Celebrity Life

Burgundy's legacy migrates to South Africa

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The Palm Beach real estate professional shares his must-haves

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From lesson plans to life choices, these six Palm Beach County educators take teaching to the next level

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If you think that balancing a full-fledged business and a passion for singing is a difficult job, then you need to meet Punjab-based Lakshay Kapoor, who has been managing his family business and has a passion for singing for years. For Lakshay, it’s been an exhausting journey, where he chose to drop out in the second […]

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With an estimated net worth of US$186.3 billion, chairman and CEO of the luxury goods conglomerate Louis Vuitton Moët Hennessy (LVMH) Bernard Arnault joined the centi-billionaires club in May 2021, according to Forbes. The French fashion mogul is one of the richest people in the world and a force to reckon with.

Bernard Arnault net worth & expensive collections -

Luxury purchases portfolio 

He started his journey to the top in the 1980s when he first ventured into fashion with US$15 million from his father’s construction business. He got the rest of US$65 million financed from Lazard to buy the then-parent company of Christian Dior – in 1985. 

Since then, Arnault has been acquiring luxury brands and earned nicknames like "wolf in the cashmere coat" in the French media. In 1987, the conglomerate LVMH came into existence with the merger of Moët & Chandon and Hennessy, the world’s largest champagne and cognac producers, respectively. 

Bernard Arnault then went on to conquer leading European luxury brands, including couture-brand Givenchy (1988), French perfume, makeup and skincare giant Guerlain (1994), French leather luxury goods brand Céline (1996), the Italian jewellery brand Bvlgari (2011), Paris-based couture house Christian Dior (2017), American luxury jewellery and accessory brand Tiffany & Co. (2020) and Italian luxury label Off-White (2021), bringing the total to 75 stellar brands.  

Apart from luxury brands, Bernard Arnault has taken the helm of other pursuits such as hotels, artwork, yachts and culture.

Superyachts

The luxury yacht named Symphony, owned by Arnault, is among the world’s top 100 superyachts and the largest Feadship. Symphony can accommodate 36 passengers and is the first Feadship to cross the 100-metre mark and measures 101.5 metres or about 333 feet. Designed by Tim Heywood Design, Symphony is an eco-friendly yacht featuring six decks, an aluminium structure, has a gross tonnage of near 3,000 GT and a helicopter pad.  

The interior of the yacht, by Zuretti Interior Design, exudes luxury with a jacuzzi, sauna, lounge and dining area to accommodate 20 people. One of the decks includes a private office and study, beach club, cinema, golf area and wellness centre.  

The French yacht enthusiast also owned Amadeus, a superyacht built in 1969, which was given a luxury makeover to host many prominent personalities such as former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair and renowned rockstar Bono. It was later sold in 2015.  

Wines and spirits

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LVMH’s 23 houses strive together to craft high-end cognacs, wines and champagnes around the world. The key brands include Moët & Chandon, Hennessy, Krug and Château d’Yquem. 

Private Island 

Bernard Arnault reportedly owns Indigo Island, a 135-acre private island located in the Bahamas that offers retreats for the affluent at a whopping price of approximately US$300,000 per week. 

Artwork 

Known for his collection of world-class artworks, the French entrepreneur’s extensive collection of contemporary artwork includes paintings by Picasso, Andy Warhol and Henry Moore. His proximity to art and culture can be established by the fact that LVMH has ventured into many artistic pursuits, including the inception of the idea of the Foundation Louis Vuitton in 2001— which opened for the public in 2014.  

According to Bloomberg, Arnault keeps the collection of most famous artists in his Paris house.  

Luxury hotels  

Cheval Blanc and Belmond Hotel are owned by LVMH, which offer extravagance like no other. Cheval Blanc is a luxury hotel with 72 rooms and suites. The hotel also features on-site LV and Dior boutiques for luxury shopping. LVMH has over 46 Belmond hotel properties across 24 countries and counting.  

Saint-Tropez mansion 

Arnault owns a massive chateau-style waterfront mansion in Saint-Tropez, France, featuring multiple bedrooms an outdoor swimming pool, tennis court, movie theatre and separate quarters for staff. 

Private Jets

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Bernard Arnault reportedly splashed US$40 million on his private jet, Dassault Falcon 7X. Previously, he owned a Bombardier Global Express 6000. He also owns an ultra-long-range business jet Bombardier Global 7500 which can accommodate up to 19 passengers. 

(Hero and Featured Image credit: Eric Piermont/AFP)

This story originally appeared on Lifestyle Asia KL.

