The Modern Menu: Jermaine Gallacher, Coco Bayley and Lant Street Wine’s Ben Wilcock on drinking, hosting and having fun
Our food series
takes you into some of the restaurants we admire for advice from chefs about cooking
and eating at home, as well as their seasonal recipes geared towards the
domestic kitchen – choose from Margot Henderson’s barbecued lamb, James Lowe’s whole-roast turbot or Seppe Nobels’ chicory tarte tatin.
But there’s more to a successful dinner – or lunch, or brunch, even – than what you put on the table. Ingredients for a good time extend to what you choose to fill your guests’ glasses with, your ability to put people at ease and, above all, making sure people have fun. For advice on that matter, we headed to our staff watering hole, Lant Street Wine, a short stroll from our offices in Southwark, where designer and furniture dealer Jermaine Gallacher has teamed up with friend and restaurant consultant Coco Bayley to open a bar in a disused room at Ben Wilcock’s wine shop and warehouse, housed in a 19th-century cork factory.
How did Lant Street come about?
Coco: “Lant Street is a more grown-up, refined version of the sort of parties me and Jermaine did when we were younger. We worked on Peckham Hotel with Frank Boxer, Hannah Barry and Practice Architecture, among others. We basically just knocked through two terrace houses, set up a bar and served pierogi dumplings.
“It was really
low-fi, very punky and DIY. It was a space that wasn’t being used for anything but
had the potential to be made into something beautiful. The architects took care
of that, Hannah Barry did the programming and Jermaine, Frank and I made sure
everyone had a good time. So, really not far off what we’ve been doing here.”
Ben: “I bought Lant Street Wine with my dad in 2015 and took over the business. I had countless people come in and tell me what I could do with the empty room in the warehouse and how we could make some money. I don’t have a problem with commercialism, but making a quick buck was all that seemed to matter to these people.
“Jermaine had
been buying wine from me for the last decade and when he suggested we could do
something, it felt like a good fit. He introduced me to Coco, and the first thing
she said to me was, ‘We don’t want it to be Instagrammable,’ and I was like,
‘Yes!”
Coco: “Although, obviously, it is!”
Why is it important to you to have a beautiful, well-designed space?
Jermaine: “When you spend your life looking for things and at things so intensely you begin to notice everything, good and bad. It’s actually exhausting, which is why having things that I believe to be beautiful around me is really important. I truly envy people that don’t notice anything and are not aware of their surroundings – it must be so peaceful. The only time I am really at peace is when I am home!
“Although this
space, which doubles as my showroom, comes close too. It’s where I can sell to
clients and bring people in; I’m starting to get commissions for projects
myself too and I’m also trying to nurture young designers so having this space
to showcase their work is great.”
Coco: “Even though food and drink is what I
care most about I don’t ever want to eat or drink somewhere that I think is
boring or drab. It doesn’t have to be beautiful in the conventional sense, but
I have to be able to sit down and concentrate on who I’m talking to. I’m not
going to have a glass of red wine by a set of traffic lights.
“I see people
in London sometimes having a pint while sort of teetering on the edge of
crossing or on the curb and ask myself what’s the fun of having a potentially
delicious drink in that environment? So yeah, I care about the aesthetic of a
place, and the atmosphere.
“But, at the same time, we haven’t overengineered this place. What we want is for people to be able to sit down, have a glass of wine and just talk about the world. And I think that is an antidote to what else is out there. As much as I love London restaurants and people in them, there aren’t that many places you can come for a glass of wine and a salty snack in a beautiful space for £4.50.”
Jermaine, there is a sense of fun and irreverence that runs through your work and the bar – where does that come from?
Jermaine: “I think fun is massively underrated, especially in design. For me things have to have wit and charm – I think those two qualities are what I admire most in people, so it’s only natural I should admire the same qualities in a side table.
“Lant Street
has bags of wit, charm and fun – it’s the antidote to the shit bar and the
boring shop that no one ever goes to. Getting drunk on great wine whilst
sitting on a fabulous chair, and then sliding off under a one-of-a-kind
postmodernist table: is there any more fun to be had than that?”
There’s something domestic and homey about the bar, was that intentional?
Coco: “In many ways, Lant Street is a home situation, taken into a commercial space. We have three drinks – white, red and rose – most nights, sometimes champagne or gin and tonic, and we serve crisps and olives, sometimes buttered salami rolls. It’s not complicated.”
Jermaine: “People come in and say it’s like
stepping into someone’s home. Just the nature of the room fees homely, even
without my furniture. When I first saw it and looked through, I thought it was someone’s
sitting room. It was just as beautiful then as it is now, but now you’re able
to be in it.”
Coco: “I think it’s fun to be able to bring that home feeling to a bar. I love, love hosting at home. Nothing makes me happier than having people over, me pouring them wine and cooking something normal, but well. I love it.”
What makes a good host at home?
Coco: “Good hosting, I think, is about simplicity. If people come over for dinner, why would you ever try a recipe that you’ve never tried? It’s just going to make you anxious, annoyed and nervous.”
Jermaine: “Good wine helps as well! We have the
best wine in London here, pretty much.”
Ben, what kind of wines do you sell here?
Ben: “We deal with small, family-run entities, mostly. Just farmers, trying to make a living by producing great wines. I quite like that part of the industry. I can tell you the first names of the people who made the wine in most cases because I grew up visiting them.”
What advice do you have to people buying wine?
Ben:“It’s either white, it’s red or it’s got bubbles and you like it or you don’t. When people come in, I ask how much they want to spend and we go from there, rather than pontificating for ages.
“If people are
walking into a wine shop I think, on the whole, they’re coming in because
they’ve got an idea of what they’re doing that evening. I might be eating a meal,
or it might be going to see some friends, but there are very few people who
walk into a wine shop to buy a bottle of wine to take home and just glug. So, it’s
helpful to know if there’s a style of wine they enjoy, or grapes they enjoy,
along with what colour.”
How should people enjoy a good bottle of wine?
Ben: “I don’t think there are hard and fast rules. Yes, temperature maybe – you don’t want to drink a nice bottle of Claret that’s just come out of the fridge. But I think it’s such a subjective thing. I quite enjoy Sauvignon as a grape, especially Pouilly-Fumés and Sanceres – I don’t know why, I just enjoy them.
“So, I think you should do what you want and enjoy. And that’s why I say to people, ‘What do you actually like?’ Also, I’ve never sat down at a meal and not enjoyed a glass of wine, so don’t worry about the traditional wine and food pairings too much. “Take champagne. It’s got high acidity so when people ask, ‘What should I eat with champagne?’, in my opinion, fish and chips with champagne is the best thing on the planet. All that fat, greasy, oily food and then a crisp champagne to just cut through it: it’s beautiful. Or a fry up. A big English fry up needs champagne!”
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