Chef Daniel Rogan today reopens his ambitious Southampton restaurant AO by Daniel Rogan, at a new address following a two-year hiatus.
Daniel, the son of L’Enclume’s all-conquering founder Simon Rogan, originally launched AO in 2022 but it closed a year later. He designed the interior of the new 26-cover venue in Oxford Street himself, fulfilling his ambition to run a top-class restaurant in his and his father’s home town.
Daniel says: “AO has always been a very personal project for me. It carries the names of my children, and represents a deep connection to where I’m from.
“This move allows us to grow into a space that reflects who we are today, still small and focused, with even more intent behind the details.”
Daniel’s impressive CV includes stints in his father’s kitchens at both L’Enclume and Rogan & Co in the Lake District. He has also worked in London, under Marcus Wareing at the Berkeley and at Restaurant Gordon Ramsay in Royal Hospital Road, Chelsea.
AO serves 7 and 10-course tasting menus at £95 per person and £125 per person, and a 3-course lunch for £55. Dishes include dry-aged loin of beef with coal oil, black garlic and tarragon; charred Jerusalem artichoke with herb verde cream; salt-baked celeriac with smoked eel, pancetta and apple jam; and Cornish cod with burnt leek, mussel butter and vanilla.
Local produce on the menu includes chalk-stream trout caught in Hampshire’s famous fishing rivers, the Test and the Itchen.
