Photo by Greggory Moore.
If you’re looking to drink cheaply, a hotel bar is rarely going to be the place for you. Long ago hoteliers figured out that their guests would pay inflated prices in hotel gift shops, restaurants, and bars as a tradeoff for the convenience of having these facilities within the hotel. To speak in the capitalist vernacular, the market will bear the overpricing.
For all my socialist leanings, I’m a big believer in freedom, from which you naturally get free market—with, alas, certain excesses. Aside from wartime or disaster profiteering, for the most part I feel you ought to be able to charge whatever you want for your goods and services, because consumers are free to patronize you or pass you by. A drink in a bar certainly falls into that category. But an experience at Sip had me wondering whether caveat emptor is always enough.
Sip is the name of the bar/restaurant at the Renaissance Hotel on Ocean Boulevard. A friend expressed an interest in getting a drink somewhere with a fire, and Sip, with its big firepit and ample patio seating, fit the bill nicely. My cronies and I arrayed ourselves comfortably between the firepit and a couple of those newfangled heatlamps with the long tongue of flame flickering upward, and before too long a cocktail server came to take our order. One of our number, Danika, asked for a glass of red wine.
You don’t need to have worked as a server in multiple restaurants (as I have) to understand that such a nondescript order is likely to indicate that the customer is looking for one of the “house” beverages. Aside from wine bars (which don’t typically have house wines), just about all establishments that serve booze have house varieties. Order a scotch and soda, and you don’t need to specify that you want the house scotch and not Johnny Walker Blue, and you can expect your drink to be in the $6 range and not the $40 or so it would be had they poured Mr. Walker’s finest.
But the server inquired as to what kind of red—a perfectly fair question. When Danika specified “Cabernet,” the server asked whether she wanted something “simple, tannic, or full-bodied.” Danika liked the sound of the last, and the server was off to fill our orders.
It was around this point that Viktor complained to me about having to pay $10 for a martini with house gin, and he guessed my coffee would cost $6. I opined it would be half that much—still a lot of money for a cup of coffee, but hey, it’s a hotel. Turned out Viktor was closer: it was $4.75. To be fair, I was brought a pot of it, so obviously the price included refills. I asked for coffee, I got coffee, there was only a single price for coffee—I had no complaints (had it been $8, though, that would have been another story).
But Danika’s wine was a shocker. A girl walks into a bar and asks for a glass of red, and before she knows it she’s received a somewhat paltry pour and a bill for $16.
It may just be my poor-man’s mentality, but it seems to me that once we’ve moved into the realm of the obviously pricy, common courtesy dictates informing unsuspecting patrons about such lofty costs—something like, “Just so you know, that full-bodied Cab is $16 a glass.” Danika—in her early 20s, far from independently wealthy, and desiring nothing more than a simple glass of red—would certainly have declined.
Had we seen a menu—there weren’t any outside, and our server did not provide us with one—we would have seen that the glasses of red wine ranged from $11 to $16. However, on the facing page, under “Happy Hour,” there is an offering of “red wine” for $5. It was well past happy hour when Danika ordered, but I found out the next night that the red wine in question was available anytime for $7. And yes, it’s a Cab.
I told this story to Sip’s manager, who fetched Nusrat Mirza, the hotel’s general manager, and I told the story again. Mirza expressed empathy with Danika, recognizing that $16 is not a cheap drink; and that had Danika complained (she didn’t think to), it would have been incumbent upon the restaurant to refund her money. He said that all customers should be provided with a menu so that they have the opportunity to know how much they’re paying; and that when a menu is not on the customers’ table—as they usually are—it is incumbent on the server to provide one.
“I think we need to train our servers better,” he said. “As managers, that is our responsibility. I’m glad that you [brought the incident to his attention]. This helps us train our people better.”
Mirza asked for me to pass along an invitation to Danika to return to Sip for a glass of wine on the house to make up for her experience. I imagine she’ll accept. After all, Sip is a nice place, a place that apparently will be taking steps to avoid such future misunderstandings.
The old Latin warning translates perfectly today: Let the buyer beware. In the world of potables, you may not be able to find out exactly what you’re getting until you take a sip, but you can always find out beforehand what it costs.