kerewin's whine cellar

How I didn't save the world by ignoring assholism

So when you go to a restaurant, you have an idea of how much the food will be, the wine, the dessert. If you have a lot of wine yourself, you don't always want to pay the "more than retail" that happens at restaurants, in which case, you bring your own and pay something called corkage. Depending on the restaurant, it can run between $5 (think Old Spaghetti Factory) to $15-20 (think Ruth's Chris).

A couple of weeks ago, we had a group of ten come into the restaurant. The first couple there brought a canvas bag that looked rather full and there was a bottle of wine on top. As I was taking them to their table, I asked what wine they brought. The man takes out a very nice bottle of Walla Walla red and we talk a little about that and then he asks about corkage, which at my restaurant is $15/per bottle. He whistles a little and tells me that is steep. Whatever.

The rest of the group comes, and as it is a busy Saturday night I don't really have time to pay attention. I do notice them getting a little rowdy, however, and I always see everyone's glass about a third full. So I ask their server how many wines they have gone through and he says, "well they haven't ordered anything off the list and I only opened that one bottle." Hmmmmmm, interesting. So I make a casual pass by the table, yup, it was a different bottle than they originally had, I would have picked it up and taken it, but there was a skosh left in it, and that's pretty much against the rules.

Now that I started paying attention, I noted that they are careful to leave a bit in the bottle, so it didn't get removed. Apparently when they were done with one they carefully opened another under the table and swapped. Not only this, but they made sure to do it with no one watching. At the end of the evening, they put the original bottle back on the table.

So here's the thing. Jesus, there are so many things, but they KNEW coming into this event that they were going to do this. They had the canvas bag with all the wine in it, but hidden, they had to have had a wine key to open the bottles and they even were detail oriented enough to swap it back to the original bottle. All and all, it was fairly disgusting to see. People really have a way of making me ill.

If I had been their waiter, I would have just poured off the rest of the wine, and pulled the bottle off the table. Thereby forcing their lie into the open. Since I was so busy with the rest of the restaurant that night, I didn't have a chance to really notice until the end of their meal. As we are on the higher end of fine dining, I also didn't want to make a scene. It was one of the cheapest, most disgusting displays I have ever witnessed in a restaurant, though. That's a big statement for someone who has been in the industry for 12 years.

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Posted by kerewin at February 2, 2004 06:08 PM