Cellar Society began life in 1999, set up by de Rougemont and his wife, Andie, around their kitchen table, after their plans to launch a private members club in Mayfair collapsed when they were served a compulsory purchase order, leaving them without premises or the means to launch another club. They decided to host wine-tastings for banker friends in the City, serving morsels of cheese on bread, and they slowly evolved into fashion’s very own catering company. The full client list reads like a route map of Bond Street: Prada, Hermès, Boucheron, Hilfiger, De Beers, Asprey, Dior, Jimmy Choo, Lanvin, Christian Louboutin, Marni, Dolce & Gabbana, Versace, the entire LVMH group and so on.
From a different kitchen table, in his newly refurbished home in north London, de Rougemont, now 45, puts his success down to making it up as he goes along. 'No one who is a founding member [de Rougemont, his wife and her mother] has ever worked in a restaurant, even a pub probably, or knows anything about commercial food production. We were free to do it our way, which is much more as a mobile restaurant than a caterer.’
Cellar Society caters at 400 events per year, in Britain or abroad if desired, from dinners for 12 to three-day events for 300. Fashion and luxury brands make up two thirds of Cellar Society’s diary; the remainder is taken up by private clients. Budgets range from £1,500 to a million or more, but most are between £20,000 and £100,000.
In all, there are nine full-time employees in the office, three more in the warehouse, and seven permanent chefs plus freelancers when necessary. De Rougemont is the managing and creative director, dealing with clients and overseeing the food alongside his mother-in-law and head chef, Carole Reynolds, 65. Andie, 43, was the chef but scaled back to have children, and is currently compiling a photographic database along with her father, Mike Reynolds, a 65-year-old filmmaker who also makes Cellar Society’s pasta. Andie’s younger sister Ella, 25, is the pastry chef. De Rougemont’s business partner, Adam Phelps, 41, joined in 2001.
Then there are the waiters, whom de Rougemont calls 'the nice boys’. There are 60 alarmingly good-looking boys on the books, mostly signed models or actors aged between 22 and 32. The Cellar Society template is approximately 6ft and lean with short, neat hair, piercings removed, no visible tattoos and always clean-shaven. Uniform options include the French Waiter (white shirt, black waistcoat, black tie and floor-length white apron), the All Blacks (black shirt, trousers, belt, tie optional) or the summer uniform (white shirt, chinos and Converses), but clients can design and supply uniforms themselves. For example, at the Acne fashion show, the designer Jonny Johansson kits them out differently each season.
The boss of the boys is Steph Mellor, the 25-year-old Australian staff coordinator-cum-nanny, councillor, stylist and ironing virtuoso. She runs a tight ship. 'I have to put up with a lot of chat, especially when there are a lot of them, but I’ve developed a thick skin,’ she says. 'When I started in September 2009 I used to blush at the drop of a hat. I’d wear thick foundation to cover it up, but being in this line of work has cured me of that.’
Mellor interviews every boy through the door, mostly recommended by friends already on the books. Vital characteristics include charm, good looks, keenness and an ability to talk to clients without appearing too cocky. Over-confident boys don’t make the cut. Mellor allocates her boys to clients according to the brief, organising castings for certain high-fashion events. Pay grades range from £18.50 to £60 an hour for a really top male model. There are a few girls on the books, but Mellor can’t offer them as many shifts because the demand isn’t there. As de Rougemont explains, 'Fashion likes pretty people,’ and fashion is made up of mainly women and gay men. In the banking world, female waitresses get more bookings.
Are the boys besieged with advances from clients and guests? 'Yes.’ Are they trained to decline politely? 'Yes. The official line is, and always will be, that if someone starts talking to one of our boys they have to be able to stop and chat for 30 seconds, even a minute if necessary, because we don’t want to be rude to people,’ de Rougemont says. 'But on the other hand, they’re not there to be chatted up or to give out their number. If I find out that has happened, said waiter doesn’t work with us again. It’s as simple as that.’ The reality is that some boys get up to 20 phone numbers stuffed in their pockets per night, not to mention indecent proposals, but they always report back to management. Tipping doesn’t happen unless a client gives envelopes to the event manager.
