The Sydney Morning Herald from Sydney, New South Wales, Australia • Page 51

TWO fUbneaPorninflfralb APR 24-30 2001 11 good living APR 24-30 2001 10 I. i II I I I) 1 IwiB. cum ON STANLEY Private Dining Room For All Occasions Cover story Scott Bolles As well as consulting, we sell pre-written Staff and Operations Manuals to make running your restaurant, cafe or bar easier and much more profitable. Manuals from $385 (also on CD-ROM). Restaurant Start-up Courses every second month (one-day intensive) and Cost Control course for operators, chefs and managers.

Find out more by calling Ken Burgin on 0414 660 550 or check www.prolitablehospltality.com. In spite of the "no smiling" photo in last week's GL (house we believe this business should be profitable fun! Lunch: Monday Friday Dinner: Monday Saturday Cnr Stanley Riley Sts, East Sydney Visit our websites at www.twochefs.cltysearch.com.au BYO headache Our bring-your-own rules are getting more and more complicated it's enough to drive us to drink (by the glass). 111 1 1 :4 6 '-rVifcrW- I il I EASOW ALE ho eto tttMftCI Mlt1 MINI llH.UH,IHte,! KVN10M CN UtAiC ANGl (scnowloMit A119B HAW (jen.1 'MY. "When I first started here in the '50s I couldn't get a liquor licence because I needed a letter from the landlord and he was a teetotaller, so we used to serve red wine in teacups. Beppi Polese "5 7 Xify urn I "1 '-wmjr" ir 1 I A diner with plenty of bottle For many Australians, the idea they can lob up to any restaurant packing a double-barrelled wine cooler is viewed as roughly akin to Americans' right to bear arms.

The only difference for the hapless Aussie BYOer is that the Constitution isn't on his or her side. Nor, for that matter, is the Liquor Administration Board, a spokesman for which concedes "there is nothing in the act saying wine cannot be brought into a licensed but cautions that the restaurateur has the right to set all the ground rules and charges. Veteran Sydney restaurateur Anders Ousback remembers an occasion during his mid-'90s spell at Taylor Square Restaurant when a customer showed up quoting his rights under the law forcing the restaurant to accept his wine. With BYO sitting in an uncharted area in the relationship between diner and restaurateur, Ousback stood his ground after the customer's attitude became aggressive. "He asked if we'd open the bottle and I told him our corkscrews were for use on our wine only and he'd have to make alternative arrangements.

He was industrious enough to use the blunt end of a fork to ram the cork in the bottle." When glassware was called for, Qusback again declined, saying cleaning and breakages were factored into the wine list mark-up, so our determined BYOer set off on foot to a local bottle shop where he purchased some plastic cups. "After he'd finished his meal, had paid and was walking out, I followed a few paces behind and handed him his empty bottle, saying disposal charges were another of our hidden costs." So, be warned. Licensed restaurants can't be forced into accepting BYO. It's usually worthwhile asking first, politely. GIANNI VERSACE 64 --Dn 1 28 CASTLEREAGH ST PH: 9267 3232 QVB, GEORGE ST PH: 9261 2116 Sydney's corkage cheapies bills 2 $3 per bottle Billy Kwong $3.30 per bottle Dragonfly $2 pp Eleni's $3 per bottle Fare Go Gourmet $2.20 pp Fishface $3 per bottle il baretto $1 pp La Goulue $2.20 pp Lunch 50 cents pp Mohr Fish None Nielsen Park Kiosk $3 pp Nilgiri's None Best value licensed and BYO deals Claude's $10 per bottle Elio $3.50 per bottle il piave" $5 per bottle Jaspers $4.40 pp Kam Fook Haymarket $15 per bottle Manna Restaurant $3 per bottle Manta Ray $6 per bottle (BYO only Mon-Thu) Marque Restaurant $10 per bottle Ristorante Italiano $2.20 pp Restaurant Balzac $5 per bottle Sean's Panaroma $3 pp Tabou Restaurant $6 per bottle Tetsuya's $12 per bottle is, if you do it for f.

