[My Weekender] Pascal Ballot

Pascal Ballot is a shameless oenophile and the manager of House of Wine, the new wine bar at Three on the Bund.

It's Friday. It's amazingly sunny outside and I already know it’s gonna be one of those weekends where I’d rather hang out in the sticks with my friends in Zhujiajiao. But that is simply not going to happen. This will be the second weekend since my new bar HOW opened, so I’m already pretty sure I’ll be spending most of my time in or around Three on The Bund. I’ll either be working in the bar and pouring wine for guests or working at the bar poring over paperwork for La Vinoteque, the company I’ve started with my colleague Philippe.

Saturday noon: chances are Philippe will bang on my door, shouting, trying to extract me from the psychedelic dreams I tend to have after my slightly boozy Friday nights. The best motivation to rise out of bed is to think about the eggs Benedict at the Jean Georges brunch. I’m already salivating. I grab a quick, super hot shower, find where my clean shirts are, dart to the balcony to check the weather, grab the appropriate jacket and hit the street to hail a cab. I’ve not even been awake for 30 minutes and I’m at the bar in Nougatine tucking into breakfast.

Three coffees later, I head to the seventh floor, have one more quick espresso at New Heights and then get HOW ready for opening. Doors open at 4pm, our staff is now used to opening, so Philippe and I will have the rest of the afternoon to do what we really want to do: taste bio-dynamic wines. One of the key figures in this viticultural movement just so happens to be in town and is hosting a dinner next door at the Waldorf-Astoria and we’ve arranged a private tasting! We bring some of our own bio-dynamic product to see how it compares. I suppose we’ll finish around 6, just in time to come back to HOW and take care of our guests priming themselves up before dinner and dancing. The cool thing about opening a bar is the opportunity to satisfy my curiosity by meeting a fantastic range of people from diverse countries and backgrounds.

Around midnight, we’ll head to Bund 18 with Jacky, the manager of Jean Georges, to meet our friends from Bar Rouge. They’re celebrating their six-year anniversary and it would only be proper to pop a couple of bottles of Champagne to salute their success. Later in the evening, I might slip out and drop by Shelter or Dada, to finish off the evening with a more underground vibe. Hopefully, I’ll be home by 6am for some much-needed rest. Philippe and I will be running the bar and we may get a pre-dinner rush. If the place is not too busy in the evening, we’ll close a bit earlier then planned and go see our friend Brad at Goga our favorite table in Shanghai. If we are busy, we’ll just have dinner at work, maybe the 1kg beef rib we just serving. I’ll wrap the evening up with som drinks at Anar for John’s Jam Cession.

I guess this is another weekend where I won’t find the time to pickup my suits and buy shirts that I’m starting to run out of. And come Monday, I know I'll think to myself “I should have slept a bit more this weekend!”