Let me start off by stating that I believe restaurants can maintain whatever corkage policies they want, including not permitting patrons to bring their own wine. I vote with my feet.
We are heading to a new restaurant tonight that charges $35 corkage for the first bottle (which is too high) and $50 for the second. This is new to me. Has anyone else seen an escalating corkage fee?
I’ve seen $0 on first bottle, charge on the second.
I’m going out a week from Sunday and one reason I selected the restaurant is because I was excited corkage was only $35…
I’ve seen $35 on the first two, $50 in the third, $70 thereafter.
seen many things from no corkage to unlimited. Bottle limits, stupid pricing, escalating prices, waiver if shared w staff, so nothing surprises.
Not uncommon at all.
Thanks, all. This is new to me. I wonder if restaurants will start surcharging teetotalers.
I’m definitely having a martini or two tonight and won’t be back
Hard to evaluate without knowing the locale and particulars on the restaurant, pricing, expense of wine list, etc.
I have happily paid $75 per bottle for two bottles (the max at that restaurant.) Given the markup at some establishments, $75 corkage is well worth it to me. The alternative is paying perhaps double that in markup for a young wine that I will enjoy far less. If one is going out for a lovely dinner, the ability to bring something that would considerably enhance the experience is more than worth the corkage.
Straight corkage I get, even high corkage. Same with bottle limits. It seems to me that most of the restaurants sunk costs come with the first bottle, and that the increase is more punitive than justifiable (I thought I heard her say $35 for the first bottle and $15 for the second, which would market more sense to me). As I said earlier, their corkage policy is their right. I was just new to me.
This is a newer restaurant in an area that doesn’t have too many sit down establishments.
$35 is reasonable in Los Angeles. I had a pretty mediocre meal at Antico Nuovo, which doesn’t post a wine list or its corkage fee (it was $50 when I was there and I think it’s more now). So I looked them up on yelp to see if anyone knew what they charged, and it unearthed my favorite Yelp answer of all time.
There is a place in Pittsburgh that seems modeled after Tour d Argent. I called to ask about corkage and was told it’s up to the Captain. I didn’t bother bringing wine.
We have a place in Orlando called Christini’s…great food. They charge $50 for corkage fee. Crazy, but from a business perspective, I get it. They can charge that much because people will pay it and they want to drive people to drink from their list = more profit.
It’s been over a decade, but I used to do tastings for wine people from the Pennsylvania Liquor Control Board at Salpietro Restaurant in Pittsburgh. I seem to remember corkage as $0.50 per bottle (I think it was $1 per six-pack of beer). I would guess this might have gone up if the restaurant is still there, but I thought it quite reasonable. OTOH, the stemware left something to be desired, as in it did not have stems and closely resembled water glasses.
Dan Kravitz
My favorite local place charged $30 first bottle and $15 second bottle. Not sure if the inverse relationship holds beyond two as I haven’t tried that yet.
Overall that’s a very standard corkage policy. Maybe even on the “reasonable” side of center. I’m not sure why that would be a reason not to go back.
We had hosted a wine tasting dinner at “Broadway by Amar Santana” in Laguna Beach once, one of the times that Blake Brown came down to visit the group. A subsequent time I asked about doing a dinner there, and they had instituted a corkage policy that escalated every bottle you brought. Like it started at $35 and went up $5 more for each marginal bottle. $35, $40, $45, $50, etc. (I’m going from memory, and those policies could have easily changed since then, my point is just to address the topic of the thread.)
Which is their right I respect it yada yada (this is sort of the Seinfeld “not that there’s anything wrong with it!” disclaimer we all have to make in corkage threads because otherwise some tedious scolds will come throw that at people), but we of course took our dinner elsewhere and had a splendid time there instead.
This is very well-trod ground on WB, but one thing that has come up is that some restaurants just don’t want wine groups. They put per-table corkage limits (irrespective of the number at the table), escalating fees, and other things which don’t really make sense at first pass, until you realize they just don’t want groups like that.
Many others are happy or very happy to have wine groups there, so it’s just a case by case basis, and sometimes the contortions you see in corkage policies are a tipoff.
There is one excellent place in town with an escalating corkage fee. As a result, I go elsewhere for dinners where we’ll be opening multiple bottles, but still go there when I’m only bringing one. Perhaps that is their intent. It’s the only place in town with an escalating fee, to my knowledge.
I live in a state with no corkage.
Given that perspective, I would be thrilled if every time I went to eat I had the chance to pay $35 - $50 fee to bring my own wine, rather than drink the WAY overpriced wine generally available.
Escalating corkage fees are not unusual, and as Chris notes above, seem intended to discourage groups which might occupy a table for a whole evening, when perhaps it might have been turned 2-3 times in a busy area on a good night.
=====
I see so many constant, skeevy shortcuts in restaurants that I am reluctant to go out nowadays. A bistro near us that we were fairly regular about visiting, went from hand tossed / risen dough for their pizza / flatbread starters to something approximating a Sysco food service variant of Boboli premade crusts. They still have superficial theatrics of the oven, but the actual food tasted like cardboard.
