Is bad wine service the customer’s fault?
January 14th, 2009
Wine service.
We wine lovers sometimes like to pick little situations or annoyances to criticize. Sometimes, these topics get henpecked. Foremost among these is restaurant wine service. It’s almost a stock, or formulaic scenario in which arrogant, supercilious wine servers condescend to restaurant patrons.
I am sure that, on occasion, people get a server who is a jerk (or is having a bad day) and some restaurants just have crappy wine service for reasons stemming from the internal culture of the establishment. However, I am at a loss to recall any instance where the server in a restaurant treated me or my party like second class citizens.
Recently, I took my wife on a last-minute weekend getaway to Catalina Island for a much needed escape. After spending much of Saturday relaxing and napping in a very nice room at the Pavilion Lodge, we walked up the boardwalk to Ristorante Portofino - in the hotel of the same name.
We were not terribly hungry and told our server that we were probably just going to have a few appetizers (among those, the black mussels sautéed in chardonnay and garlic butter were excellent). We let her know that we had a special bottle of bubbly in the room and that most likely we would be ordering wine by the glass.
The place looked pretty slow, so when it came time to choose the wine from the wine list, I asked the server which of the whites were most recently opened, indicating the wines we were thinking about having. I did this politely and casually and our server said she’d check and left us.
A few minutes later, she returned with two glasses of wine. “I told him [bartender] that you were concerned about freshness so he opened some new bottles”, she explained with a smile as she placed the glasses in front of us. The wines tasted fresh and we were appreciative of the effort she’d made.
I do what I can not to aggravate the wait staff. I don’t think of them as my servants and don’t like to make anyone feel invisible. For a very short time, we have a relationship while I sit at the table and they bring me my food. So I like to chat and joke with them. I’m on their turf and their guest. At the end of a relatively short period, they are compensated but I never lead them to believe that I am dangling a decent tip above their head in exchange for their fulfillment of pedantic expectations.
There is a myriad of nonverbal cues that people give off on initial interaction that affect - if not dictate - the tone for the rest of the interaction. I think that patrons can be as guilty of this as the wait staff. I try to be aware of this whenever I go out to eat. Restaurant personnel work in stressful environments. While they are there to cater to customers, they have feelings and need to feel that customers see them as human beings.
I recognize that it might be far more difficult to establish any sympatico with a server in a bustling restaurant and that, certainly, staff at big name establishments can get a little full of themselves at times.
The question begs asking, though: how much of the reported dissatisfaction with restaurant wine service is rooted in the types of expectations patrons have and the messages their body language and nonverbal cues convey to the staff?
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