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In The New York Times, Eric Asimov details a growing trend in the restaurant business of eliminating the sommelier. This trend will prove temporary for real fine dining establishments, or they will be closed and replaced by private clubs, as many fine diners know about as much about wine as they do about food, which is to say, very little. Today, the amount of wine to sort through is vast, and without a guide, most diners will be incapable. Asimov writes:
Restaurants are bustling and dining rooms are buzzing. If you want a reservation at the newest and hottest places, you are out of luck unless you know somebody.
On the surface it seems that restaurants have safely emerged from the despairing depths of the Covid pandemic and the throbbing hangover that followed. Yet one key element that seemed essential in any serious restaurant before 2020 is often missing: the sommelier.
Wine is still poured at many tables. But the dedicated wine professional responsible for selecting and procuring bottles, assembling an intriguing list, training the staff, assessing a table and telling stories that turn otherwise unknown bottles into delicious adventures — those people are rarely strolling the dining room.
For many restaurants, the sommelier is now a luxury, nice to have but expendable in the blunt calculations of the post-pandemic restaurant model. The highest end restaurants seem unaffected — diners at Le Bernardin in New York will still be greeted by a smiling Aldo Sohm and his team of ace sommeliers in their black aprons with silver tastevins.
But underneath dining’s stratospheric level, many serious, wine-oriented restaurants are doing without. Instead, those positions once dedicated to wine are now often hybrids with servers, bartenders or managers handling wine in addition to their other duties.
Sometimes, consultants manage lists and train servers to at least have a perfunctory idea of what they are now tasked with selling. The training job might even be farmed out to distributors who sell wine to restaurants. As a result, many wine lists seem not only more expensive but shorter, simpler and less inventive.
“Not so many wine lists are curated, and wine-by-the-glass lists have less precision,” said Étienne Guérin, a former wine director at M. Wells in Queens and Gage & Tollner in Brooklyn, who is now retail manager at Sotheby’s Wine on the Upper East Side.
Cedric Nicaise, a sommelier who is now an owner of the Noortwyck in Greenwich Village, said wine lists were less creative and more “generic-looking.”
Read more here.
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