Trevor Gulliver

The Path

The practical shape of hospitality shows early in a career built around ownership, service, and the discipline of keeping a room running day after day. At The Fire Station in Waterloo, Trevor Gulliver worked as owner until 1993, a period that grounded his later work in the realities of trade rather than theory. In 1994, as co-founder and co-owner of St John Smithfield, he joined a house that would become closely identified with London’s modern restaurant landscape. By 2010, that remit had widened to wine with the founding of St John's winery (Boulevard Napoleon), carrying the same attention to character and provenance into another part of the business.

The Work Today

The restaurant’s identity at St. JOHN Restaurant in London is shaped as much by the cellar as by the pass, and Trevor Gulliver’s role as Co-Founder & CEO places him across both. His line — “Fergus puts it on the plate, I put it in the glass” — describes a working split between kitchen and wine with unusual economy. It also sets out the house logic plainly: the meal is built through coordination, not hierarchy, with food and wine treated as equal parts of the same service.

Signature

Boulevard Napoleon wines sit at the centre of Trevor's signature dishes. The point is not garnish or side note, but the role of wine as a working part of St. JOHN’s identity. In Gulliver’s orbit, what is poured carries the same weight as what is cooked, and the bottle becomes part of the restaurant’s language.

In Their Words “Fergus puts it on the plate, I put it in the glass.” The first line reduces the operation to its essential divide: food on one side, wine on the other, both held in relation. The second places the work in everyday proximity to restaurants, a long-standing urban closeness that reads less as anecdote than as context for a career spent inside the trade.

Acclaim

The phrase “Fergus puts it on the plate, I put it in the glass” has become the clearest shorthand for his approach, linking the kitchen and cellar without overcomplicating either side.