by the glass

[Randy Caparoso]

Well, here's the sad-but-true story of it: The restaurant business is indeed like any other, except far more labor intensive.

It is, in fact, especially more labor intensive than retail. So if Joe Six-Pack, for instance, gets hired to open a bottle of wine, do you think he's going to do it for peanuts? No way.

Let's look at it another way: If you not only bought a bottle of Beringer Chard in a store, and then went home where someone parked your car, some others cooked and washed your dirty dishes, and of course, you have a specially trained butler to open and serve that dag-durned $10 bottle -- you think you're getting that experience for $10? No, it means you're one rich, silly hombre, who can afford to pay considerably more... voluntarily.

THAT'S what the restaurant business is all about, and even Joe Six-Pack knows it.

Here's another sad-but-true story: Say, a restaurant has a bottle of wine that costs $10 wholesale, and a salad that costs just $2 in fresh ingredients. If, in order to meet their overhead, they have a choice of selling the wine for $30 and the salad for $6, or selling the wine for just $22 and the salad for $9 -- which route would they normally take? Most places would take the latter -- sell the salad for less and the wine for more. Why? Because a cheaper salad will attract more customers than a cheaper wine.

The day, however, when wine becomes nearly as important to the restaurant business as food, this may change. So far, this happens only in specialty wine bars and in some of those savvy wine-oriented retail/restaurant combinations we've been talking about. But the reality is that there are only so many wine crazy customers to go around as of yet, and so in the meantime the majority of restaurateurs will have to struggle along with these types of hard choices -- cheaper wine, or cheaper salads.