one and others see you do it, '''understandably' they feel they" should weli. Greg Doyle I 1 1 mi U) Kam Fook ($15 a bottle) offers more questionable value. The upmarket Glebe restaurant Darling Mills may have an impressive wine list, but operator Sarah Adey says part of running a successful restaurant is understanding what your regulars want. "If they want to bring a nice bottle of their own wine to enjoy with the food, even if we don't make as much money out of it, I want to encourage them to enjoy our food. Mid-week BYO $6bottle corkage was so popular we.

extended it to weekends $iobottle corkage." Unlicensed restaurants tend to be more of a movable feast in terms of corkage. There are those such as Nilgiri's, Mohr Fish, Frattini and Sea Cow that obviously believe BYOs have no place charging corkage, and pass no such cost onto the consumer. Rob Broadbent, co-owner of both the licensed Buzo restaurant in Woollahra and BYO Sea Cow operation in Paddington, believes corkage is a matter of horses for courses. "At Sea Cow we don't charge corkage because it's a BYO and think it's a bit of goodwill not to. At Buzo we're licensed; there's plenty of wine to choose from and it's cheap, so we'd prefer customers to order from the list.

We don't advertise it but if someone really wants to bring something special they can, but we charge $8 a bottle. A lot of them complain about the charge but we're licensed and we've really got to draw the line somewhere." While BYO charges at licensed restaurants are widespread, the bulk of BYO restaurants charge between $1.50 and $2.50 per person. And there are a few other surviving BYO bargains around town. Annie Parmentier charges only 50 cents a head at Lunch in Castlecrag, while the Greek-Australian cooking at Eleni's in East Sydney comes with proper wine service for a modest charge of $3 a bottle. There are also non-economic arguments for the slide away from a BYO culture.

Stricter drink-driving law enforcement has seen an increase in sales of wine by the glass. And even when driving isri't a consideration, wine by the glass allows smaller tables to start with champagne, then match wine course by course through the meal, so you don't have to drink chardonnay with your steak because your partner's eating fish. Plus, the purists believe BYO doesn't go hand-in-hand with good eating out, restricting the restaurateur from giving proper wine service such as correct chilling of white wines. Ironically, the shifting landscape towards licences has provided an environment in which a few traditionally licensed-only restaurants want to also offer BYO in an effort to pull in disenfranchised BYOers. Caleb Kilzi, who is reopening at the former Ristorante Mario's site in East Sydney for the second time since buying it last year, says his research shows customers want BYO as well as licensed options, and he'll be offering the service.

Manta Ray at Woolloomooloo offers BYO Monday to Thursday ($3 per person), and even the difficult-to-get-into Restaurant Balzac in Randwick does the same on Wednesday, Thursday and Sunday nights. With any luck the BYOlicensed mix will catch on. Sean Moran, of Sean's Panaroma in Bondi, says it's a "tricky" issue. "There are the Saturday-night types who'd come in with piles of beer because they saw us as just a cheap drinking place, which was a bit of a slap in the face, and regulars who want to bring in a nice bottle of wine. "We've had our liquor licence for about 18 months now and kept the BYO wine option going probably because we were originally unlicensed, but also for those serious regulars." It works at Claude's, where serious wine buffs can bring something special from their cellar and round out the experience with a selection from the restaurant's small list.

Tetsuya's, like Claude's, is a Sydney Morning Herald Good Food Guide three-hat restaurant that still offers a BYO facility. Owner Tetsuya Wakuda describes it as a "gift" to his customers (although one with a $i2bottle price tag). Wakuda says he wants diners to feel comfortable bringing something special to enjoy with his food. So, when you consider we're just about the only major dining capital on the planet where you can still BYO at two of our top five restaurants, it doesn't sound all that bad. If only Sydney's BYO rules were as easy to explain as a BLT.

