Hello
peeps,
Restaurant
ed. Cath Shone is running a very cool blog at the moment called Restaurant
Referee dishing out ‘red cards’ to restaurants who are using the World Cup as
an excuse to hike up prices and rip us all off. She has an interesting topic up
there today about a waiter at a wine farm restaurant who charged some friends
of hers a whopping 261% mark-up on a wine which they had been tasting only
moments ago.
Now I’m not
suggesting we get into the whole restaurant mark-ups/corkage debate here –
perhaps we should save that one for a rainy day. No, what’s bothering me is the
massive mark-up itself – this on a product which was manufactured only yards
away, has had to go through no expensive distributors to get to the restaurant,
hasn’t had to sit in costly storage facilities and for which the supply could
surely be managed by the most cost-effective means on the planet (‘We’ve just
run out of Chardonnay. Can you hold on a second sir whilst I pop next door and fetch
one for you?’).
I find it
totally unacceptable that a restaurant on a wine farm marks that farm’s wines
up to the same level as a normal restaurant. To me, it’s like a ‘chicken and
egg’ thing – is the restaurant getting business because people visited the
winery or is the winery getting additional sales because people drank their
wine with lunch? It ought to be a mutually beneficial relationship with both
parties out to help each other and I find it wrong when people abuse their
customers in this way.
Now it is
sometimes the case that the restaurant isn’t actually owned by the wine farm
but is independently leased out. But that still isn’t an excuse for charging
normal mark-ups – make a plan!! If I drink a wine with my meal and enjoy it,
guess where my next stop is after I’ve paid the bill? And with so many
restaurants to choose from, do I need to trek 10km down an unmade farm track to
eat lunch unless there’s another reason for me to do so. Not rocket science is
it?
So I say
‘get your acts in gear, wine farm restaurants and sort it out’. Many have
already done that and are either charging cellar door prices or a very small
‘corkage’ type fee and deserve to be commended for it – places such as Clos
Malverne, Rust en Vrede, Dornier and The Duck Pond at Welmoed for example. But
on the other extreme – let’s red card places such as Buitenverwachting,
Jonkershuis at Groot Constantia plus any
others who treat their customers in this way. What do you think – and who do
you know who’s not playing fair when it comes to mark-ups? Tell us all about it and see
you on a good value wine farm soon!!
Cheers,