|
Somewhere in the first half hour our server mentioned that the owner was from Maine, which in Reno is not a small piece of information. I grew up in West Gardiner, I have family in the town he came from, and the two of us are close enough in age that we were in that state at the same time, going to the same sorts of places and almost certainly knowing some of the same people. So I walked over to the bar and introduced myself, not as somebody who writes about restaurants for a living, but as another man from Maine who had heard there was one in the room.
He was not interested, and he could not manage to pretend otherwise. There is a version of that exchange where a busy owner hands a stranger ninety seconds he does not really have and both men walk away from it pleased, and that was not the version I got. I gave it a minute, let it go, and went back to my table.
This was one of the downtown restaurants people here recommend when somebody asks where to go for something nice, whatever nice means in a city like this one. A friend of ours had driven up from Southern California and we were watching his dogs while he and his friends played golf in Tahoe, so we took him to dinner. We started at Mo's by the River, the way we usually do, and walked over from there. I am not going to name the restaurant. Some people in Reno will work out which one it is anyway, and I would rather that happen on its own than have me point at it. Nothing that went wrong that night was unusual enough to deserve a name attached to it, and that is most of the reason it is worth writing about at all.
One of us had ordered the salmon, and the first plate came out oversalted enough to send back, which happens in any kitchen on any Saturday and is nobody's scandal. The second plate arrived smelling of fish, and fresh salmon does not smell of fish, so that one was simply bad. She told them not to fire a third, which was a kindness to the kitchen more than anything, because the rest of us were most of the way through dinner by then and a third attempt would only have stretched the whole thing out. The rest of what came to the table was fine.
Our server was the one who had to sort it out, and he was the same man who had told us about Maine an hour earlier. Getting the plate off the check took work, and the reluctance was plain enough to see from where I sat. Our friend had driven up for the weekend, and that is the piece of the evening he carried home with him.
The owner was still at the bar through all of it, with a drink in front of him and a friend beside him, on a full house and a good Saturday, thirty feet away with a clear view of our table and of the conversation happening at it.
Everybody at that table was being read
We were dressed casually that night, not sloppily, but casually even by Reno standards, and Reno standards are not especially demanding to begin with.
I do not think anybody decided to size us up. It happens faster than deciding, before anybody says a word, and the people doing it would be insulted to hear it described. They are not snobs. They are working with the only thing in front of them, which is what we happened to put on.
Here is what was actually at that table. I keep a cellar, some of it American and some of it European. I have been buying wine for a long time and I have spent real money on it. There was a Russian River Pinot out in the car. None of that was visible, and none of it came up, because nobody asked.
The cost of guessing wrong never turns up where anybody would see it. We finished, we thanked the server, we paid, we left. Nothing on the report at the end of the night said anything had gone sideways.
The same thing happens across a tasting room
The same guess gets made across a tasting room every afternoon of the week, and it gets made faster there, because the encounter is shorter. A couple comes in wearing shorts on a Wednesday in August, somebody decides in four or five seconds whether they are a tasting fee or a club conversion, and the next forty minutes get poured accordingly. Nobody announces the decision or would admit to having made one, but it shows up in which bottles come off the shelf, in how long the pour takes, and in whether the club gets mentioned at all before they walk out.
I have stood at a counter in Dry Creek Valley pouring my own way through a flight while the person behind it restocked and the owner talked to somebody he knew at the other end of the room. Good wine, well made, from a family that has farmed there a long time. I bought nothing and nobody noticed.
I have been on the wrong end of it in Napa too, in a handsome room with correct service, where the tasting fee was set high enough that the two of us sharing a single flight was the only sensible move, since two full tastings would have run past two hundred dollars before anybody had so much as mentioned buying a bottle. So we shared one, and the person pouring understood exactly what that meant about us and adjusted accordingly. We finished the flight, we thanked her, and we left.
Dom Michael at Baldassari Wines does the opposite. When we are both in the tasting room he stops and sits down for fifteen or twenty minutes, and that costs him the busiest part of his day, given away to somebody already standing in the building.
I have also stood in rooms pouring fruit off the very same vineyards as the expensive ones, where the wine went out to the car with us. Those rooms were not nicer and several were barely rooms at all. The fee was low or got waived early without ceremony, the person pouring got off the script somewhere around the second wine because the script was not taking us anywhere useful, and whoever was standing there was paying attention to how we were drinking rather than to where we were in the flight.
