Thursday, May 29 2008
Hitchens: Mitts Off My Wine!
Put down that Chablis or I'll fill you full of vitriol. And bullets. Lots of bullets.
Christopher Hitchens (portrayed with eerie accuracy above by excellent actor Ray Winstone) has some interesting things to say in Slate Magazine this week. He avers to a restaurant meal he was hosting where a waiter interrupted a conversation to re-fill wine glasses for the guests. His complaint:
The vile practice of butting in and pouring wine without being asked is the very height of . . . bad manners. Not only is it a breathtaking act of rudeness in itself, but it conveys a none-too-subtle and mercenary message: Hurry up and order another bottle. Indeed, so dulled have we become to the shame and disgrace of all this that I have actually seen waiters, having broken into the private conversation and emptied the flagon, ask insolently whether they should now bring another one.
Faster Pussycat, Pour! Pour! Pour!
While many bloggers and new sources are reporting this as a 'vitriolic attack' on sommeliers and the restaurant trade in general, I completely agree with Hitchens on this (plus, I really like the label George Galloway gave him, 'drink sodden former Trotskyite popinjay', to which Hitchens replied, 'Only some of that is true').
In addition to serving their whites too cold and their reds too warm, restaurants where I live in BC train their waitstaff to act like Great White Sharks, cruising toothily, just out of sight, waiting to swoop in and sever the bottle from the table, topping up glasses to within a millimeter of the brim at the first sign that you've taken a sip. It's so bad that I not only request ice buckets to take the roasting heat off of my red wines, I actually purposely move the bottle as far away from the waiter as possible, and after the first pour I tell them I'll do all of the pouring from now on, thank-you.
And I'm not alone: New York Times food guy, Roger Cohen wrote about just this last week.
The kind interpretation would be that, through a gross misunderstanding of the nature of pleasure, servers and the restaurant managers behind them are convinced that solicitude is measured by the regularity with which a glass is topped up.
The uncharitable view would be that, guided by an acute understanding of the nature of commerce, servers are told by restaurant managers to hustle clients through a meal and as many bottles of wine as possible.
He goes with the second. I think it's not that clear-cut. Few servers have a really nuanced understanding of the dining experience. They see it from the point of view of turning as many four-tops as possible in a night, while the diner (me) wants to enjoy the room, the view, the food, the wine and the service, all at a pace appropriate to their situation and their inclination. I'll wager not one server in a hundred has ever thought about the implications of topping glasses for patrons and how it affects their experience (I can say this confidently because I was a waiter, a sommelier and a restaurant manager who trained people for wine service.)
The reaction of the people discussing Hitchens' column probably has more to do with how they feel about his politics than about their deep commitment to defending the wine service in restaurants, which is always going to have room for improvement. Once again the best lesson I can take a way from this is that it's yet another good reason to make your own and pour it in the safety and comfort of your own home, where you can fill the glasses up a quarter of the way and never worry about opening another bottle.
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