Try running its local intricacies past overseas visitors and if they're still with you after the "some restaurants do, some don't, others swing both ways" routine, you're bound to lose them on corkage. How do you explain a charge, in some cases on par with international departure tax, based randomly on anything from the number of bottles drunk to the number of people in attendance, even if it's an AA Chapter out to dinner with a single lapsed member? For all its confusion, Australians consider BYO sacred to their restaurant culture, yet it's a quirk that's slowly evaporating. One of the reasons is that liquor licences are easier to come by, particularly for smaller restaurants. David Armati, chairman of the Liquor Administration Board of NSW, says the compliance system is now "more flexible" regarding the provision of toilets, but the real clincher was last year's introduction of licences for restaurants and cafes with less than 50 seats. With about 45 restaurants having already taken up the licence, it is making a sizable impact on the BYO scene.

This a double-edged sword for consumers. Where we can now have a beer or a glass of wine with something as humble as fish 'n' chips at The One That Got Away in Bondi, elsewhere, local restaurants have abandoned BYO, making us select from miserable lists, often comprising the commercial offerings of a single wine company. And there's been a noticeable shift away from the BYO option at many licensed restaurants, an attitude Sydney's longest-surviving restaurateur, Beppi Polese, believes is mean-spirited. "If people have something special, they should be able to bring it along," he says. The BYO charge at his East Sydney restaurant is $7.50 per person, with a $30 a table ceiling.

"When I first started here in the '50s I couldn't get a liquor licence because I needed a letter from the landlord and he was a teetotaller, so we used to serve red wine in teacups My first BYO customers were from the food and wine society." Obviously, not everyone agrees that BYO is a customer's right. Apart from the outlay on the liquor licence itself, restaurateurs argue they face all sorts of costs, including expensive glassware, breakages and interest on cellaring. BYO is a judgment call restaurateurs face each day. Greg Doyle, owner of the Pier restaurant in Rose Bay, which has a clearly stated policy of not accepting BYO, recently had a customer who was given a bottle of Grange as a gift at the table and wanted it opened. "The difficult thing is," Doyle says, "if you do it for one and others see you do it, understandably they feel they should be able to as well.

Plus, we've got Grange on the list going back to '69 and we have to pay interest on those wines sitting in our cellar." Doyle's compromise was to offer the customer a corkage charge equivalent to the average restaurant mark-up. He baulked at the $20o-odd fee. Matter settled, the wine went home. More and more licensed restaurants that once tolerated BYO now actively discourage it. Places such as Golden Kingdom in Kensington and Oh! Calcutta! in Darlinghurst have joined the list of those opting out.

And if you look at the figures, who'd blame them? Sam Hunter from What's Up in Wine, a wine list research company that monitors Sydney's wine lists, says a bottle of Petaluma Chardonnay bought wholesale for $26.87 sells in a traditional restaurant for an average $65 (a 142 per cent mark-up) and in a top restaurant for $91.35 (a 240 per cent mark-up). Buy it in a bottle shop and you'll pay about $42, so even with steep corkage the BYO customer is still out in front. Corkage seems to be the most clouded issue in the whole BYO debate, with outright hostility among customers towards some charges that appear to be plucked from the air. What people often don't see is the value occasionally offered for that charge. Corkage of $15 a bottle at Cleopatra in the Blue Mountains or $10 a bottle at Claude's in Woollahra, a newly licensed restaurant that only recently started charging corkage, at least comes with proper wine service and trimmings such as decanting and decent glassware.

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$1,000 (Includes a complimentary breakfast) Valid 1501 to 31701 Contact the i On site Manager Phone: (02) 6680 9187 Fax: (02) 6680 9205 www.bayroyal.com.au 98Bi 3fo mm 3 a "1 I ff Cheap date: Billy Kwong's, above, corkage charge is $3.30 per bottle. Photos: Steve Baccon, George Fetting and Jennifer Soo..