As Tatler Dining’s Sustainability Champion for 2023, Ashley Salmon has left an indelible mark on on Roganic, the forward-thinking restaurant founded by Simon Rogan. We get to know Salmon—and his humble beginnings—a bit better after his win
Sustainability has a new look, and it can be found at the apogee of modern British restaurant Roganic’s tasting menu, in the form of a perfect slice of local duck breast from the Hop Wo Ho poultry farm, aged in-house for 14 days and glazed in local hundred-flower honey with skin so crispy and glistening as to defy conventional wisdom.
The duck wings, necks and carcasses are transformed into a terrine to accompany the breast, as well as cooked into a rich duck sauce. Smoked beetroot trimmings, aromatic herbs and elderflower vinegar add the finishing touches to a dish that is British upon first glance, but fully local in composition—and wholly, lip-smackingly delicious to boot.
The duck, like the restaurant it is served in, is a medley of disparate parts that, through some act of culinary alchemy and a liberal dash of imagination, becomes a greater sum altogether. “You've got to respect the produce,” says Roganic’s 32-year-old head chef Ashley Salmon, on the secret to conceptualising this signature poultry dish. “Without trying to sound corny, I’m a big believer that you’ve got to put love into the food. You’ve got to do it with love and with passion, and then that really speaks volumes on the plate.”
Arriving in Hong Kong at the end of 2018 to open two of acclaimed British chef Simon Rogan’s signature concepts—Roganic, and restaurant-within-a-restaurant Aulis—Salmon has been a fixture at the Causeway Bay venue throughout some of the toughest years for F&B in recent memory, while also becoming the driving force behind Roganic’s sustainability credentials locally.
Yet upon first glance, Salmon—who was named Tatler Dining’s Sustainability Champion for 2023—doesn’t exactly strike me as a yelling-from-the-treetops eco-warrior type. He’s got a taciturn expression and a nose that wouldn’t look out of place on a Roman bust, but as soon as he starts speaking in his northern English twang, it’s apparent that he’s just another bloke who’s as comfortable digging into a plate of bangers and mash at the local pub as he is debating the relationship between gut health and soil management practices.
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Raised in Warrington, England—“a normal sort of working-class northern town” between Liverpool and Manchester that he calls “no man’s land”—Salmon entered the professional kitchen on weekends as a pot-washer at the age of 14 to do his part in a single-parent household, while his mother worked as a waitress.
“I think it's a bit of a cliché, but as soon as I got into the kitchen environment, the fast pace of it all, the sort of discipline, the high energy, the banter… having all these things was attractive to me because I wasn’t a school person at all.
“I was never a naughty kid. I had concentration issues but in the kitchen I found something practical that I was good at, which I think that's something that needs to be done more at schools, you know?”
After finishing school, he dove straight into full-time cooking, first at an independent family-run French brasserie called La Boheme in nearby Lymm, then at Manchester restaurant Isinglass, where the menus revolved around seasonal and foraged produce. Stints followed at the two-Michelin-starred Marcus Wareing at London’s The Berkeley; and Aiden Byrne’s three AA Rosette-awarded Church Green back in Lymm.
In the kitchen of Manchester House, another Aiden Byrne restaurant, Salmon crossed paths with Simon Rogan’s son, Craig, through whom he snagged the opportunity to stay several days at Rogan’s claim to fame, the three-Michelin-starred L’Enclume. Together with its on-site farm, L’Enclume sprawls over 12 acres at the village of Cartmel in the Lake District, and is today recognised as a leader in sustainable fine dining as well as a lynchpin in the culinary boom times that Cumbria is currently witnessing—the English county boasts a Michelin star for every 48,000 inhabitants, compared to London’s 98,000.
“I don’t wanna say I fell in love with it, but I felt like it was a place I wanted to be when I work, and it’s the food that I wanted to cook,” Salmon recalls of L’Enclume, which recently celebrated its 20th anniversary. “From there, it really ignited my passion for what we do now.”
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