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The much-needed change in the Indian film industry has started and the biggest example of all time is ‘Sisak’- India’s first silent LGBTQ film that has won 60 international awards till date. Faraz Arif Ansari is the filmmaker who has initiated this change and for him, it all began in 2008 when he decided to […]

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At the age of 11, when kids are often busy playing video games and outdoor sports, Manavaditya Singh Rathore was trying to lift his father’s gun in the backyard shooting range of the military bungalow in Delhi. Well, this might sound bizarre to many, but it was quite normal for a son of the legendary Olympic […]

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Varun Soni is a 25-year-old content creator from Abu Road, Rajasthan, who is also a passionate dancer, actor, and performer. For Varun, social media is the biggest boon that gave a direction to his career. Varun considers his 159K followers on Instagram as an extended family and makes content to entertain, inform, and educate them. […]

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The success story of Delhi-based Tattoographer Karan defines passion in the most unique way with a pinch of pain. Karan, a tattoo artist and piercer by profession is the world’s first individual with one full bodysuit tattoo inked, he also got his sclera inked black and has hundreds of piercing all through his body. Ask […]

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The chefs of Ashok through food carving showcased India’s triumph at the Tokyo Olympics. The portraits of the medal winners were carved on the watermelon using various tools. It is kept at showcase for the medal winners and the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Contingent at the Ashok hotel- as they champions are staying at the hotel.

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Glamourous Korean American restaurateur and chef Judy Joo worked in the finance industry before turning to food after graduating from the French Culinary Institute. Moving to London, she worked in several top kitchens in the British capital, then opened her first Korean restaurant in 2015. She’s appeared on TV shows such as Korean Food Made Simple and Iron Chef UK, and recently set up a new London venture, Seoul Bird.

You’re usually flying between the US, UK and Asia. What do you miss about life on the road?

I miss exploring new cultures and eating all that amazing food! I love street food and learning about a country through the lens of food and the people who cook it. When you take a bite of something, you’re tasting a piece of that country’s history and tradition.

What are your favourite places to dine around the world?

I love eating in Seoul and Busan, of course, as Korean cuisine is my ultimate comfort food. Everything from high-end Michelin- star meals, like at Gaon and Bicena, to the down-and-dirty street offerings, such as tteokbokki and hotteok – it’s all so enticing and exciting. The food scene in Hong Kong is also bustling and vibrant. I love what May Chow is doing, and some of the Japanese restaurants are as good as in Tokyo.

I also have a serious love affair with Italy, but who doesn’t? I usually go to the Amalfi coast every summer and indulge in local specialities and freshly grilled seafood just kissed with local olive oil and lemons. It’s heavenly, no fuss and exceedingly fresh. San Sebastian is also one of my favourite food cities. I love just strolling around and nipping into pintxo bars for some small bites and txakoli. And you can’t miss some of the best fine dining there, either – Arzak is divine and never disappoints.

I love New York, too, and still think it’s one of the food capitals of the world. I absolutely love Per Se – totally food-gasmic. You can eat on the cheap very well in New York too, and I love exploring the ethnic enclaves to seek out the best tamales, pão de queijo, gua bao, samosas and more!

How did your upbringing affect your attitudes to life and entrepreneurship?

In Korea, food is served in all ceremonies, from weddings to funerals and it’s even associated with sacred religious rituals. My family is no different and food was always a language of love. Even if I was just sad over something, my mom would try to feed me to make me feel better. Food is considered medicine in East Asian cultures and nourishes the body, soul and mind. I have so many wonderful memories from my childhood: every day after school, my mom would serve me a soothing rice porridge called juk (congee) that has a 3,000-year history in Asia.

What’s involved in the art of hosting a great dinner?

My top tip for impressing people at dinner parties is to use one unusual ingredient to jazz up a familiar dish. Even if it’s just adding a dash of soy sauce to your burger mix or sprinkling a bit of za’atar on your pizza – these little international twists add serious flavour and make the ordinary truly exciting. For example, I like to use yuzu instead of lemon when making English posset. The fragrance transforms this humble dessert into something quite elegant.

What do your day-to-day work outfits look like? Are you often in chefs’ whites and, if so, how you do like to dress outside of the kitchen?

Since I’m mainly focused on my fast-casual concept, Seoul Bird, I’m not in chef whites much these days unless I’m doing events or demos. During Covid times I’ve been super casual and packed on a few pounds, so it really has been activewear for me most of the time lately as I can’t fit into most of my wardrobe! Ha! But I’m mostly a jeans and cool top, with a stylish jacket draped on top kind of girl. I’ll slip on some great stylish heels and jewellery to dress things up, and a statement handbag.

How did your past experiences, such as working for Gordon Ramsay and at the Playboy Club, inform how you run your restaurants and kitchens?

