There are two essential rules to ordering wine in a restaurant: 1. Never presume the waiter has brought the right bottle—read the label. 2. Always assume the waiter has made a mistake with the bottle—read the label.
A corollary is that, when the waiter has brought the wrong bottle, you can indulge in whatever fantasy of punishment and retribution you desire. Our waiter from Elizabeth on 37th , a very expensive Savannah restaurant that allowed us to indulge in possibly our worst high-end dining experience in some time, is currently being bricked up in an airless hole in the wall like that unfortunate gentleman in Poe’s Cask of Amontillado. Heed, reader, as I recount our tale.
We arrived at Elizabeth at 9 p.m. at the end of a brief visit to the city now so entwined in the public imagination with Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. (Go out to Bonaventure Cemetery, as gently melancholy a scene of droopy Southern gothic as you could wish, and eavesdrop on the tour guides leading their groups to graves mentioned in the book.) We were led to a nice corner table in an old-fashioned Victorian-looking room that Aldo thought had a certain Hush Hush Sweet Charlotte ambiance—not a bad thing, in Aldo Land, not bad at all—and given a nice old-fashioned basket of biscuits.
Oh, you Southerners and your biscuits!
Our waiter, a brisk-speaking young man in thick black eyeframes, articulated a fairly detailed list of promising specials—notably a salad of lobster, crab and corn assembled on a shell of parmesan and resting on a tomato puree, or something. It was easy to get lost in the Escher-like intricacies of the recipe. I ordered it along with a bottle of the 1999 Clos des Perriers Savenniers. At restaurant prices, it was a wonderful bargain at $59.00. I nibbled contentedly on a biscuit, anticipating the wine. Aldo was rather quiet: He had been thoughtful since we had gone by Flannery O’Connor’s childhood home and been reminded of A Good Man Is Hard to Find: He had picked it up years ago under the mistaken thought that it was a “a saucy gay romp,” I believe was his phrase.
“This,” I said, “could be our best meal in Savannah.”
Which, by the way, it wouldn’t have been hard to be.
We had already had two perfectly competent, pleasant meals at a place called Bistro Savannah, but this town did not seem to be a culinary mecca. There were times, Aldo said as we drifted through the leafy gardens, we would have been better off as giraffes. Then we could have stretched up our necks to graze on the moss so lavishly draping the trees.
We each ordered the lobster-crab-on-parmesan to start, with my entrée being a red snapper on a cauliflower flan and Aldo choosing scallops accompanied by a finely diced ratatouille. The waiter seemed to place special emphasis on the miniature preciseness of the ratatouille.
First, though, came the wine. The waiter handed it to me without a word, expecting ready approval, I assumed. But because of my rigorous approach to tasting, and my unstinting adherence to the two rules, I first read the bottle’s label. And, because I am fully literate, I saw without struggle that what I was being offered was the 2003 Chateau des Epire—in other words, a completely different wine and vintage than I had ordered.
I pointed this out to the waiter. With an unchanging tone of authoritative cheer he told us, well, yes, but they hadn’t had the wine I had ordered in the restaurant’s cellar for some time (then why was it still printed in the list?), and so he had brought us one as “stylistically” close to the Clos des Perriers as possible. And that it couldn’t possibly cost more, anyway.
This was rather astounding.
More precisely, this was galling. And maybe even sneaky.
Did this whippersnapper—oh, I won’t hold back now—did this whippersnapper have any intention of telling us that he was going to let us drink the wrong wine? I repeat: This was astounding. Galling. Sneaky. And not what you expect from an establishment charging $30-plus for an entrée. I wouldn’t expect it from an establishment serving cold pizza.
I decided to let him go ahead and open it, even though it was a 2003 (not a great year for a Loire Chenin Blanc). At least the importer was the reputable and highly dependable Kermit Lynch. And the wine was—fine, I guess: full-bodied, apple-flavored, but lacking in the lean, clean minerality I wanted to go with our seafood.
Still the waiter made no apology, even though his slipup was a grave one. (And was he a rogue agent, or following management’s policy?) It was if I had gone to the library and asked for A Tale of Two Cities, and instead the librarian brought me back Les Miserables with the explanation that it was still a big novel about France. He left us to our appetizers.
I wish he had left them somewhere else. What his description had conjured as an impressive feat of presentation and flavors was in reality a mushy fish salad, a seafood glop, lying inert on a frail cheese taco. Both Aldo and I ate it, possibly hoping to find a miraculous bite of deliciousness by the end. We both concluded in despair that it was a disgusting dish.
And now the evening grew stranger.
I was wrong, you see, about the waiter’s cheerfulness. He had apparently felt the chill of my froideur, and now began to try to make amends for my disappointment. He did this by overcompensating madly (and maddeningly), inundating us with wine. He brought us a desperate parade of opened, nearly empty bottles—probably used for the by-the-glass crowd—and offered us tastings of each as “a consolation prize,” as he put it. A thin Oregon Gewurztraminer, a German Riesling Spatlese and Auslese. We were also given a sample of the evening’s soup and a complimentary salad. It felt like what they used to call regifting on Seinfeld. It felt obsequious and cheap. He did not offer us an apology, or even a full free glass. He did not offer to comp us the bottle of wine that we had not ordered. Instead he kept cluttering up our table coming with these “consolation prizes”—a phrase, by the way, that shifted the sense of error from him back to us. An overly extracted Oregon Pinot Noir, some New World Chardonnay. It wouldn’t stop. He hoped, I suppose, to watch us subside into a state of happy, forgiving inebriation.
Instead, we were jerked back to angry consciousness by the food: My snapper was a dead, dull thing resting on its flan like lichen on a stone. And Aldo’s scallops, while edible, gained nothing from that ratatouille. The rat in the Pixar cartoon would have laughed at this gummy pile of atom-sized vegetables.
We did not finish the entrees.
At least, by now, the waiter had called off the wine assault. In fact he finally disappeared, like a vapor on the summer air, leaving a female colleague to approach us about dessert . . . and the check. We rushed into the warm spring night and back to our hotel. But if we had happened to stumble on an actual garden, however good and/or evil, we would have uprooted the vegetables and eaten them raw. There’s something cleansing about a raw uprooted vegetable.
