that. and we have a real comradeship in the business because of it.

What permanent changes could we see in the industry moving forward?

We are going to see more al fresco eating and we are going to see people using spaces they didn’t know they could use before. People are also going to be rethinking how many staff they need if they like using QR codes for ordering.

We’ve also seen the issues with big chains of restaurants. They were the ones making big cuts early on. The smaller ones with some heart behind them, where a couple of people have spent ten years or so building up one venue don’t want to give up so easily. Chains with sixty or so restaurants are less sentimental about it. Business needs to be sentimental at the moment.

What can customers do to help support the industry?

It is important at this stage to be understanding of the costs involved. Understand the value of dining. People want to go out in London, and they want to pay £35 for three courses in a Michelin star restaurant. They want bubbly involved, they want to book it through a booking app that takes a big cut and they want all waiters to be paid fairly. They want the best, but they want to pay £30 for it. It’s crazy really. At L’Enclume we deliver an experience and that demands a high price.

People used to want more for less but it’s the other way around now. I keep telling my staff we have to do more with less, we need to be clever but not in any way reduce our standards. It’s not about a COVID tax, the issues were already there. And what restaurants need to do is to not make apologies for their product based on COVID, not do things substandard because of COVID, be creative and find ways to deliver the product.

We are set to be busier in the coming months than this time last year. I’m 5-10% up on L’Enclume for July-August and 80% up on Rogan and Co. for August, and we were already busy last year. The spirits are high, the team are great, we are ready to go and can’t wait to look after guests.