From the consumer’s perspective:
Would being lucky enough to dine there the day the DRC is listed be worse than having to be able to afford five figures for it? I see arguments pro and con.
From the business’ perspective:
I have no idea how much DRC (or Cros Parantoux, etc) Keller’s restaurants sell, or what their balance sheets looks like. If they are regularly selling those wines at five figures, how should they deal with the reduced revenue? Less profit for the owners? Less take home pay for the staff? Fewer staff? Cheaper ingredients? Higher food prices? Leaving that much money on the table seems inconsistent with running a business.
If the wines are just sitting there at those prices, they aren’t contributing to the bottom line and serve no legitimate business purpose. The restaurants would book just as many tables at lower prices. They are like museum pieces that aren’t even on display for the public’s enjoyment. You know they have the Renoir in storage but you can’t see it. Lowering prices enough for the wines to sell would be consistent with both providing hospitality and running a business.
The few times I have had DRC wines, I have found they range from utterly brilliant to really good, and the young ones I have had, have tended to the latter than the former. It’s definitely a wine that needs serious cellaring, and restaurants usually offer current vintages. I don’t buy current vintages, so why would I pay the three to five time multiple to buy them.
Even if the money was not the issue, and I were comfortably sitting on several billions, would my meal be enhanced by an RC, or would I be better off with something with age, the way I like my wines?
Looking through the list, I am shocked at how young the Burgundies are. There is very little there of interest with any age, so if I were not worried about the check, I will have to content myself with a Campari soda followed by a Latour 1982
The wines are young because they sell them. As I said earlier I’d almost certainly bring my own bottles due to the pricing but I very much enjoy drinking DRC and Rousseau at a young age. The 22 DRC and Rousseau I’ve had so far have been magnificent. Check out @Jeremy_Holmes notes on the whole lineup.
Then they aren’t allocating enough personnel to monitor auctions. There’s plenty of aged wine out there at the margins they are asking. Why don’t they take 1/2 of their current allocations and spend the other half at auction.
It doesn’t have to be DRC either plenty of reasonable (at their pricing) choices out there.
Their allocation pricing for the wines they’re selling is likely much lower than their auction cost, also obviously they can’t send flawed wine back to the auction house.
My n=1 was the opposite. I saw no blue chips being opened at all.
At what point do the prices become so outrageous that it becomes a detriment? I was the youngest person in that dining room and I really did have a thought that it didn’t seem sustainable. I feel at some point this “environment dictates the prices” is going to come to head and eventually turn the population away as a whole and then there goes the revenue stream anyway?
It hasn’t seemed sustainable since the late 90s yet here we are. Actually things were a bit crazier in the mid/late 2000s prior to the 2008 crisis and the end of the unlimited expense account culture.
You can forever copy and paste that argument, but It doesn’t make it something to celebrate. There are other avenues if they are interested in some effort.
Thomas Keller is interested in making money. I don’t think per se and TFL are nearly as innovative as they have been in the past, and I don’t love the price increases and supplements but I still find the food and service great, if perhaps not as good as 20 years ago. If you don’t like it don’t go there. Obviously the wine list (and to a lesser degree the menu) aren’t targeted to people here.
That costs money to add staff or takes staff away from other duties. Or takes more effort to figure out how to price auction buys so that they aren’t losing revenue. Why would a business owner do that if they are selling at current pricing?
I’m not celebrating this pricing, only trying to understand it from the perspective of the people setting the prices.
I thought Michelin-starred restaurants (in general) had extremely thin margins and often lose money? They function less as profit sources and more as status/achievement/artistic markers, which can then be potentially leveraged for profit in other business ventures.
TK is one likely exception to that rule as he has almost infinite pricing power.
If a hypothetical new 3* would open and charge those prices, it would be empty.
Totally. If Keller and the team thought that their wine wasn’t selling because they overpriced it, they’re smart enough to adjust accordingly. But, given that their markup multiples have been above-market for years, it’s apparently not an issue for them.
Most people who can afford to eat at a TK high-end place can afford the markup for the splurge, because it’s a special event (see, also, jewelry stores at vacation ports of call). And I’m guessing many of them have limited wine price information. If the market continues to bear that markup, why change the practice? Definitely not because it pisses off WB’ers!
My wife and I no longer give each other Christmas presents, but visit Manhattan bo-monthly to eat at the better restaurants. So yes, we do go to Per Se, and pay corkage, and bring serious wines that would add up to over $12k if they were on the list. They are also several decades older than the majority of wines there: much to the somm’s delight.
The last time we there, at least one third of the tables had no bottles of wine, and the remaining two thirds either had the wine pairing, or bottles that looked to be carefully chosen to cost no more than the food.
I saw no high end Burgundies; the couple next table had ordered Tempier, and we gladly traded.
I think it’s hard to generalize, and if there are high rollers, the people we saw in the restaurant were not out to spend several thousand dollars on a bottle of wine.