Weiss wine wisdom

After ten years as a sommelier in some of London’s top Mayfair eateries, Richard Weiss has devised a pretty clear blueprint of how a restaurant should be run.

With Brasserie St Jacques, a new project on St James’ Street he co-owns with Laurence Glayzer and acclaimed restaurateur Claudio Pulze, Weiss is busy putting all this into practice.

You wonder how he finds the time. In addition to his front of house presence here, Weiss lends his charismatic personality to the bright lights of broadcasting, with appearances on Market Kitchen and even The Paul O’Grady Show, as well as throwing himself into a number of heavyweight consultancy projects, both in the UK and Dubai.

While it is usually the chefs who take the limelight, Weiss maintains: “The sommelier has to be the aristocrat of the team”, explaining: “He needs to know how the food is produced in the kitchen, but is involved in the restaurant as well as the cellar. He has the first and the last touch, from apéritif to digestif.”

As the decision to open a relaxed brasserie in an area dominated by high-end restaurants might suggest, Weiss’ eminently sociable character has a important influence on the style of restaurant he has chosen to run.

No stranger to the world of fine-dining, with an international CV which includes Michelin-starred restaurants Chez Bruneau and The Greenhouse, as well as Brown’s Hotel, Weiss has seen for himself the added value a good atmosphere can bring to impeccable food.

“Stiffness doesn’t bring class or flare”, he explains, “I adapt myself to my customers.” His other mantra is “Don’t screw the customers: I always go lower than the price they’ve fixed.” Added to this, Weiss notes: “I never tell them what they’re drinking; I always let them taste blind and then ask if they like it.

“People confuse sweetness and bouquet or aromas; a good Gewürtztraminer can be very dry, but very floral. If you let the customers speak first, you can then guide them more easily. It’s the duty of the sommelier to let the customer discover new things.”

Unsurprisingly, Weiss’ 240 bin list has a patriotic French weighting of about 60%. The other 40% is made up of a global selection of wines, which Weiss believes “are the most representative of how wine from that region should be.”

He cites Catena from Argentina and the Ribera del Duero’s Vega Sicila as prime examples of this approach, but also acknowledges that a good number of the wines on his list, both French and further afield, are the result of the longstanding friendships he has built with so many producers during his career.

The name Brasserie St Jacques has also inspired a new section about to be built into the wine list, which will feature wines from key winegrowing regions along the pilgims’ route to Santiago de Compostela.

Weiss’ consultancy roles give him cause to be confident about the health of the top end of the UK on-trade scene. He reveals he is currently working on three “major” projects, of which two are London-based. For the moment however, apart from mentioning that one is worth £5 million, Weiss is giving nothing away.

Speaking more generally however, he says: “I try to be optimistic and say that most of this crisis is over. Anyway, 2012 will be very exciting with the Olympic Games and we have to be ready for that. There will be a lot of new openings in London. When the recession came, most of my projects just went on standby, we didn’t lose any money.”

Meanwhile, his consultancy responsibilities for no fewer than five different hotels in Dubai have given Weiss different challenges to those he faces in the UK. “There are only two importers in Dubai,” he explains, “so I try to open their minds a little more. The rich get bored very quickly and they can’t drink Lafite everyday.”

Given all these commitments, it’s a wonder that Weiss has found time to be a more or less permanent front of house presence at Brasserie St Jacques since it opened in June. For all his fingers in various pies, it’s evident that Weiss is in his most natural element when talking to customers.

With an unnerving degree of energy for a man who can’t have had a day off, never mind a full night’s sleep for months, he closes with an admirable but all too rarely found sentiment from a member of the restaurant fraternity: “My aim here is very selfish: to enjoy myself. That’s the basis of the job and a lot of people forget that.”

Gabriel Savage, 10.11.09