A restaurant accidentally served a £4500 bottle of wine. And they handled it gracefully and discreetly (at the time) and have got a lot of good publicity for it.
I remember a big brouhaha about an American restaurant trying to charge a diner thousands for a bottle when the customer had been told it cost tens.
Looking at that last paragraph, it bespeaks well of the company that it recognises that mistakes happen and isn’t punishing the member of staff.
Oh yes:
What a great response! I can not even imagine as a server how freaked out you would be when you realized the error.
This situation maybe? The man thought the wine cost $37.50, not $3750.00.
There was a thread about this.
ETA:Here we go.
Color me surprised that a restaurant as upscale as Hawksmoor doesn’t have a sommelier.
How the hell is a chain steak restaurant in Manchester offering a 4,500 pound bottle of wine in the first place?
And how do you carry something that heavy to the table?
And why the hell isn’t it under lock and key?
Why did they keep it a secret from the diners? I would think they would enjoy it more if they knew they were getting such a fine bottle of wine. (and tip a lot more too, even in UK)
Of course they could have swept this under the rug and not said anything publicly. By tweeting about it and co-operating with articles such as that one from The Guardian, they hope to gain more than £4500 worth of publicity and good will from the mistake. And they probably will.
I presume Bargain Booze made a similar error when the restaurant sent in its last order…
Would have been much funnier if they hadn’t liked it.
It’s a very upscale mini-chain. The Knightsbridge branch offers even more expensive bottles of wine than that.
That’s on the F&B Manager for failing to properly train her staff. Or set up even a rudimentary inventory control system for their beverages. And, along with HeyHomie’s comment, how much product are they moving that a bottle of 2001 Pichon Lalande isn’t getting the attention of the sommelier? Or that waiters have access to four-digit cost bottles? What, if they’d grabbed the bottle of 1945 Mouton, it’d be just another mistake too? Part of being a manager is setting up a system that makes it easy for people to do their jobs, and that helps them not make mistakes.
The labels for Le Pin and Pichon Lalande don’t look anything alike.
One slick one I saw demonstrated, used bar codes and scanners to authorize the product for sale. Server enters the beverage into computer, server later pulls product, scans it, gets a GO code, and serves the product.
Nice score for the diners, although the one time I had a sip of Le Pin, I honestly prefer Pichon Lalande. There was a weird five-spice thing going on in the Le Pin, and it was the over-extracted critics’ darling you’d expect. Still, I’m not turning it down.
Ukelele Ike, I’m guessing it’s an expense account haunt. Similar to other chain steakhouses in the US like Ruth’s Chris, Morton’s, etc…
Ain’t nothing wrong with making lemonade out of lemons.
According to the article in the OP, it was the restaurant manager - on a very busy night - who picked up the wrong bottle…
Also, I very much doubt that a 4,500 bottle would be discernible from a 200 bottle.
Wines like that are usually sold to nouveau riche doofuses, and young Wall Street millionaires who grew up in Omaha drinking root beer.
LOL, they could have done a reverse Folgers Crystals commercial.
I was in a nice but not particularly upscale restaurant once for a work function and we noticed that the menu had one whiskey for something like $900 a glass. We asked whether anyone actually ordered that and we were told, yes, occasionally.
Then that’s a fireable offense, at least many of the places I worked in hospitality. I’d expect an F&B manager to know the difference between Le Pin and Pichon Lalande; I’m not sure if a restaurant general manager would. They hire people to do that sort of thing, if they themselves didn’t work up to that level of responsibility from the beverage side.
(Story Time: I’m watching some championship in the '90s on TV, in the employee canteen of the resort I was working in. I think it was the Bulls winning one of their titles. The team is spraying themselves with Champagne. The assistant F&B manager sticks his head in, sees the action on screen, and blurts out, “Wonder what they’re drinking? Oh, Moet White Star.” Then sheepishly apologizes for being a geek.)
Though I did have a not-quite-as-large booboo when I didn’t double check the golf course guys work in closing the rear cargo hatch of my passenger van, after they loaded my vehicle with golf clubs from not quite a dozen golfers. Good thing we had a very well stocked pro shop…and always double check others’ work when you’re the driver of a company vehicle. I’m still surprised I wasn’t let go for that.
Since markup for wine is approximately 200% this cost the restaurant £1,500. That’s not nothing but it’s not quite as bad as it looks.
200% markup for the top of the list is flatly obscene. But if the rubes, I mean customers go for it, who am I to say “No?” I can imagine restaurants where it would sell faster if the price were raised…
Prices for 2001 Chateau Le Pin Pomerol at Winesearcher. Looks like around 3800-3900 USD bottle is about the average. Or about £2950-3000.
Even a 150% markup seems a touch high, for something they very likely purchased at auction, and therefore didn’t have to deal with tying up their capital for 15 years since release (or even longer, if bought en primeur), nor had to deal with storing the wine until maturity: all of which were reasons restaurants and wine shops would cite as to why a given bottle of older wine was expensive. But again, if the customer is paying that price, and product is moving at the desired velocity, I guess the price is right.
