“Right wine, wrong stemware…grimace. What’s your restaurant hang up?”
By ELENA MANCINI
Spending some time in Queens this week dog-sitting an adorable Lhasa Apso who’s short on legs and long on attitude, inspired me to take the intiative to get together with a dear friend from the borough with whom a catch-up session was long overdue.
Image from: http://www.all-about-italian-food.com/italian-red-wine.html
She recommended we go to a Greek sidewalk cafe’-restaurant on 30th St. in Astoria. I was game. For both of us it was more about catching up than a gastronomic indulgence…we ordered savory crepes and Pinot Grigios. The crepes were average and the fillings were lackluster in flavor, but considering that the restaurant was neither a creperie nor French, they were acceptable. I won’t mention the restaurant by name, because their misstep was so inexplicably widespread that it would be unfair to single them out.
What gets my restaurant sensibilities in a twist and makes me want to shake a righteous finger to the poor unknowing or vile uncaring culprit is when restaurants serve white wine in a red wine stemware. The infringement on the particular evening cited was a Pinot Grigio in a wide-bowl shaped red-wine glass. Never one to demand that my wine be served in a Riedel glass (although it is awfully nice when it happens), I do not think implementing the proper glass genre for white wine is too much to expect of a restaurant in New York City. While red wine may be HDL cholesterol booster and king for some palates and the most sold, there is no reason why restaurants, especially in New York City, cannot stock white wine stemware. Without getting deep into the science of it, improper stemware also interferes with the whole oxidation aspect (the variances between white and red can be significant) of decanting, lest you though it was merely a matter of etiquette. And for the record this is not just an outer-borough phenomenon. Manhattan eateries that are not diners are not immune to this. The only thing that gets my inner Martha Stewart slightly more riled up than the wrong stemware is being served coffee (of any kind) in glass….but that’s for another day’s rant…
Please tell me I’m not alone. What’s your restaurant pet peeve? Curious minds want to know, and service-minded restaurants ought to want to know.