The food is a vital element in Cellar Society’s success. Ingredients are seasonal and local where possible: honey is from Regent’s Park or Kentish Town, pork is from just inside the M25, gin is from Highgate, vegetables are grown on smallholdings around Greater London. De Rougemont says fashion’s appetite has shifted in the past five years. 'Pretty much all of the fashion and luxury brands that we work with now want a very natural look to their food, nothing is over-styled. For example for Gucci we do a whole honey-roast ham that’s hand-carved on a stand, which was unthinkable in the days when Tom Ford was at the helm. He wanted very small, minimalist canapes, not a lot of food.’
There were simple fresh ham sandwiches with homemade piccalilli on Hoxton sourdough bread for the Topshop cafe during London Fashion Week; there was roast golden beetroot with Childwickbury goat’s cheese at the Vogue Festival cafe; and Jersey Royals with Ossetra caviar at the opening of Louis Vuitton’s Bond Street Maison. For a dinner Hermès chooses tarte Tatin with vanilla crème fraîche; Mario Testino always wants single-estate el Pedregal chocolate truffles; and Juicy Couture wants anything 'LA’, such as a carb-free burger wrapped in lettuce and a juice bar.
Ironically, Cellar Society doesn’t do much of a trade in wine. Fashion people like champagne, Pol Roger to be precise. So much so that Cellar Society is the biggest private buyer of Pol Roger in Britain – approximately 15,000 bottles a year. De Rougemont takes a hard line on cocktails. 'We don’t do silly, fruity cocktails because it’s pointless,’ he says. 'It’s a waste of fruit and it’s a waste of booze. We work with the best bartenders on the planet, such as Peter Durelli, who was head bartender at the American Bar in the Savoy for 40 years and is now in his seventies. We serve serious, classic cocktails, such as straight gin or vodka martinis or negronis.’
At Stella McCartney’s London Fashion Week dinner 90 staff served up damson sours made with Cellar Society’s home-infused damson vodka and a lemon drop to 175 guests including Anna Wintour, Rihanna, Kanye West and Kate Moss. The waiters were cast by McCartney’s team, and a two-hour rehearsal ensured choreographed perfection. Dinner was six courses in a speedy hour and a quarter: duck egg with Périgord black truffle, chestnut and Jerusalem artichoke velouté, beetroot and blood oranges, saffron risotto with aged Parmesan, cheese on toast with Périgord black truffle and finally blood orange and Campari sorbet.
Highlights this summer include a Cap Ferrat 'super-wedding’, parties for Tinie Tempah, Karl Lagerfeld and Damon Albarn , and the launch of a private members club during the London Olympics for one of the main sponsors (de Rougemont is sworn to secrecy). For a Dunhill party during London men’s Fashion Week Cellar Society took over the Coach & Horses pub in Soho, staffed it with beautiful bartenders and served ham-and-piccallili sandwiches and home-made pork scratchings. A pub quiz had Will Self as quizmaster. In contrast this autumn they are putting on Jemima Goldsmith’s Hallowe’en Ball at her new house in the country.
But Cellar Society will never cater a sit-down dinner for more than 500, and double-booking events is out of the question, so when Jade Jagger’s wedding came and they already had a booking, she got a no. When Katie Price and Peter Andre demanded a heart-shaped pink wedding cake with an arrow through it, they, too, got a no. 'I’ve been very clear right from the beginning how far I’m prepared to stray from our path. It’s served us pretty well so far,’ de Rougemont says.
Future plans include a pop-up game (as in pheasants) restaurant in October, and eventually a restaurant – with a few cookbooks in between. But despite the recent three-year high ('we are currently knocking on £4 million turnover’), de Rougemont says he will never expand beyond his limitations. 'I never want to turn over more than £5 million, because that is the point at which you fail to deliver quality at the highest level. I don’t want to be a multimillionaire off the back of this; I want to do this because I earn a living and I really love it.’
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