Drink - Victoria Moore is not amused by sloppy restaurant habits
The British temperament is most evident in restaurants: we like to grumble quietly (preferably afterwards, so as not to spoil the evening), but we'll never complain. This is partly because most of us eat out so rarely that we're not sure what we're allowed to expect. It's also because, in this age of food and wine snobbery, we are easily cowed by a haughty chef or sommelier who bullies us into thinking we just don't know what we're talking about.
Well, I have a complaint. Picture this: the waiter glides over to the table, lifts the bottle out of the ice bucket and refills your wine glass with such delicate ease you hardly register his presence. Does that sound perfectly all right to you? What if you haven't drunk any wine since the last time he refilled your glass? What if the wine meniscus is rippling a bare 1cm below the rim of a very large glass?
It's not all right.
Restaurants routinely mark up wine by about 300 per cent a bottle. This I can accept - they have to make their money somehow. But part of that 300 per cent deal is that you get to enjoy the wine. Personally, I don't like to have my wineglass more than a third full, ever. It's overwhelming, and you can't enjoy the smell of the wine nearly so much when you can't swill it round at least a little.
But, more seriously, if a wine is meant to be drunk chilled, then you shouldn't have almost half a bottle in your glass. By the time you get to drink it, it will be warm and soupy. Decent restaurants must know this. I can therefore only assume that the idea of overzealous topping up is to get you to drink more quickly (and, by some indefinable law of the brain, speed of drinking is related to fullness of glass) so that they can make more money when you order a second bottle.
It seems to me to be happening more and more.
Worst of all, it has happened to me in two London restaurants - Neat brasserie and Tamarind - where the bill for dinner has come to almost £150 for two. At that price, you really do expect to be getting near-perfect service, not tensing over your crab zabaglione as you realise you weren't in time to stop the sneaky waiter hurling more wine into your glass. In both cases, the last of the wine was poured, too swiftly for me to stop it, when I'd have much preferred it to stay in the ice bucket, and the empty bottle was thrust under my nose as the waiter asked if I'd like another.
What I really wanted to do, and should have done, was to ask for the wine to be poured back into the bottle. However, not wanting to cause a scene, I simply smiled thinly and vowed never to go to either restaurant again.
It's not just in top-end restaurants that this happens, either. And because wine still comes wrapped in mystique, people think they can get away with anything. Last week, I went to 192 - the Notting Hill restaurant made famous by Helen Fielding's Bridget Jones. Perhaps they think their customers have more money than sense. Perhaps they do. On this occasion, I ordered a bottle of rose - Chateau des Gavelles at £16.75. My partner tasted it and pulled a small face, venturing that it didn't seem very well chilled.
"It's been in the fridge, but it's a hot day," snapped the waitress, and turned on her heel. I tasted the wine. If it had been in a fridge, no one had remembered to turn the fridge on. I resolved not to be put off. We hailed another waitress, who touched the bottle, smiled, shook her head and immediately replaced it with one that was perfectly cool, and which we enjoyed - easy, in the end, but it should have been attended to when we first made the point.
Another sneaky restaurant wine trick is to bring you a different vintage from the one on the list. With fresh summery whites such as Sauvignon Blanc and roses, this can mean palming off older wine (say, 1998 or 1999) when you'd be better off with the 2000. With red wines such as Rioja, it often involves flourishing a crianza for your acquiescent nod when you have ordered, and will be paying for, an older reserva.
It's not good enough. And as long as we keep letting them get away with it, there's no reason for them to stop.
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