Bring your own meanness 11 October 2006

In a recent Noseweek article, Tim James wonders about problematic restaurant winelists and awful restaurant customers

Insipid pieties about the need to keep an open mind are not robust enough for most realities of our harsh world – certainly not for vital matters like wine and food. I like GK Chesterton’s appropriately imaged suggestion that the point of having an open mind is the same as that of having an open mouth: to shut it again on something nourishing.

So it’s a settled thing with me that most local restaurant winelists are deeply problematic. Even beyond those specialising in Distell wines (Nederburg, Fleur du Cap, etc) in exchange for substantial rewards, most selections are woeful. Mark-ups of two or three hundred percent are unjustified, when the restaurateur can derive no excuse from the expense involved: seldom have the bottles been stored for longer than a month or two, seldom in decent conditions; serving staff are usually untrained to offer useful advice or good service, the wines mostly served in nasty, overfilled glasses.

Consumer resentment seems justified when asked to pay heavily for a bottle identical to one seen on the supermarket shelf for a quarter the price that afternoon. It almost seems an appropriate response to restaurateur greed when restaurant patrons abuse the bring-your-own (BYO) system, by in fact bringing their own current-vintage plonk.

Given these established truths, you will understand that I was somewhat disconcerted recently to have my mind pried open in relation to some problems of restaurants – good restaurants, that is: I gather it is more difficult to make a living from offering good food and wine in pleasant surroundings than from dealing in poorer quality, quick turnover frozen and microwaved stuff.

Mellow from another excellent Italian dinner (and some good BYO Italian wine) at 95 Keerom Street, one of my favourite Cape Town restaurants, I was aghast as well as amused at some stories told me by owner Giorgio Nava. For starters: ‘Every night’, he says, ‘customers steal four or five bottles of olive oil’. Do they perhaps think the oil on the table is included in the bill? Unlikely, and impossible to imagine they think that about the cutlery – maybe Giorgio should think about tying a teaspoon to a table-leg with string for customers to stir their espressos with.

Giorgio tells me that it is not unusual to have groups settling down for the evening and consuming virtually nothing. The night before, a party of six had settled a bill under R200 (with main courses about R75 each). Perhaps one of them was the guy who’d whinged that the mozzarella in the Caprese salad was white and watery (Giorgio flies in buffalo mozzarella from Milan every few days), and not the solid yellow slabs he knew to be the real thing….

On the evening I was there, five well-dressed adults had shared a salad between them as a starter, and two main courses. Then, blandly unembarrassed, they left in their BMW. Not, however, without one of them popping back in: he wanted (out of the bounteous generosity of his heart) to give something to the guard who’d been watching his car in the cold and rain of the street: but he had only a five rand coin - could the cashier give him change?

Both of these exemplary sets of diners had drunk tap water, and, of course, their own wine. In fact, they were only allowed one bottle of BYO per table – a practice that is, sadly but only too understandably, becoming commoner. At least they weren’t driving drunk (unless they’d also brought a surreptitious hipflask) – and must have been hungry too – presumably stopping off to fill their faces at some takeaway, after their evening out.

I don’t know what bottles they brought, but I’d bet it was more ordinary stuff than they could have bought off the lower end of Giorgio’s good and fairly modestly marked-up list. BYO should, it seems to me, really be for wines that are a notch above the cheaper listed wines, to enable people to drink better than they could easily afford with a mark-up. A corkage charge equivalent to the mark-up on the list’s cheapest wine seems reasonable – Giorgio’s R25 corkage is over-generous.

• This article first appeared in Noseweek, 'South Africa's unique investigative magazine'

COMMENT

From wine and restaurant critic Jean-Pierre Rossouw:
I always enjoy this debate, especially when there is a restaurateur present. We are of course relatively fortunate here in the Cape to have BYO, it is not as prevalent in the rest of the country and is unheard of in most of Europe, for example. So it clearly is a privilege we enjoy and we certainly should not abuse it. But it's wonderful to be able to side-step the corporate wine lists of restaurants that clearly have no feeling for wine. On the other hand we should celebrate those lists that add value to our wine culture (and industry) - not just an unjustifiably high profit margin.

From Stephen Digby:
Sorry it's taken me a few days to respond to this article, but as a busy restaurateur, and wine-shop proprietor, I don't get much time to spend "in the ether". But thank you so much for your comments and observations, which unfortunately are all too depressingly accurate.

I am the owner of a Manuka Franchise, a small but growing chain with a passion for food and wine. Some of the outlets have wine-shops attached to the restaurant, and these shops typically stock 300-500 different wines at close-to, or even below cellar-door prices. This is effectively our wine list, and for the restaurant, every wine is marked up by a modest R15, no matter what the wine. Even French Champagne (yes I know I shouldn't need to have 'French' in there!) is marked up by R15. Just as an example, the 5-star Glen Carlou Syrah 2004 would be R190 in the restaurant, Eikendal Chardonnay, 4=star Platter and Michelangelo Gold is R74.

Our BYO policy is R25 - that usually takes the bottom end wines above our prices, so they buy from us anyway, or if it's a 'decent' wine that we might not stock, I even waive the corkage in return for a glass! We serve our wines in decent stemware, white wine glasses are chilled, and at least our full time staff are trained to CWA standards.

But we still get charged that we are 'ripping off' our customers by charging them R15 to walk the wine from the shop to the table! But as you point out, these are customers who share a cup of coffee, are disgusted that we charge R2 extra for tomato in a sandwich, remove "No Smoking" signs from the walls, watch their children throw stones at our chicks, want cellphones charged, paper provided, etc etc etc!

And mostly, being the great hosts that we are, we smile, say thanks so much for coming, please grace us again with your (miserly) presence....

From Ben Coffman
As a Londoner (UK) who has spent a lot of time in the Cape, I look on with great envy at the general attitude to BYO that you still have in SA that unfortunately just doesn't exist in the UK at all.  Here in London, a 3x mark up on the standard retail price is the norm. I have seen 5x and more on some bottles too! BYO is really only granted as a special favour in only a handful of (enlightened) restaurants who charge a modest corkage fee.

A sensible way forward is for restauranteurs to charge a decent, though not excessive, charge for corkage. This should discourage those bringing plonk, but give leeway for those who want to bring special bottles.

Response
Thanks for this, Ben. It's good that we be reminded again that BYO is not a given, by any means, but a privilege that we shouldn't abuse - and thereby put in jeopardy. — Tim

From Peter James-Smith (The SABC's food and wine person):
There seems to be a perennial problem of balance between the restaurateurs who excessively mark up wines that they haven't even paid for themselves yet and the customers who expect everything for nothing. 

Don't forget the table booked for a party of 10 that is either cancelled  5 minutes before they are due to arrive or only 4 people turn up.  Wouldn't it be great if you could do that at the theatre?

At least we can avoid the hefty wine mark-up places or do what I do, order a beer.

I greatly sympathise with restaurateurs and the treatment they often get from a small minority of the general public.  I would find it very difficult to maintain my usual bonhomie faced with such provocation be it the snoep diner, the ignorant cretin or the free meal manipulator.

The customer may not always be right but unfortunately the customer is always the customer.

From J Michael Leuw
The 'rules' for BYO are really quite simple. You do not bring your own bottle to a restaurant that has a super wine list, e.g. Belthazar, Butcher's Grill, 1-Waterfront. Never! Not even special SA bottles. Only growth Bordeaux (or equivalent top Napa or Tuscan, etc) should be allowed and the corkage waived by the impressed restaurateur. I always offer the server a glass. He/she usually refuses.