I know this topic gets covered regularly but I offer this as much for comic relief as anything.
Best comment I saw: “Lovely bottle. I’ll go to browse Wine Searcher and get back to you with a corkage charge by the end of your meal.”
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This type of policy would make me skip dining at this restaurant.
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this sounds like gouqi min london, is it?
NVM just saw the Fallow, sorry.
Guoqi have a similar policy
I’m going next week.
There are plenty of good wines under 100GBP and by the glass.
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I’m sure it is good and hope you enjoy. For me I would choose not to support a policy like that, but that’s just me and I’m sure they don’t care.
I noticed right above that they are happy to have dogs, which would also keep me away.
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A smaller point, but WTF is corkage for sparkling wine 80% higher than still wine? I guess there is sometimes having an ice bucket, but on the other hand, it’s easier to open, no decanting or careful late pours needed.
Others have disagreed with me on this, but I still maintain that markups are generally higher on sparkling wine on restaurant lists than still wines.
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Sounds like the type of place that puts a 20% discretionary service fee on your bill and then prompts for a tip.
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Flying cork insurance premium.
Because:
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We had a tasting lunch once a long time ago (at a wine-themed restaurant no less), and the young guy server bounced our Champagne cork off the very high ceiling and hit an old lady across the restaurant.
Then he came by later and poured a different wine into someone’s partly-full glass. “Oh, I hadn’t tried the Burgundy-Bordeaux blend yet.”
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Knocked Biniam Girmay out of the Giro d’Italia in '22.
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I think I agree with the general theory behind the value based pricing, but the execution is clunky.
Some expensive high-end restaurants I know charge an incredibly high flat fee because enough customers will accept defeat and pay 3/4/5x markup for a listed bottle or are bringing in 40+ year aged bangers and simply don’t care about corkage cost.
That said, I often like to bring in aged dessert wines to fancy meals. They are generally not absurdly valued and pretty much never on the wine lists. Paying a $100+ corkage is a no-go.
I also recognize alcohol sales is a big revenue driver for restaurants… To me something like this needs clarification about what a “premium fine wine” is and the charge should simply be a higher flat rate and not a percentage.
Don’t get me started on the flat versus sparkling mess though… weird
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Can’t wait for a “non-drinker” fee.
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So… decant that bottle of GC Burg into a Bourgogne bottle in advance is my takeaway from this policy.
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The part that really annoys me is the “at the management’s discretion” part. Charge a fee, or don’t - then I can decide in advance whether to bring a bottle or not. But don’t make me guess!
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Could you explain why you agree with that theory? I don’t get it on any level:
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Why is it different to the restaurant that a customer brings in a bottle worth $100 or $1000?
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It seems to encourage bringing in less expensive wines, which (to the extent the restaurant cares) seems less desirable for them.
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The customer has no idea before she arrives, or even probably after sitting down at the table, what the fee is going to be.
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It invites uncomfortable disagreements and debates between customers and staff about the fee charged, and hard feelings from a diner who feels the fee was unfair. And I don’t really know how you resolve the dispute in the moment.
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I think @BryanGreen is right: they are trying to push their largest demo to purchase from them without completely alienating their most lucrative customers. Though I think the management discretion part kind of does that.
I get it. I just think it’s dumb for the reasons you laid out.
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The restaurant is free to impose whatever corkage policy that they want. I am then free to spend my “dinner out” money wherever I want.
Except for “but we can change the rules at the last minute if we want to,” this is not the worst policy I have seen. I wanted to arrange a wine dinner at a local steakhouse, so I called them on their policy. They responded that they charged $10 per diner for each bottle. I had my doubts as to what the person said, so I suggested the following example. We have 12 people i our regular wine drinking group and we average one and one-half bottles per person, so that means that corkage would be $10 per person x 12 people x 18 bottles = $2,160 corkage fee. The person on the phone confirmed that was correct. I said that we would be dining elsewhere.
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To address Point 4 first, I think that clarification is very much needed liked I said.
As to why it matters to a restaurant what the customer brings in is generally reflective of the money they’d make from selling different pricepoints off their list. $50 corkage covers a good portion of markup for many bottles. But if a restaurant has really expensive wine in inventory, but that’s also what a customer brings in - there are more problems for a restaurant. They are not making as much from the corkage / missed bottle list sale and they are also dealing with cashflow issues by having that money locked up in inventory. It’s more fair for the restaurant and I doubt anyone bringing in liquid gold cares if the corkage is higher than standard to some reasonable level.
Is there an on-site loo fee for passing the corkage-paid wines?
The restaurant should not overlook that opportunity.
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Any restaurant that advertises itself as offering ‘conscious gastronomy’ is very liable also to feature a grotesquely self-important corkage policy. Why don’t they just say no?
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