Bringing Your Own to Fine Dining Places

[ulterior epicure]

There's an article in today's Wall Street Journal about a number of New York fine-dining restaurants dropping corkage.

A friend told us that the Modern, the elegant Danny Meyer restaurant in the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan, was offering no corkage on Sundays in the bar room.

...

We called Mr. Meyer to talk about it. "Two things that have been hard for people during a recession: They wonder 'Can I afford it?' and 'How does it feel to tell other people that's where I went?' So we wanted to address both of those issues," he told us. "I would imagine that many wine lovers have more bottles in their cellar than they're going to drink in a week, a month, a year, maybe even a lifetime and they're waiting for a special occasion to open them. We wanted to encourage people to enjoy what they already own and at the end of a delicious meal, they can see that the check is smaller.

"We decided it would be sommelier-free and there would be a graciousness behind it, that you would actually flatter us by bringing in something from your cellar to have with our food and our hospitality. We decided that if we did this, we have to actually go overboard to demonstrate our appreciation." And of course, it does bring people in. "My goal is to keep our restaurants busy and to keep our people employed," Mr. Meyer said, "and if you can make people feel happy, give them a full dining room -- people don't feel so good in a half-filled dining room -- that's good." Another of his restaurants, the Union Square Café, next month will begin a nightly program of $10 corkage; that, as Mr. Meyer said, "is really gentle."

Another fancy Manhattan restaurant, Alto, an Italian place with an extensive wine list, dropped its corkage fee completely earlier this year (maximum one bottle) "in recognition of the fact that times are a little bit tough, people are not quite as optimistic and people have a lot of wine at home," Eric Zillier, the wine director, told us. How is it going? "For the most part it had the effect it intended: People had a special bottle of wine at home and they brought it in. The idea was to have people bring in these fun bottles and they are." But there was an exception: "The first night, we had someone who looked like they went to the store and picked up a wine. And they didn't like the bottle!"

...