When a head chef moves to a new job, they will typically bring their own knives, perhaps a few personal gadgets and some recipes. They rarely come armed with a couple of kilos of pinecones.
Mark McCabe had taken the time to forage for them for his old restaurant in Bristol. When it closed, he wasn’t about to leave them behind. “Some ingredients are too precious,” he says.
The mini cones are a fundamental ingredient in his beetroot dessert, cooked down in sugar syrup. “I had been playing with the dish for a little while and did a take on it for a competition last year. I love desserts. Part of cooking is finding interesting things to do with largely uninteresting produce. You can do the blackening process with anything that has a lot of sugar in it and the beetroot takes on a tobacco-type depth.
“The pinecone idea comes from Eastern Europe. They are a real labour of love. I am really happy with the combinations in that dish.”
It may have been the influence of L’Enclume when he completed a stage there a couple of years ago or simply that he has the right ethos, but Mark embodies the ‘Rogan’ demeanour. Humble, relaxed, smart, and driven in the pursuit of excellence, qualities that run through every member of the group.
Paul Burgalières, executive chef of the three Michelin star L’Enclume, clearly saw it in him too, so when an opportunity came up and Mark was available, he swooped in to bring him back to Cumbria.
Mark is proof that you can come to a new profession quite late and still, well, make your mark. Now 37, he is originally from Aberdeen and studied English and Music at university. His dream career was to be a musician and he spent most of his mid-20s touring and recording “miserable singer-songwriter stuff”, earning some, but not enough, to make it his living.
In between he worked in hospitality, split between the front and back of house.
Some of Mark’s friends own Wolf House Café, in Silverdale, and when they expanded into additional premises Mark joined them. He learned to cook and stayed for two years.
His next stop was Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s River Cottage, in Dorset. “I had always watched it on TV and loved how excited Hugh got about growing his own veg and foraging. I took myself down there to do one of their cookery courses and gave them my CV while I was there. From a cooking point of view, there wasn’t much on it, but my overall hospitality background was reasonably strong.
“After I’d done the course, I stayed on for an extra day to help out in the kitchen. If not technically skilled, they could see I would work hard.” He was offered a job and stayed for the next two and a half years.
“It was a really good place to learn because they do everything from scratch. I would be butchering a cow one day and making a wedding cake the next. It’s where most of my education in the basics came from and it was a really nice place to spend a couple of years.”
In between the café in Silverdale and River Cottage, he also worked for a brief spell at The Ethicurean, in Bristol.
“I had their cookbook and was looking to work somewhere with a garden, which they had. I went there for four months while there were no vacancies at the Cottage. A few years later, the owners of The Ethicurean, Matthew and Ian, were looking for a head chef. I already knew them and knew we worked well together, so I moved to Bristol in 2019.”
Mark became a co-owner and the award-winning restaurant renowned for its sustainable practices continued for a further four years, gaining a Michelin Green Star in 2022. Last autumn he and co-owner and restaurant founder Matthew Pennington decided to close it.
“After we’d announced we were closing we decided to go out with a bang with a series of guest chef collaborations. I asked Paul if he would come and do a dinner with us. I wasn’t expecting him to, but he said yes and came down.
“I’m very glad we had that opportunity to end it properly, to pay our suppliers and staff and do all the important things that sadly some businesses don’t get the chance to do.”
After that Mark was ready for a break but still had plenty of ambition. “Because I started cooking quite late, I skipped a lot of the stages in the middle, which has its pros and cons. It was in my mind that I needed to do a long stage and I loved Simon’s [Rogan] ethos. If there was one restaurant group in the country I would want to work with it was this one, even as a commis chef.”
Then the call came from Paul inviting him to Cumbria to take a look at Henrock.
“It took a couple of days to pick my jaw off the floor, it was such an opportunity to be approached like that. I felt very, very fortunate. I came up, had dinner, and fell in love with the place.”
He continues: “It’s the perfect balance for me, having some of the autonomy I had in my own business, but also with incredible support, guidance, and expertise behind me, that allows me to keep on learning. It removes some of the stress and means I can focus on food.
“I feel very honoured to be here, it’s a great challenge and amazing to be part of the group.”
Developing the menu has been a joint effort between Mark and Paul. There were certain parameters to adhere to: reflecting Simon’s travels and the international expansion of his restaurants, as well as using hero ingredients grown at the group’s Our Farm, near Cartmel.
“From the start, it was an open dialogue. I have certain things I like to cook and it’s all up for debate, but we definitely want to have the Asian feel while still using super local and very sustainable ingredients as Simon’s ethos dictates. It’s marrying those two worlds together."
“I love being handed a list of things that are being grown at Our Farm; it was very much what we did at The Ethicurean, which had a beautiful Victorian walled garden.
“The team at Our Farm grow specific things for each restaurant and for Henrock, we have chillies, pepper trees, mustard leaves, big Asian flavours that aren’t appropriate for L’Enclume.
“At the Ethicurean it was always a bit of give and take with the gardener, so having the integration with Our Farm where everything is grown with the restaurants in mind is amazing. If I want something harvesting at a certain size that’s absolutely fine.
“We’re also thinking, can we make our own soy and miso and grow things at the farm that are more exotic? How can we take the premise of flavours and make something ourselves that is very Asian in heritage but make it with a Cumbrian twist, that’s really exciting. It’s going to be incremental this year before we think about how we can expand next year.”
After starting in March, he spent six weeks developing his first Henrock tasting menu. “It’s a tremendous amount of work to create eight dishes while still learning a kitchen, and I was very lucky to have a long crossover with the previous head chef Cillian Hennessy.
“I worked with Paul on the menu until we both felt the dishes were ready and we could present the whole menu to Simon. I was confident in the sense I would never have served him something that wasn't the best I believed it could be, but I had no idea how he would react to it, it was horrendous. The man has eight Michelin stars to his name and it’s a daunting thing to do but he was terrific.
“I have been very influenced by Simon over the years and there wasn't a huge amount of adapting from my style to slot in. The menu largely got through with his blessing with only a couple of tweaks. It was a big moment.
“My food must have a reason to be on the menu, it’s more than just taste. I like to be able to say, ‘we forage this over there’ or ‘this ingredient is at its peak’ or ‘the farm has lots of this, so we have come up with this really great dish’.
“I like to give people a little snapshot of where they are. I don't want people to come here and have a meal they could have in any other fine dining restaurant. I want it to be a taste of here; Simon's other restaurants do that incredibly well.
“For me, it's always about telling the story with individual ingredients that might not at first glance seem like the most exciting thing in the world but with the right care and attention can be really delicious.”
He has gelled instantly with Gerald, head chef at Linthwaite House, with whom he shares the kitchen. “He is a great guy and if there is time to help him and he’s really busy I will. I’m always stealing his potatoes, so it’s a quid pro quo.”
He is also complimentary about the existing Henrock team.
“The team usually starts work at around 12 and we have a briefing about the night ahead. Then it's a case of getting our heads down and working hard towards a great dinner service. I like my team to feel comfortable and able to have a bit of fun in the kitchen."
“Everyone in the group wants Henrock to be the best it can be. It would be really nice if a star came along with that. Personally, I am very ambitious, it's definitely something I would like to tick off and achieve on a personal level.
“There is so much potential here. The kitchen is enormous, and the hotel and the dining room are magnificent, so between that and the incredibly talented teams we have, I think that really sets us apart. It's got all the building blocks to be something really special.”
