“I have 200 wines on my list including a lot of Greek wines, and, no, I don’t provide any descriptions.”
The sommelier is young – Gen Z – and charming and, I’m sure, immensely knowledgeable about every single item on her list. She says she likes nothing more than explaining them to her customers, and her boss is apparently happy for her to spend quite a lot of time doing this.
I find her attitude and her list – like so many others – very, very annoying. And strangely unempathetic.
Few restaurants would dream of listing dishes such as ‘Steak Pierre’ or ‘Cod in a Slavonian Sauce’ without offering some kind of indication of how the ‘Pierre’ aspect is going to affect the flavour of the meat, or the key ingredients favoured by cooks in Slavonia. And where further explanation is required, every waiter should have been told how to explain the menu, item by item, before any guests arrived. They do not say, “I’m afraid I’ll have to send the Maitre’d over to give you this information.”
But, when it comes to wine we’re all apparently supposed to know how ‘Nero Oro, Riserva Passione; Sentimento Bianco; or Cintilo White are going to taste. All of these were plucked from the list of a smart London restaurant that made no attempt at description. I presume the author of that document also expects customers to be familiar with the style of Clairette Blanche, Xinomavro and Zweigelt despite none of these featuring widely in wine shops.
“Oh” I’ll be told, “you just need to ask the sommelier. They’ll tell you everything you need to know.” But what if I don’t want to have a conversation about wine today? What if this meal is all about meeting up with an old friend, or learning more about a potential new one? What if the two people at this table have a lot of tricky business to discuss?
Wait for the somm
And that’s presuming, of course, that the well-informed sommelier is miraculously able to explain their list simultaneously at several tables rather than leaving us to wait, dry-mouthed for them to finish a lengthy chat with a couple of wine enthusiasts on the other side of the room. The Californian wine writer, Blake Gray described this well in 2012, “I always ask for the sommelier, I live in a city that has them, and I'd say the somm gets there within 15 minutes of my request about 20% of the time.”
A recent piece in Vinepair by Dave Foss made the separate point that some customers do know what they want and would happily order it from a waiter – but are prevented from doing so. As Foss says, “Nothing is worse than a server refusing to take your order because only the somm can do it.
Friends have told me, he continues, “If they just let me order through the server, I’d have ordered another $150 bottle.” But instead, they left frustrated – and the restaurant lost money.”
He also referenced a natural wine bar where “someone at the next table asked if they had a California Chardonnay. Instead of a polite explanation, the server very condescendingly said, ‘We definitely do not – we focus on natural wine." The customer reacted in the way I might have done. As Foss recalled, “she ended up ordering a vodka tonic instead.”
This kind of – to my mind – unempathetic arrogance among wine servers is just as apparent at Smithereens, a seafood restaurant Eric Asimov included in a New York Times piece about short wine lists in January. “Of its 62 selections, more than half, 32, are Rieslings. Twenty-nine more are various other whites. There’s only one red wine, a Pinot Noir from Shelter Winery in the Baden region of Germany.”
Soon, says Asimov, who ‘loves’ seeing a wine list with this much ‘attitude’ and ‘character’ the tide at Smithereens will turn. “The wine director, Nikita Malhotra, has nothing against red wines. Sometime this spring, in fact, she’s planning to reverse the dynamic by composing a list showcasing Grenache wines from sandy soils. That list, she said, will be all red wines, with one white.”
What if, just hypothetically, my guest or I might fancy a white wine with our meal in this seafood restaurant and we don’t happen to be attracted by the style or price of the single example Ms Malhotra has chosen? She’d say her strategy gives “her an opportunity to entice people to try new things.” I love trying new things. Sometimes. But I also like familiar ones too. And, just as importantly, so might my guest.
Inscrutable lists
There is nothing new in any of this. Asimov recalls a 2012 piece by the New York Post restaurant critic, Steve Cuozzo, who was complaining about wine lists that were ‘100 per cent inscrutable”. He “just wanted a “nice, affordable Bordeaux to go with chicken and summer greens" and was struggling to find one.
Asimov has limited sympathy for Cuozzo. While acknowledging that “Most restaurants, no matter how it might affront a chef’s creative bent, offer a few safe landing places for less adventurous customers, like steak or salmon", he rhetorically asks “Must a restaurant offer bottles that even the most timid diner will recognize? Or can a wine list reflect a restaurant’s best conception of itself, no matter how unconventional?”
Gray, responded at the time “ if you want customers like Cuozzo and his readers, you need to have some recognizable wine brands for them. I'm sure hip Brooklyn restaurants are perfectly happy to have these customers walk away in disgust. But in other towns, with larger seating areas to fill, the strategy might not be the soundest.”
All of which took me back some 50 years to my parent’s hotel and restaurant in the south of England. In 1971, guests could choose between Blue Nun Liebfraumilch, Mateus Rosé, Henkel Trocken and Mouton Cadet or, if they felt more ambitious, Meursault Charmes, Chablis Fourchaume, Echezeaux, Leoville Barton, Lafite and Taittinger Blanc de Blancs.
The idea of a modern equivalent of a restaurant that featured in the Good Food Guide of its day offering Mateus and Blue Nun as well as serious Bordeaux and Burgundy is almost unthinkable. Today, you might be lucky to see a Beaujolais, Rioja or Chianti.
If a restaurant can survive and prosper by selling unfamiliar and/or natural wine from a list with no descriptions or, in Asimov’s words ‘safe landing places’, I wish them well. But I also noted that Reynard, the Brooklyn restaurant with an entirely French list on which Cuozzo could find no recognisable items, is no longer in business.
Restaurants are in the 'hospitality sector'. There is nothing hospitable in forcing customers to wait for the opportunity of a conversation they really may not want in order to have something to drink. Give them a comprehensible list with a few safe landings, and empower all waiters to take their order.
Unless of course, you'd prefer to see them order vodka and tonic.
