Sometimes I have a very hard time believing what I read. It might be the sheer inanity of the headlines of a supermarket tabloid staring me in the face as I wait to pay for my groceries. Or it could be the taglines rolling by on the bottom of the screen on some of the networks. And of course we all know that every assertion made on the internet is true, right? But among the worst is picking up a journal from your own profession, eyeballing a quoted study, and then really scratching your head. Case in point follows. Continue reading »

OK, so I live in San Francisco and, in my opinion, we may soon reach a nexus of having too many wine bars and wine bar themed restaurants for the viable population base. This is truer here than in other cities (New York may have far more wine bars but it also has far more people), and I think we may hit the saturation point soon. Let me explain what I mean by this…

We have a plethora of classic wine bars, which is to say places that focus on wine with minimal labor intensive offerings (cheese, salumi, breads, olives, and other foods that don’t require a high labor cost ‘trained chef’ and team). This formula works, is a lot of fun, and provides great ambiance and forums for social interaction. Though they’ve been around for awhile and aren’t per se that new (remember the London Wine Bar (now closed) in the financial district? Hello..), wine bars have been sprouting up like weeds. Continue reading »

The New Year always starts out with folks wanting to make prognostications as to what the forthcoming twelve months will bring. Financial people look at indicators from the opening day on Wall Street (up 150’ish for those who don’t recall) to consumer confidence numbers. Retailers take physical and emotional inventory of the ‘OND’ (October-November-December) and especially the holiday ‘D’ numbers while restaurateurs intuitively get a hit from the level of consumer happiness they detect in the dining room, the number of private parties booked at holiday and what they were spending, and bullishly anticipate what the first few weeks of the year will bring. Continue reading »

OK, a bit of a rhetorical question, since we all know that the simple answer is “not so good”. I will not rehash bad news for fear of scaring us even more and feeding the panic. Instead, I will say, it was nice to go out on Valentine’s Day with my wife and witness that things were packed- both what I saw peeking in windows, and what I witnessed on Opentable.com when booking. Admittedly a shot of euphoria in an otherwise deflating, depressing world, but it’s nice to know that people will still spend for romance! Continue reading »

Being a sommelier today is very different than what it has been previously. Forget the fact that a contemporary somm needs to be aware of wines coming from Greece, Argentina, Portugal and South Africa in addition to the derigeur classics- Italy, France, and California. They have to be more adept at inventory management, staff training, cont controls and oh yeah, they need to know about pairing wine with food. Not as obvious today as it once was. Let me explain…

Historically there has been a ‘traditional’ culinary order that a sommelier addressed on the floor of a dining room: an appetizer or salad, a ‘main’ culminating in a dessert. Sure maybe a cheese course was fit in between the entrée and the sweet or an amuse was tossed in at the beginning to titillate the palate but the basic architecture of the meal was essentially consistent. But that’s not the case of many restaurants today. Continue reading »