I had the pleasure of working with – and learning from – Chantelle Nicholson of Tredwells in London early on in my career. I spent time in her kitchen, back when she was still on the pass, and watching her command a brigade of surly men with finesse was awe-inspiring. She walked that fine line of being strong and forceful, without compromising her femininity and grace. She was clearly in charge and a slightly feared but revered force in the kitchen; yet her elegant, soft, refined and unbridled creativity still shone through her food and plating. The way she works has definitely influenced how I run my restaurants, about which I only have three rules: no harassment, no discrimination and respect everyone.

Which routines keep you grounded?

I do a lot of pilates and general fitness, and I focus on wellbeing. I love tennis and try to get on court at least once a week. I also make sure that I sleep a lot – it’s so important and the third pillar of health. I also try as much as I can to meditate and just zone out a bit, which is good when I go for a run. I also find the act of baking bread extremely therapeutic – there’s just something about kneading dough that I find healing and relaxing.

Who are your style icons?

Amal Clooney, Robin Wright and Cate Blanchett

You’re a busy woman. What’s always in your bag?

I carry around too many things. My laptop and chargers. I’m known to set up a mini office in taxis and Ubers! I have a make-up bag that has my UV Mist cushion, blush and bronzer, lip glosses and mini make-up brushes, and I always have a tube of Elizabeth Arden eight-hour cream. I’m in a bad mood if I forget it. I’m totally addicted – I have dry lips and it’s the best for shine and moisturising. I also have luxury hand cream – as I cook a lot, I need a good lotion to repair the damage I’ve done. I have a water bottle usually filled and mixed with some kind of collagen powder or energy- boosting elixir. A vitamin pill box with my supplements – beauty starts from within! Face masks, hand sanitiser, a snack bar or nuts and a pair of flats, if I have to wear heels. I walk everywhere, so I have to have comfy shoes. Sunglasses, glasses, hairclip and, of course, my phone and earpods. And a nice pen and bespoke notebook – I like to design my own covers. Right now, the cover of the one I’m using now says “Judy Joo’s Profound Musings” and it has a background of strawberries and lily flowers.

Where do you find most inspiration for your recipes and restaurant concepts?

I get the most inspiration from my travels. I have to get on the road again!

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Setting up a chain of top-quality butcheries and delis in today’s time of veggies might sound like an uphill struggle. But with his new retail venture Steak King, Johnny Glover reckons he’s on to a winner. We find out why.

At a time when we're constantly exhorted to change the way we eat, and to shift from an animal-based diet to one in which plants predominate, Johnny Glover might be said to be swimming against the tide. Because the food retailer- cum-restaurateur, who became famous among Hong Kong gourmands through earlier ventures such as Pacific Gourmet and The Butchers Club, is back in business under a new – and unashamedly carnivorous – name: Steak King.

I’m meeting the expat Yorkshireman at The Factory, the upper-floor space – part butchery, part kitchen, part retail store and part private dining room – in the Wong Chuk Hang godown where he runs his Steak King operation. Lining the walls are voluminous glass-fronted refrigerators, packed with every cut of top-quality beef, lamb, pork and chicken imaginable, as well as sausages, pies, ready-made meals and all manner of seafood. In some cabinets, huge hunks of beef on the bone, most of them specially ordered by customers, sit for weeks on end in a humidity- and temperature-controlled dry-ageing process that will leave them richer in flavour, more tender in texture, lighter in weight and – inevitably – considerably more expensive that if they’d been sold fresh-cut. It’s a process that Glover introduced to Hong Kong when he set up The Butcher’s Club almost a decade ago, though rather than high-end butchery, he says he actually started out in the food-retailing business selling seafood.

“The first location was in Ap Lei Chau’s Horizon Plaza,” he says of his first wholesale venture, which later morphed into the Pacific Gourmet stores. “It was a warehouse, similar to this, and I put some fridges at the front. I remember on the first day I was there by myself, and I think I had about four customers that day. And then a journalist from NowTV did a little video – they filmed me with all these oysters, seafood, and these beautiful red snappers – and next day there’s literally a queue out of the door. And I realised that by putting a shopfront on the wholesale concept, people liked it – they think they’re getting a deal, and they are! And that concept has always stuck with me. So whatever I’ve done after that, it’s always had that look and feel about it.”

Glover admits that he gets “bored pretty easily. I have two or three years in me where I’ll kill myself to build something up and make it as big as I possibly can, and then once I’ve got it to a stage when it’s saleable I’ll try and find someone to buy it.” And that’s exactly what happened with Pacific Gourmet, which “a rich banker” took off his hands around 10 years ago.

He’d also realised pretty early on that seafood was “a ticking time bomb. It’s stressful, it’s hard dealing with live oysters and seafood, you’ve got to move it quick. And those difficulties are what brought me into meat, because [with the latter] the shelf life is one or two months, and then you can dry-age it for another two months. I like that idea, because you’re actually getting paid to let it go out of date!”

