please help

[Randy Caparoso]

Your advice on picking wines to match your menu is sound, foodie; but as usual, you're offering your typical outsider's perspective on markups. Getting into trouble there; especially since the poor guy asked about knowledge, not about how he should run his program. Wine is a "profit center," but in potentially so many different ways.

The fact is, markups depend upon what you're offering as a whole. So if you're a simple, casual restaurant, offering more or less average food (meaning, you don't exactly have a three, or even one, star chef), then it is perfectly appropriate to sell, say, a Voss Merlot (which usually retails for around $18) for about $23-$25. Reasonable enough.

But if you're a restaurant like Emeril's, or a Rubicon, Le Bernardin, or Charlie Trotter's, which employs three sommeliers each, provides white table cloths, crystal glassware, and is serving world class food, then it is just as reasonable to be selling Voss Merlot for about $39-$40. The ironic thing is, you can't make the blanket statement that you'll be more successful selling for lower prices; especially since these fancy, high priced restaurants are selling far more wine, to far larger numbers of appreciative guests.

Not that I want to get into that same ol' restaurant markup battle. I believe it's been covered in this forum already. I'm just asking you to give a little leeway to individual restaurateurs when it comes to how they should actually be running their business. Common sense, as opposed to cut-and-dried "rules."

[This message has been edited by Randy Caparoso (edited 08-28-99).]