A Drink With… James Shearer, Oblix

After 10 years with high-end restaurant Roka and sister venue Zuma, group bar manager James Shearer is finally set to open Oblix at The Shard in London. Despite a slew of international sites due to open soon, he tells Becky Paskin why this one is special.

James Shearer, group bar manager for Zuma, Roka and now Oblix, also has a passion for photography

James drinks are on us, what will you have?
Always a rum and coke. I can drink it on and on and never get a hangover. I grew up drinking it as a kid in Uruguay (although I’m originally from Nicaragua).  One thing I can’t drink is tomato juice; I’m allergic to tomatoes.

You’ve been opening restaurants with the group for 10 years, but The Lounge at Oblix is special isn’t it?
Yes, it’s the first time we’ve departed from the Roka and Zuma concepts and we’re super excited about it because it’s Rainer Becker, the owner’s, baby. It’s familiar territory but also exciting and new because we are playing about with ingredients we wouldn’t be able to use at Zuma which is Japanese focused.

So what is the focus at The Lounge at Oblix?
The menu is themed on New York and New Orleans with a lot of simple drinks reinvented a little bit. For instance we have the Lazy Lady which is a camomile-infused Pisco with gin which is a twist on a White Lady. We emphasise a lot on Manhattans as well. We’ve got a formula which uses Zacapa rum instead of rye whiskey with a fig liqueur and chocolate bitters, which is aged together for two years. We have an aged cocktail library as a centrepiece of the bar. The menu itself is divided into spirit categories: Aperitifs, Botanicals (gin), Pure Spirit (vodka), Agaves (Tequila), Sugar Cane (rum), American (Sazerac, Manhattan, Iced Tea etc) Effervescent (sparkling), and my favourite, the Sour. Laying a menu out like this is quick and easy for the consumer to read. Bars do loads of cocktails and they call them names and halfway through the inscription you realise what spirit it is. We make it simple for them.

How will you make The Lounge as much of a destination as the restaurant?
There’s going to be live entertainment and a house band playing every night and certain stars will be playing. Then we’ve also got the drinks, the service and the great views all making it a destination place. We want to make the service a focal point of The Lounge.

How do you intend to make the service a main attraction?
One of the things I like about New York is the service you get there – a cheeky, sarcastic professional calm attitude and it’s all about the customer, the drink comes second. We’ve got really cool simple drinks but we want to focus this time on the experience for the customer. You go to some famous bars and it’s almost like you going to a model agency; you have to stare at the bartender/ model in order to get a drink. We don’t want that. When the customer comes into the lounge, we want to emphasise in our service that we think they are special and comfortable. We ask our bartenders to do their research on current affairs, and make sure they know what is going on around the world and to be able to engage people in a professional way.

You must have a stellar bar team?
The Lounge will have a bar team of 12, headed by Troy Dalton who ran all the bars for the London 2012 Olympic Games, and Wendy from The Connaught who’s extremely creative. We also have a guy called Ross Nolan from the north who’s a stand-up comedian. When I was interviewing him and he mentioned that to me he was already hired in my mind.

The group has some ambitious expansion plans and as head of bars you must get to travel a lot?
We are preparing for Zuma Abu Dhabi and New York next year, plus one more Roka in London toward the end of the year, so I have my hands full. We used to open one site a year now it’s four or five. The pressure’s on. Every year my position expands and it gets more challenging, which only makes it all more interesting.

How do you tailor the concepts to new markets? Amsterdam is very different to Abu Dhabi.
The first thing I normally do in a new market is check out the supermarkets first – the expensive supermarkets, the cheaper ones and the local market too to see what’s out there and available, then we research the top bars and what they’ve done and where they get their stuff from. Then we try to replicate a Zuma or Roka as much as we can in that area. Sometimes contacts we have can make it easier obtaining certain items, but the only one we’ve struggled with is Istanbul, because they are so strict about what goes in and out of the country. As far as everywhere else our menu is adaptable and we use fresh fruit and ingredients which isn’t complicated. We thought rhubarb would be difficult to get in other parts of the world, but it turns out it wasn’t.

How does London’s cocktail scene compare to the rest of the world?
The London cocktail scene is exploding. I’ve worked behind the bar for 12 years and the one thing I’ve learned is to keep it simple, try to be specific to one certain trend like Prohibition, bootlegging, making your own spirits or molecular drinks. But now with so much media attention and the internet, everybody is experimenting with different techniques. Another thing that’s really happened over the last five years is bartenders have teamed up with kitchens on different ways of creating ingredients you can’t necessarily get from suppliers.

What really aggravates you about the industry?
I hate the term mixologist. Bartenders are bartenders in my eyes. We get so many CVs from people claiming to be this or that; I’m not a big fan of the word at all. It means you’re claiming to be something more than you are. I’d maybe consider someone like Tony Conigliaro a mixologist though. The other thing that frustrates me is when you go to bars and they add 5,000 ingredients and a rainforest of a garnish on top of their drinks. Keep it simple guys.

It’s been over a year since you signed a loyalty deal to serve Diageo’s Reserve Brands in your bars. Do you ever feel restricted by deals like that?
Sometimes. We teamed up with Diageo simply because of the Reserve Brands, which are actually the top sellers in our outlets. So it made sense after 10 years to do a loyalty deal in London and we’re slowly doing a global deal as well. We made the deal with the understanding that we don’t have a noose on our neck as to what we can and can’t do. Diageo have been very supportive and never interfered in Zuma especially with the Japanese ingredients we use there. We promised volume and exposure and it’s worked out fine so far. The only problem with Diageo is they don’t have a Cognac or big brand Rye, but it’s fine, we just use other brands.

The Lounge at Oblix will open at The Shard on 7 May.