How a restaurant should handle a mistake

[Chisquirrel]

@Gray_Ghost

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.

I agree. I’m able to buy wine through my restaurant at wholesale price, for tasting. Low end wines are marked up something like 400+%, while even getting into bottles that retail for ~$150, the markup drops significantly. And these are all wines bought through distributors, and nothing that tops $300 a bottle. I’d wager the markup curve continues to decline the higher you go. At some point, moving the bottle (and associated capital costs) is more important than making the best possible profit.

[Quartz]

@Ukulele_Ike

Also, I very much doubt that a 4,500 bottle would be discernible from a 200 bottle.

I can taste the difference between a £10 bottle and a £40 bottle but that level? No way.

@Gray_Ghost

Ukelele Ike, I’m guessing it’s an expense account haunt.

I agree. Hopefully a Doper who lives in the locality can conform.

[DPRK]

There exist people who do occasionally order $10000 bottles of wine at restaurants.

That said, when you order even a super-cheap bottle, don’t they bring you the bottle so that you can confirm it is what you ordered, before opening it in front of you and giving you a chance to examine the cork, taste a little bit, etc in case you need to send it back? Emphasis on the part where you check the label yourself.

[kayaker]

@Quartz

I can taste the difference between a £10 bottle and a £40 bottle but that level? No way.

IME, the more the wine costs, the more difficult it is to smoothly remove the cork.

[Quartz]

@kayaker

IME, the more the wine costs, the more difficult it is to smoothly remove the cork.

Hahahaha! Very true IME, actually.

[KneadToKnow]

@Dewey_Finn

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.

For me, the question would be whether they actually served someone who so obviously already hammered.

[Teuton]

@Gray_Ghost

Then that’s a fireable offense, at least many of the places I worked in hospitality.

It’s much, much harder to fire someone in the UK than in most of the US.

[puzzlegal]

That happened to me, once! I was at a fancy restaurant with my family, and my father ordered a bottle of wine. What he ordered was a nice wine, maybe in the $75 range. The wine came, the wine-drinkers each took some, and we enjoyed it enough that we talked about how good it was for a while, which we didn’t usually do. My mother, who just took a taste to be polite, took seconds.

A while later, the sommelier came by to tell us that they had made a mistake – the wine my dad ordered was new to the menu, and they had brought us something with a similar name but a much higher price tag. That was maybe 3 decades ago, and I don’t remember the price, but we were all impressed.

The sommelier went on to assure us that since it was their error, we would be charged for what we had ordered, but they wanted us to appreciate what we were drinking. We assured him that we were.

Honestly, I was surprised then and am still surprised now that we liked it so much, because I would not expect price to correlate with “everyone likes it” at that level. But we did.