I was reviewing a classic Mandarin restaurant some years ago and was amazed at what I saw. The restaurant’s food was made to go with aromatic white wines, but 13 of the 14 tables had chardonnays.
Even though this was a truly upscale restaurant in a supposedly savvy wine town, chardonnay isn’t the best match for this kind of food. Gewurztraminer is. And the wine list had a superb dry gewurztraminer, which is a classic match with Asian food.
I can’t blame the restaurant for the mindlessness of its patrons in ordering yet another boring chardonnay. But I can blame most restaurants for not helping diners with their choices.
Most restaurant-goers are not wine experts and could benefit from some wine assistance, particularly if the servers are not carefully trained on wine.
But the current state of affairs does not include one-on-one education in restaurants. In the last several years, even before COVID-19 struck and devastated the dining-out scene, many restaurants abandoned professional wine servers or sommeliers. Part of their reasoning is that high salaries paid to these people usually were not covered by the sale of wine.
And part of this may well have been due to extremely high markups for wines in restaurants at a time when many diners eschewed wine because of high pricing!
Another factor in diners’ reluctance to buy wine at restaurants is simply that they are not particularly skilled at identifying a wine that will work with their food.
Back in the 1970s, a chain of restaurants in the Los Angeles area that I used to frequent called The Velvet Turtle had a small, well-chosen, and well-priced wine list. Part of the clever marketing of that chain was the fact that every menu entree had a wine listed; it was the chef’s best guess as to what went with that dish.
Not only were the suggestions accurate, but the restaurant also didn’t blindly buy the next vintage of each wine; they tasted the wines vintage by vintage to make sure that the wine did go with the dish for which it was targeted.
Even in the most upscale of restaurants, diners need help. The best wine-savvy restaurants know this, and some still employ knowledgeable servers.
The same tactic of food-wine suggestions on the menu worked brilliantly for one of the best restaurant owners I ever knew, a man by the name of Tony Hermann, who ran the old Bouzy Rouge Cafe in Newport Beach.
For sheer wine intensity, one of the nation’s wine institutions is the superb Bern’s Steak House in Tampa, Florida. Most of the servers are well-trained and tremendously helpful.
