My favourite watch: Tom Sellers, Seinfeld and Carl Cox
What do Michelin-starred chef Tom Sellers, top DJ Carl Cox, comedian Jerry Seinfeld and astronaut Don Pettit all have in common? They all need a good watch to do their extremely specific work. Alex Doak takes a look at the most talented people with quality on their wrists
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The corner of Berkeley Street and Piccadilly. You couldn’t get more ‘Mayfair’ if you tried. So you can hardly blame top chef Tom Sellers for trying to land a spot there and then, after six years’ negotiation, succeeding.
“It’s an unbelievable site,” he says about the location of his third restaurant, Dovetale, at the top of the 1 Mayfair hotel. A two-Michelin-starred chef still in his mid-thirties, the Nottingham boy is a figurehead for his generation of tattooed, ‘intense’ young men carving things up with ne’er a starched tablecloth in sight. Indeed, FX’s fictional TV chef of the moment ‘bears’ an eerie resemblance to Sellers, right down to formative stints with Thomas Keller and René Redzepi.
Dovetale is a major career milestone, but it was Restaurant Story in south London’s Bermondsey that elicited another milestone for Seller: a wristwatch. It’s a very personal talisman that, it transpires, is the default choice for many talented people operating under pressurised circumstances.
The then-26-year-old Seller plumped for a green-on-green ‘Hulk’ Rolex Submariner. “Yes, green is my favourite colour,” he explains, “but if you’re a ‘watch person’ you know it’s also an expression of yourself, and an expression of heritage and craft. Like serving up a classic, well-executed dish.”
It’s no secret that, ever since, Sellers has moved from Rolex to being a ‘friend’ of Audemars Piguet, becoming its Bond Street premises’ VIP caterer. This affords for the chef a “huge opportunity to see how a family-run institution like AP ticks”.
It’s facile to compare the intricate components of a mechanical watch to the machinations of a starred kitchen. But, satisfyingly, Sellers’ description of how he and his team stay in sync paints Restaurant Story as a timekeeper in itself.
“We have one big clock in the kitchen,” he says. “The irony is, though, that if you stand in my kitchen at any one time, you’ll know the time without it. I know that if napkins are being folded over there, it’s probably between 10 and 10:15 in the morning. If red wine bottles are being opened and decanted in the dining room, then it’s around five.”
This ‘workplace-as-wristwatch’ dynamic plays out across many disciplines beyond hospitality, with the one constant being an actual watch worn by their practitioner. It’s a status symbol for those who’ve made it, a literal totem of their particular craft’s timely nature. Plus, something that’s useful. Or not…
“Truth be told, I don’t think I’ve ever realistically used my Zenith Defy’s chronograph function for something specific. Does anyone, really?”
This sentiment is echoed by Britain’s living legend of electronic music, DJ Carl Cox, a man who has long suffered the ‘watch bug’. Cox is a proud latter-day member of the Zenith family, with a 100-piece turntable-inspired watch bearing his name.
“That said, activating the stopwatch is a lot of fun. Hands spinning at 1/100th of a second is a lot faster than my eyes can keep up with! Every time I start it, I’m amazed by the speed and sound.
“I also love engines,” Cox adds, as a nod to his CC Motorsport passion projects, “anything from an old banger or a Mini to a Superbike or a Ferrari. But on a smaller scale, watches are even more personal, with a story behind each one.”
‘Timing is everything’ goes for music, but far more famously for comedy. Appropriately, Jerry Seinfeld is never knowingly not strapped to a Breitling chronograph: “I would never go anywhere without a stopwatch,” Seinfeld told GQ in May. “I time everything.” If the mâitre d’ in a restaurant says ‘We’ll have it ready for you in five minutes’ you better believe Seinfeld will be reaching for the start button on his Navitimer’s timer.
The same ‘click’ of a chronograph proved less pointed and rather more poignant for Jack Swigert aboard Apollo 13 in 1970. It meant he could time the 14-second fuel burn required to align their ‘successful failure’ of a mission’s re-entry into Earth’s atmosphere. The astronaut was using Omega’s answer to Breitling’s Navitimer and Zenith’s El Primero, the ‘Moonwatch’ Speedmaster, which NASA had tendered, tested and ‘qualified’ for the Apollo programme.
But what few realise is how the Speedie’s modern-day ‘X-33’ LCD-display incarnation has proven just as crucial to NASA’s recent orbital exploits, while remaining just as personal to its practitioner.
At the time of writing, Don Pettit was on the cusp of returning to the International Space Station (ISS) for a third time as NASA’s oldest serving astronaut, at 69 years of age.
“The X-33 has a titanium case and has acoustical vents in the back which means the alarm is really loud… the loudest alarm I’ve ever heard from a wristwatch. [It’s] great [in] orbit because you’re living in a very noisy environment.
“So what broke..?”
Over 20 years ago and only recently shared on Pettit’s Instagram account (mostly featuring his incredible astrophotography), this vented caseback needed to come off for an unusual bout of field repair.
“Omega have now fixed these issues, so this watch I’m wearing is a newer model,” Pettit says, brandishing his X-33 towards the webcam from quarters at ‘Star City’, Moscow. “But most functions are operated via the crown, which you use a lot, always pushing the crown to change functionality. So this broke, fell off and got lost.
“All these bits float around and then get stuck on filters… You have to clean the filters once a week, cos all this junk accumulates in them. And it was like, ‘wow! I found the bits for my watch. I can actually repair my watch!’”
The video may look like a YouTube tutorial, but Pettit filmed it long before social media as we know it. He needed to fix his watch, since the Columbia space-shuttle disaster of 2003 had grounded the ISS’s resupply chain for over two years. And fix it he did: with tweezers, a Leatherman multi-tool and double-sided tape to stop the tiny parts floating away.
“After my watch-repair video downlinked to Mission Control, the maintenance people at NASA started to think: ‘Let’s take our boxes apart and fix them on orbit. Astronauts aren’t aren’t just bulls in a china closet.’
“I proved we had dexterity… that we could do fine repair work on spaceship.”
It’s (almost) a million miles from the DJ booth of Space in Ibiza, or the heat-lamped pass of a London kitchen, or a Seinfeld stand-up set. But what clearly shows is how 40-odd millimetres’ worth of wristworn timepiece can assume such myriad purpose, both personal and professional.