Thus, when The Butcher’s Club began – in an Aberdeen warehouse, of course – a dry-ageing room was set up alongside the rows of freezers and a table for 16 diners. It was there that Glover hosted private dinners where the star was a huge piece of beef, which attracted a high-end clientele that included “heads of state, tycoons from Singapore and tons of people from Mainland China. Quite often there’d be a motorcade of armoured vehicles downstairs and bodyguards outside – it became a real thing. We charged upfront and at one point we had a six-month waitlist, every day including lunch on Sundays.”

In growing that brand into a chain with outlets in Singapore, Bali, mainland China and Taiwan, as well as six stores in Hong Kong, Glover also developed a penchant for what he calls “guerrilla marketing. Social media was really starting to take hold – this would have been 2013 – so I bought a pick-up truck and we wrapped it in matte black and put a big barbecue in the back. And we posted on social media that we were opening this restaurant, but the week before we were going to do a trial run in Lan Kwai Fong.

“So we parked outside of Wagyu and 400 people showed up. Of course, the guys at Wagyu weren’t happy, so they called the police, who told us to move, and we said no, knowing that they were going to arrest me. And they did, and we filmed it – and this was all live on Facebook. Of course there was an uproar, but whatever, we opened the restaurant the next week and there was a queue 200 metres long to get in. And we were doing 1,000 burgers a day, every day, for about a year. It was amazing. That restaurant was doing close to $3 million revenue a month from 400 square feet.”

True to form, having built up the The Butchers Club, Glover sold the business on around four years ago and, after a spell of gardening leave, he’s back with his latest venture. “This journey has been about refining, all the time,” he says. “The mistakes we made with Pacific Gourmet, I think we rectified them with The Butchers Club. And the mistakes I made with the Butchers’ Club I want to rectify with Steak King. I like retail. With restaurants there’s lot of moving parts to mess up. And though I’m still doing restaurants you’ll notice that they’re really, really simple and ingredients-driven.”

With branches already open in Sai Kung and Mui Wo, as well as The Factory HQ and more outlets on the way, Steak King is planned as a network of neighbourhood shops. Glover had noticed how, during Covid, people were coming into his Wong Chuk Hang warehouse to buy high-quality ingredients to cook at home, and that gave him an idea. “Why don’t we do little butcher shops and delis in residential locations around Hong Kong? Let’s not do it in Central or Causeway Bay. Let’s do it in Sai Kung, Mui Wo, Tung Chung or Tseung Kwan O, places where people live. Let’s create a corner shop where people can pick something up on their way home – a retail butcher shop, but we’ll have a cafe element to them, so you’ll be able to buy a sandwich, a pizza or a pie too.“Think of a 25-year-old guy,” he says of his notional customer, “who’s just bought his first house, and he’s just got off the MTR. He walks into our shop, he buys a steak, some veal jus, some nice herbs, a salad, and even a frying pan and a gourmet chef’s knife to cook them with.

The butcher tells him how to cook it and recommends a wine and a sauce. He buys some mashed potatoes and the whole thing goes out with him under his arm, a package that allows him to cook a Michelin-star-quality meal for him and his girlfriend who’s waiting at home. That’s the idea of Steak King, it’s somewhere you can buy more or less everything you’re going to need to cook a real gourmet meal.

“And I don’t want to put these in shopping malls. I want them beside wet markets or near to Wellcome or ParknShop, and I want [the competition] to look at us and think, ‘They’re doing it right.’ You never know, maybe one day they might have to buy us out.” As to the meat-versus-plant-based debate, Glover’s philosophy is thus: “If you’re going to eat an animal, you should celebrate its life. If you’re going to eat a steak, don’t eat a crap piece of meat every day but a good one every two weeks. But it’s not all about the meat we sell, it’s also the seafood, vegetables and herbs, they all have heritage. And in all these 25 years that I’ve been in business I’ve built up relationships with farmers and fishermen [much of his meat and seafood comes from personally selected producers in Australia], and I’m still working with them now. I know that if I’m ordering a case of tenderloins they’ll give me the best.”

A hotel-management graduate and experienced chef, Glover originally arrived in Hong Kong in the 1990s to teach with the Vocational Training Council and he still lectures part-time at the Polytechnic University. His role as an educator even spills out into this current venture: along with chef Brandon Tomkinson, who formerly presided over the kitchen at Gordon Ramsey’s Hong Kong restaurant, Bread Street, he’s produced a series of short videos instructing how to prepare and cook almost every item of meat and seafood he sells, which can easily by accessed online via a QR code on each product.

“We handle it the right way and we’re teaching people how to cook it the right way,” he says. “What we’re selling isn’t cheap, but I think it’s the best value in town. And if I can convince one in 10 to try it, to cook it well and in a certain way, if I can teach some people how to cook and educate them, then my job is done.”

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