This should not be behind a paywall if my Chron subscriber benefit works (able to share the occasional article). You can read my comment there.
Hi Larry - Doesn’t work for me. Shows up behind a paywall.
Had to give my email address…no payment required.
I don’t blame restaurants for making money off corkage, I honestly have no problem with rising corkage fees at many places. What bothers me more is 3x retail or more for their wine list. Combine that with a wine list that barely offers anything less that’s $100 means I’m bringing my own, having a cocktail or staying home.
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This is part of my reply:
“What used to be $25-30 not than long ago has now increased where I now I think twice. I really dislike paying really high restaurant wine prices for younger vintages. That’s why folks (like me) cellar such wines in order to see what they’ll turn into. To me it’s a waste to drink a wine that’s the current vintage under those circumstances.”
I ate at a decent but not high end restaurant in downtown Minneapolis last night, with entrees in the $15-27 range, and corkage was $40. I paid it and didn’t complain or act put out, but that was rather surprising.
The server had no idea and she had to ask her manager about corkage, so that may not be very common there. Or maybe they don’t even have a policy and the manager just threw out a number, I don’t know. Stemware was . . . not stemware, but thick-ish stemless glasses, the kind you often find as your water glass in nicer hotels these days.
The options on the list were a bunch of Justin type stuff, so I figured better to enjoy the nice bottle I brought along.
But I wouldn’t go back there again, either. Not only because of the wine thing, but it was just kind of mediocre.
The only interesting thing was that Diana Taurasi sat at the table next to us, with a younger woman who is probably a basketball player but I didn’t know who she was (I honestly could probably list on one hand the number of past or present WNBA players I could identify just by sight).
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But when a restaurant has taken pains to keep its wine mark-ups low, as the Morris and Great China have, ordering from the list should be a no-brainer, Einbund said. “We have a huge wine inventory. We’re constantly tasting the wines on our list to determine whether they’re ready to drink. And we make sure to balance the list so that there are amazing wines that are affordable.”
True, but there are so few restaurants which actually do have good selections with reasonable markups (though I’m sure a great many more think that they do).
Two other points that are important to me but not mentioned in this article (or most articles or discussions on the topic):
(1) Bringing wine and paying corkage makes it so much easier when you are dining with friends who enjoy wine but aren’t wine collector/enthusiast types (which describes many of my friends).
Instead of being stuck choosing off the wine list for everyone, and spending a bunch of time looking at the list while being trapped between (a) choosing something lousy versus (b) worrying that you’re picking something more expensive than others will want to have paid, you just bring good wine for everyone and the corkage fees are usually small enough that nobody cares about splitting them up with the bill.
(2) The process of ordering off a list is often quite slow and cumbersome. You wait for them to bring you the real wine list, you ignore everyone while you read through it hoping to find something decent at a reasonable price, you wait for the server to come back, you ask for the bottle, a bunch of time passes before they either bring it or (fairly often) tell you they’re out of it and do you want to pick another.
When I bring bottles, the server just needs to pull the corks (if I haven’t done it already) and give us glasses, and we’re off and running. So much simpler, so much more ability to focus on spending time with the people I’m dining with. Easier for the server too.
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Wrong thread
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Have we not beaten this to death here in WB? Obviously restaurants are trying to recover from COVID/ supply issues/etc. And again the hope is to balance the books by selling expensive alcohol to make a profit. There seems to be a fear that making “only” $50-60-70 in clear profit up front with minimal work in their part (except providing me with a glass) is not enough. Hell I will even open the bottle myself!
It’s like I walk in your door, hand you a $60 dollar fee, and you give me a clean glass. Then I buy food, and tip the staff, hopefully generously, for service. Is that not enough? Then please feel free to raise the prices on your food. That is what I am really paying for, not your ability to manage and curate an expensive wine list. If there is an idiot who brings a cheap ass wine, fine. Tuck those three $20 bills in your pocket and be happy!
Just ate at an excellent little Italian bistro in Pittsburgh (piccolo Forno) if you must know. Nothing elaborate about the decor, but the food is really lovely. They charge six bucks for corkage, and if you buy a bottle from the little retail bar/shop around the corner they own, they charge nada.
How are they doing? Packed at night. It’s not hard to understand why…
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this is so true. for those that care - small number, but still - ordering off a list of even moderate size is a chore and becomes antisocial really quickly.
given the financial impact, restaurants should endeavor to do a better job of making their accurate lists available online (no one wants to email for it and never receive it) and further, should offer a decent way of reserving the bottle in advance. this would be a massive advancement in hospitality and aligned with their financial goals. it’s the most expensive thing they buy, sell, and that their guests purchase - eliminating every point of friction should be the goal.
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I regularly pay $40-50 corkage fees here in Las Vegas. I paid $50 last week at Ferraro’s which has an incredible wine list and cellar. But since it was my anniversary, I brought a '97 Argiano BdM (anniversary vintage), and it ended up being corked. The sommelier waived the $50 corkage fee which I thought was a great gesture.
I know we’ve beaten corkage generally to death. However, I find it somewhat amusing that this is in a SF newspaper which is generally talking about SF and Northern Cal restaurants. It seems that the wines brought into the restaurants are probably Napa/Sonoma wines, and the average mediocre Napa Cab costs roughly $75-$100, so complaining about the corkage price seems a bit disingenuous.
Right. Vegas. That amount was NOT the norm in the Bay Area even as recently as a year ago.
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Victor ??
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PA in general has very generous corkage policies. Very nice restaurants here charge ~20-30 for corkage.
I used to live by piccolo forno, it’s a nice spot although there are nicer ones further down butler towards downtown.
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Wow, that’s quite an assumption. FYI, my offline groups don’t bring wines like that. At all. That happened once when Alan Rath brought a bottle of '12 Caymus 40th Anniversary just to see what it was like (yes, he brought other wines). We’ve given him shit for it ever since. 
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But you can’t beat the corkage!
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I definitely choose restaurants with lower/more reasonable corkage fees when the difference in quality of the dining experience isn’t that huge. If a restaurant is just about selling out every night and they want to charge $75+ corkage, I get it, but for restaurants that are trying to bring in more people, I don’t understand why they’d disincentivize wine collectors (and people who want to have wine but can’t afford to spend $100+ on a mediocre bottle of wine) from coming to their establishment.
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Even aside from specific issues around corkage, supply chain, COVID backlogs and whatever, the cost of everything is going way up, and there’s no reason corkage shouldn’t do the same.
If lunch for two at Five Guys costs you $45 after tip (which you now routinely do pay), what should corkage be?
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