Why Mr Simon Rogan’s new venture Aulis isn’t like other restaurants.

Mr Simon Rogan’s new Aulis isn’t like other restaurants. It has eight seats, no menu and no traditional kitchen. There are no windows; neither any signage. You would mistake it for another nondescript Soho address, tucked away down a backstreet, unless you knew what you were looking for.

There is just one exposed concrete table in the middle of the room. On one side of the table are the diners’ chairs – brushed metal and exposed wood stools – and on the other, two hotplates, an oven and expanse of the brushed concrete for food preparation. Diners face their three chefs; chefs cook back at their diners. As in the House of Commons where MPs sit two swords and one inch apart, if both parties were to swipe a knife or fork across the table the two blades would kiss.

“I want to create an environment with no boundaries,” says Mr Rogan, who is most famous for his two-star Michelin restaurant L’Enclume in Cartmel. “I want an experience where guests can interact with chefs. Watch, learn and ask questions if they’d like. But above all that, I want people to experience this style of food and a different way of eating.”

The evening begins normally enough. A sommelier introduces himself and pours a glass of sparkling wine from Gusbourne, Kent, and explains a bit about the experience: “We’re going to look after you. I’ll pick the wine and the guys on the other side of the table will cook your food. All you’ve got to do is sit back and enjoy”.

It’s the kind of place you’d book with your partner, or someone with a serious interest in food. With bookings priced at £250 (inclusive of food and wine), it’s certainly towards the top end of the market, but he evening lasts in the region of four hours and comes as a cavalcade of experiences.

The snacks kick things off: raspberry, goats’ curd, rose; seaweed and caviar custard; carrot, sea buckthorn, crab; and potato and smoked yolk. They follow the current menu trend of saying very little in terms of ingredients and processes – a departure from the 1990s, and convoluted French-led descriptions – but this only works if the food speaks for itself.

As the snacks subside portions sizes grow. A beef tartare is followed by a fresh broth of mackerel, radish, watercress and apple. The combinations seem unfamiliar, but when they hit the palate they make sense. When the binary flavours align – sour, sweet, bitterness and salt – you wonder why you’ve never tried them together before.

“We’re treating Aulis as a development kitchen,” says Mr Rogan. “All the ideas that my chefs have will be tested right here. We’ll be looking for feedback from diners and their reaction will influence where we take the food. Many of the dishes will end up on the menu at the new Roganic, which opens in December in Marylebone.’

Some of the equipment the chefs are working with wouldn’t look out of place in a science lab. Pride of place at the back of the room sits a rotary evaporator. Six feet high and three feet wide, in its natural environment in chemistry department it is used to analyse blood. However, Mr Rogan puts it to work to create sauce. A puree is placed into a chronical flask, which is then dipped into 50ºC water and rotated extremely quickly. The essence evaporates and vapor is cooled and collected in another flask at the top of the machine. It sounds complicated, but the result is some of the purest flavour you’ll ever experience.

These sauces are applied to some of the dishes we try.

The assault on the senses continues. A celeriac baked in hay is removed from the oven and fills the room with a pine-like aroma. It’s cubed and then pan-roasted in butter on the hot plate with as much love as any high-grade piece of Japanese wagyu, before the rotary evaporated sauce is added on. It’s delicious. There are few chefs anywhere in the world who treat vegetables with such love and respect. It is precisely where Mr Rogan comes into his own.

If Mr Rogan’s goal was to create a restaurant like London hasn’t seen, he’s succeeded. It’s not the kind of place you’ll return to next month, or even perhaps next year, but it’s an experience with conversational currency for years to come.