I didn’t want to either leave it with the server or have to go find her at the end of the meal. To paraphrase Jim Morrison: I was hoping to change her mood from mad to gladness.
Do folks on this board generally tip their sommelier separately? I don’t, even when the sommelier provided significant value to me.
That said, I tip on the total check, including wine, but I’d feel weird handing individual staff members cash. Nearly everyone pools tips for the FOH, anyhow.
Only when they break the cork of my Lafite and knock the remaining stump into the wine.
When we BYO its easy enough just to tell the waiter/somm whatever that we’ll pour ourselves. I don’t recall pushback.
It’s better to be upfront about all these requests early, rather than having awkwardness later.
I never have. It seems tacky. YMMV.
George
I guess I’ve got some s’plaining to do. I consider bringing wine into restaurants to be a priveledge not a right. Even when others behave poorly, I’m still going to try to salvage the experience. Then when it’s over, I decide whether or not I care to spend money there once again.
This is what I do unless I am familiar with the server. I don’t recall any pushback from this.
I still get great service in lots of NO restaurants. Just went to 5 that had great service. I think the operant word here is steak house. Other than Berns, I have had dismal wine service at steak houses around the country and, in fact, won’t go to one unless it is someone else’s preference. They know how to make expensive wine books but not how to serve wine properly. It isn’t rocket science. There are standards for wine service. Every certification I have sat for requires that as part of their exam process. Especially if you have a sommelier that is one of his/her main functions is training the staff at wine service. it just ticks you off even more when it is a special bottle you bothered to decant before you brought it in.
It depends on what the sommelier has done. If he/she has done a service for me, I tip them. They aren’t making big bucks and if they are truly somms, they have gone to great lengths to get that pin. They deserve the bucks.
Yes I do tip.
I learned this lesson the hard way. We have our annual Over the Top lunch, which involves a BYO of around thirty bottles of old wine. Plenty of problematic corks, all the wines needed to be decanted, and the sommelier one year did an exemplary job. There was corkage, and the bill, and we tipped around 40%.
The following year we wanted to go back to the restaurant, but the sommelier was unhappy with the way he had been treated. We did not know that as a salaried employee, he did not get a penny from the enormous tip we left. Although at the time, I was equally furious at being yelled at, since I really had no idea that this was the restaurant policy, now I see his point. So yes, I do slip the sommelier money, if he has done something special.
That seems more like a problem that the business created in how they do revenue sharing/attribution, rather than anything you, the customer, created.
Unless the bill was presented like this, with presumably blanks for the last two, I think its their issue.
Food
Bar/Corkage
Tax
Tip
Somm
I realize the somm was your friend but others problems.
And letting that stuff spill over onto customers is also bad.
Pre-Katrina New Orleans had approximately 800 legit restaurants (not including fast food) and now 10 years later that number exceeds 1400. During the early years of the rebuilding, many of the servers were neophytes. No one complained because it was thought that restaurant owners were doing the best that they could, under the circumstances. It’s a funny thing about lowered expectations: it has a way of becoming the new norm. And with the overall trend of increasing informality in restaurants, service can sometimes seem to be quite a casual endeavor. Wine service seems to have been particularly negatively affected.
Only when they break the cork of my Lafite and knock the remaining stump into the wine.[/quote]
I guess I’ve got some s’plaining to do. I consider bringing wine into restaurants to be a priveledge not a right. Even when others behave poorly, I’m still going to try to salvage the experience. Then when it’s over, I decide whether or not I care to spend money there once again.[/quote]
The attitude is going to be driven by local customs/laws. Out west its pretty easy to do corkage, so places that DONT want to offer it (or have the passive aggressive analog like the French Laundrys $75 corkage) better have something special.
If one is in locale where BYO is hard/impossible/risks a liquor license, then yeah, the customer might feel more grateful for this.
Still, when I see how many restaurants close/shutdown, I wonder if more of them shouldn’t have considered frankly generous corkage policies (Free or waived on certain nights or btls of certain age) as a gambit to stay open.
I took my wife to Dylan Prime, a steakhouse, for our anniversary dinner recently. It was comical how bad the wine situation was:
My wife ordered a Giacosa dolcetto by the glass. The wine was pathetically oxidized, and about 80 degrees. (Why is it that even places that profess to have a good wine program can’t keep reds at a decent temperature?) The bottle had clearly been open at least 24 hours.
We rejected the wine and asked that the next bottle be put on ice. Yes, we’ll wait.
Waitress then knocks over my wine on my wife’s new dress. Luckily I was drinking white.
About 15 minutes later, the waitress returned with a bottle of red and says they didn’t have any more of the dolcetto but this is very similar. It’s some wine from the Marches that I know will be nothing like dolcetto, and the bottle is warm to the touch. We said no thanks and my wife went without wine.
They comped us on dessert – some ice cream with no flavor.
I left a token tip so they knew I hadn’t forgotten.
We walked down the street to the Tribeca Grill, where I mentioned our dire experience to the woman at the podium. They served us reds at perfect cellar temperature and brought us desserts on the house that said “Happy Anniversary.”
Some places know how to do it right. Others…
I find when I’m ordering by the glass and need another glass for the main course, the wait staff is invariably in hiding. I wait while my food goes cold. Grrrr.
Since we’re all complaining I want to put in a good word for a few places where I’ve had superlative wine service in the last year: Racines, Marea and Rebelle.
I advance tip the sommelier/server with short instructions if I want something done a specific way. ESPECIALLY if you’re bringing your own bottle.
where you byob’ing around beantown?
I’ve been told by a few somms that they are paid based on wine sales. But if he’s a salaried employee, that’s part of his job, sometimes there are easier cases, sometimes there are harder cases.
Check the BYOB forum for Boston area restaurants.
http://www.wineberserkers.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=118255
It may be part of his job, but frankly opening and decanting 30 bottles of wine is way beyond normal expectation of service.
And I think most Berserkers who BYO have experienced staff that either doesn’t give a damn, or are actually hostile and make the whole experience unpleasant.
I prefer to treat sommeliers as part of the experience, I am happy to give them a glass of the wine, pay corkage, tip separately etc. The restaurants that I go to hopefully don’t mind the fact that I bring in expensive bottles of wine without paying the true tariff, three times mark up.
Well by all means give 'em a Jackson then! That should smoove things over.