The wine in the expensive room was not worse. In one or two cases it was better, and I could not tell you today what any of it tasted like.
The list was never the problem
That restaurant has a serious wine list and it is not overpriced, which is worth saying because the easy version of this story would be that they gouge people. There is a Mâcon-Villages from Comte Lafon at forty-five dollars and a Bourgogne from Rémi Jobard at fifty, and either one is a good bottle at a number nobody flinches at over dinner. We never heard about them. Every suggestion that came to our table came off the top half of the list, and they arrived while we were still reading, at the kind of pace that tells you the room would like this table back by nine. So we closed it, and we brought in the Russian River Pinot we had out in the car, and the corkage came to very nearly what the bottle had cost us. The restaurant has a reputation around town for being expensive, and I do not believe that reputation was built by the prices printed on the page. It was built by which of those prices get spoken out loud at the table, one Saturday at a time, over a great many years.
The other room
Some time later we started at Mo's again, same as always, and then drove out to La Famiglia. It sits right next to the Pioneer Center and catches that crowd most nights, though we were headed out to the Grand Sierra for Earth, Wind and Fire, so we were only there for dinner. It is Italian, it seats roughly the same number of people as the first restaurant, and it is priced for the same kind of evening out. Corkage runs twenty dollars, or twenty-five if the wine is already on their list, which strikes me as entirely fair, since a bottle they stock is a sale taken off their own shelf while a bottle they do not carry costs them two glasses and a corkscrew.
We had not been in for more than a year, and nothing had happened to keep us away. The place fell out of the rotation the way a wine club membership falls out of the rotation, quietly, for no reason anybody could name afterward, and if they had run a report on it we would have turned up somewhere on the lapsed column.
John Ekizian, the general manager, came over and sat down with us. He did not put a hand on the back of a chair on his way past to somewhere else. He pulled out the chair and stayed ten or fifteen minutes, which on a busy night is the most expensive thing a man in his job has to give away. We caught up, mutual friends came up the way they always do in a city this size, and then he looked after us for the rest of the night.
Their list runs from a Bell'Agio Chianti in a wicker basket at twenty-six dollars up through Barolo, Brunello, and a magnum of Groth, with plenty of Italian reds sitting between twenty-nine and forty-eight. We ordered a bottle off it to finish the meal and carried the rest of it home.
He holds the same job in his restaurant that the man on the barstool holds in his, and he was out on the floor.
What it costs
Nobody at the first place did anything wrong that night apart from the kitchen, and even the kitchen only had a bad run with one fish. Nothing was broken. The list was good, the room was full, the food came out, the check got settled.
What went to waste was the work our server had already done. He had read the table well enough to know there was something worth passing along, and he passed it along, which is most of the job. What he got back was an owner thirty feet away with a guest from his own state standing in front of him and nothing whatever to do about it. An hour later he was the one negotiating over a bad piece of fish while the owner sat there with his drink.
None of this is a wine problem. Every one of those decisions was somebody looking at a guest and deciding, in a few seconds and without knowing they were deciding, what kind of person had walked in. That reading is most of the job and almost nobody is trained to do it.
Watch what happens when a guest asks what is good. Most servers say everything is good, which is useless and both people know it. The rest recite the menu from the top. What almost nobody does is ask a question back. Are you hungry or looking for something light. Have you eaten here before. Is this a celebration or a Tuesday. Two questions and a guest tells you what they came in for. Then you can steer them, and the steering is the part they remember. You can pair a wine to what they just ordered. You can suggest the better bottle without leaning on it, because you know by then whether tonight is the night for it. You can make a recommendation that proves somebody was paying attention.
It works the same way at a front desk, at a table, and across a tasting room counter. Somebody asks where to start and gets the flight in printed order because that is what the sheet says. Ask what they drank last, or what has disappointed them lately, and the next forty minutes has somewhere to go.
John gave us fifteen minutes, and a bottle went onto a check that did not have to have one on it. Nothing was comped, no discount was offered, and we will be back in there before Thanksgiving. The owner at the bar had been handed the same opening in his own dining room and let it go by.
|