Are bottles of wine, of any price level, in any restaurant, ever priced with cents at the end? I think that should’ve been a tip-off.
First, this is irrelevant to the point i was making, which was to rebut your argument that the guy simply wasn’t paying attention.
Second, i don’t know how he read the menu and ordered his food, and neither do you. Maybe one of his dining companions helped him out. But if the waiter was right there, and he asked her the price of the wine, he shouldn’t have to check the list. He should be able to rely on her.
I’m not arguing that anyone was intentionally dishonest here; i’m simply noting that your argument about him not paying attention is contradicted by a part of the story that you failed to take into consideration.
My take on the waiter’s role in this situation comes from my own years, in the early 1990s, working as a waiter on three continents, in a few pretty expensive establishments. I’ve recommended and sold and opened and decanted and poured some pretty damned expensive wines in Australia, Canada, and Great Britain.
I believe that any waiter who goes straight to a three-thousand-dollar bottle of wine when asked for a recommendation by someone who doesn’t clearly doesn’t know much about wine is an asshole of the highest order. Even if the price issue was a genuine misunderstanding, it was completely ridiculous to recommend the third-most expensive regular-sized bottle on the whole menu. This sort of thing might be acceptable in a place with a smaller range of prices, say from $40 at the cheap end to $140 at the top. But in an establishment where the most expensive wine is almost 100 times the cost of the cheapest wine, it’s a complete dick move.
While i’m not claiming that my experience can encompass all possible idiosyncrasies of human behavior, my own time as a waiter suggests that most diners make pretty clear to you if they’re interested in a wine at the top end of the price scale. They’ll say something like, “We want something really special; what would you recommend?” or “Do you have any recommendations for a wine to go with this? Something really nice.”
And if someone doesn’t make that clear, there are ways for a good and responsible waiter to offer suggestions without diving straight for the most expensive thing on the list. You can recommend a few, starting near the bottom. You can say something like, “I think a nice, full-bodied cabernet would go best with your meal. In the 100-dollar range, this one here is very nice; if you want something a bit more special, this one here is fantastic; and if you really want to go all out, the Screaming Eagle is best we’ve got.” That gives your diner a choice, and you’ve worded it in a way that encourages him to spend a bit more while also not implying that he’s a pauper or a cheapskate if he goes for the lower-priced option.
I’ve done exactly that sort of thing on quite a few occasions, and have never had any customers complain. The only times when i went straight to the top-of-the-line stuff was when the diner made clear that was what he or she wanted, or when it was a regular whose wine preferences i was already familiar with. I’m not saying that the waiter in this case needed to recommend the cheapest cabernet on the list, but the restaurant in question has 33 cabs between $100 and $300, and another 14 between $300 and $500. Why not start there, instead of being an asshole?
I’m rebutting this notion:
Sometimes people just choose what someone else is ordering.
Hey, I’ve eaten here before and I’m definitely having the lamb.
Great - me too!
And the restaurant probably doesn’t really expect to ever serve anyone the multi-thousand dollar wines. They’re just on the wine list to announce to everyone that this is indeed a top shelf establishment that is the kind of place you could order a multi-thousand dollar bottle of wine if you went off your meds one day, and to make the $100 bottles of wine look like a bargain.
Maybe he asked the waitress to recommend something?
Just out of interest, if you stopped 1000 people on the street, showed them a bottle of wine, and said that it was worth “thirty seven fifty,” what percentage would assume that you meant $3,750?
Would it be great than one percent, do you think?
I remember watching something about a famous high-end Parisian restaurant selling it most prestigious/costly bottles. They said that between the loss risk (wine turning bad, bottle broken,…), the storage cost and the low demand, it was a net loss, hence the sale.
ETA : of course, they might have been lying, and selling the prestigious bottles just because they needed the money.
It would be 1% if, by random chance, 10 people were sommeliers: otherwise it would be 0%
Not relevant. A random sample of 1000 people on the street is going to have very different characteristics from a rendom sample of 1000 people eating in haute cuisine restaurants.
What percentage of people who eat at that restaurant, do you think, order wines costing over $1000?
I don’t see how people could think that he was pulling a scam, given the information we have. There seems to be agreement that he asked for a recommendation. He had no way to know in advance that the waitress would recommend a very expensive bottle of wine. For him to be pulling a scam, he would have had to have hatched the plan when he heard the price. The scam doesn’t work with all prices (“How much?” “Thirty-seven hundred” or even “One fifty”. No scam). I don’t find it plausible to think that he immediately realized that “Thirty-seven fifty” could be misinterpreted so that he could pull a scam.
It’s a celebrity-named steakhouse in a casino in front of the ocean. Knowing just that, I bet I could order a week’s worth of different dinners w/o looking at the menu.
Since when is Bobby Flay haute cuisine?
I think Gus Gusterson sums it up perfectly. It can’t be a scam since such a scam would require knowing that the waitress would choose a crazy expensive wine AND be ambiguous about the price.
My side anecdote about shitty waiters is I was once at a fairly nice Japanese restaurant. The waiter offered the appetizer special (Not printed on the menu, vocal offering only). We thought it sounded good so we ordered it.
Cost: $70.00
All the regular appetizers were $10-$15. Hell, our entrees were something like 30-40 each.
I thought that was a shitty thing to do.
We should have asked the price, but we weren’t concerned since the regular appetizers were reasonably priced. We didn’t expect the special to be many times more in price. And it wasn’t like we were ordering foie gras or caviar or something like that. It was octopus.
That’s kind of a meaningless survey. We’re not talking about a thousand people on a public street. We’re talking about people in a restaurant eating a thousand dollar meal.
And it wasn’t just somebody saying the wine cost “thirty seven fifty”. The waitress also showed him the price list.
My initial belief that this was a scam included the possibility that Lentini was lying. The waitress could have said “three thousand seven hundred and fifty” but Lentini and his friends could all claim she said “thirty seven fifty”.
What a scammer. No one on this board has every forgotten his reading glasses.
It was a thousand dollar meal for 10 people. $100/person is no doubt pricier than the average person spends, but I’d be shocked too to find a $3000 bottle of wine in a place where the entrees are between $30 & $50.
Not to mention that the person asking has reason to expect the ones being asked would assume the meaning is “Thirty-Seven and Fifty Cents” due to no cents in the price list.