Cellar Society by the Numbers

When Bertie throws a party, the stats are as punchy as the canapes. From one-off tasting menus to star-studded fashion week dance floors in his five fluent tongues, here’s his ledger of indulgence.

On average, how many events do you execute each fashion week?

How long is a piece of string? In a four-day window we’ve done 30-35. This year: 24 fashion-week-moments - store openings, beauty pop-ups, the works.

Name the most exceptional bottle ever served – vintage and story, please.

We began life as wine-tasting obsessives—City-bank dinners when budgets were generous. The single greatest pour? Last November we opened a Balthazar of 2010 Barolo from Roberto Voerzio—twelve litres, the equivalent of 16 bottles, poured into 120 glasses.

For age, a 2019 dinner saw 12 first and second growth Bordeaux reds, all in Imperial format: Château Léoville Las Cases 1982, Château Trottanoy 1985, Château Mouton Rothschild 1986, Château Montrose 2002, Château Angélus 1994. It was one of the rarest Bordeaux line-ups London has seen in decades, with several 100-point bottles. An animated evening, and some sore heads the next morning.

Since pivoting from finance into fashion events, our palate has stayed exacting. Cellar Society is now shorthand for silver-platter standards—whatever the brief.

Furthest you’ve travelled for a single event—or ingredient?

California for a celebrity wedding in Ojai (Oct ’23). We’ve hopscotched from Boston to Saudi.

Seasonality is our compass: Alba white truffle one month; British asparagus the next. If TikTok wants coconut-water matcha lattes in twelve permutations, we’ll make twelve—and make them content worthy.

Your largest guest list to date – and how many plates?

1,800 guests; 6,000 canapés; 3,600 small plates; 70 chefs; 80 hosts; 80 waiting staff; 36 mixologists; 24 managers — all for the Dior Men’s Show and after-party at Olympia, December 2021.

Fastest concept-to-canapé…and the wildest setting you’ve ever pulled it off in?

People call at 10 a.m. asking for dinner for 100 by 8 p.m.—we get pitched the impossible weekly. Once, a decade ago, we said yes to a three-day Rothschild affair in Montenegro—outside the EU then, and with no real airport. We flew to a neighbouring country, then drove four days across mountains to source every ingredient locally. Where the roads ended, we improvised: some produce had to be rushed in, with paperwork catching up at 4 a.m. via a private yacht.

Thirty chefs and eighty staff flew in. The “cold rooms” promised? One fridge the size of two phone boxes, no ice. I took €10,000 in cash, shut down the biggest fishmonger in town and ran 24/7 ops from his walk-ins.

A fisherman landed us a 100-kilo tuna; we flew a sushi master from London to carve it live on ice blocks. By the time our last lorry left for the UK, I stumbled to a bar and nearly forgot my wife had flown in to meet me.

Famous last words?

What goes to lunch stays at lunch.

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