Bruni bottle blow
Frank Bruni one-stars the new and apparently-not-improved Russian Tea Room in today’s NYT. The restaurant owners must be rethinking their wine service right about now. Gotta love the anonymous critic. Snip:
Outdated menus with erroneous information were put on the table. Drinks and food were ludicrously slow to arrive. Servers responded dismissively to complaints, one of them telling us that we shouldn’t bother him with questions about a fugitive bottle of wine. It was, he shrugged, the sommelier’s problem.
And what a problem. Although we had ordered a 1998 French Burgundy for $84, we got a 2001. We flagged the discrepancy, and for the next 15 minutes, as we ate our appetizers and thirsted for pinot noir, both the wine and sommelier were on the lam. When he showed up, he presented us with a similar 1998 — the listed one was unavailable — for $20 more. He paused, seemingly waiting for us to agree to spend that.
Then, in the manner of a car salesman, he said: “I’ll make you a deal. We’ll call it an even $90.â€
Could he throw in cruise control? A leather interior?
He later dropped the price to $84, the right end to a wrong situation that typified the restaurant’s clumsiness.
[NYT]
tags: wine | wine service
On December 22nd, 2006 at 6:26 am ,Marisa D'vari wrote:
Usually, the gracious thing is for the Sommelier to to present a similar bottle and say you can have it at the same price. This happened at Chanterelle recently and it makes for good PR and customers who rave. It’s said that if you don’t like a restaurant, you’ll complain to ten people, if you like it, you might not say anything, but if you get great service you’ll rave to everyone.