[wine] Next week, bad diners

Greetings, Any interest in meeting next week? Warren's putting together something at Strip Club, no idea when. Manny's is waving the corkage. Ngon was fantastic. Haven't been to Jay's (or anywhere else) in a long time. If there any interest, I'll put something together. Cheers, Jim Oh, and don't be these guys. Bay Area diners' behavior grabs attention Stacy Finz, Chronicle Staff Writer Thursday, April 9, 2009 Diners have been known to gripe and moan about restaurant service. In fact, many surveys show it as the No. 1 complaint about eating out. "He didn't refill my water glass fast enough." "She got my order wrong." "What does it take to get a little attention in this place?" The list goes on. Well, here's a little newsflash, diner: You're no peach, either. It's not because of paltry tips or lousy attitudes, restaurateurs say. Those they can handle. It's the recent spate of weird antics - pole dancing in a crowded dining room, sex in the bathroom and raucous feuding - that has restaurant workers scratching their heads. "It's not everyone," says Frank Klein, owner of San Francisco's Fish and Farm and a national restaurant consultant. "But over the past couple of years there seems to be this sense of entitlement. There are people who are so rude. And it's not just me. I've talked to consultants across the country who have noticed that diners have become more disrespectful and aggressive. It's a shame, because it puts a damper on other diners' good times." Some chalk it up to a generation raised on Facebook, Twitter and reality television, where narcissism and bad behavior is not only accepted, it's encouraged. Katheryn Twiss, a food archaeologist and an assistant professor at Stony Brook University in New York, says etiquette gets redefined with the times. "Ancient Romans were OK with belching and vomiting at the table," she says. Now no one thinks twice about cell phone calls, texting or holding a table for hours, while others wait. And society seems to have put a premium on being the center of attention. "Infamy and celebrity is sort of currency today," Twiss says. Perhaps that's what emboldens some people to make a scene in the middle of a fancy restaurant. Klein remembers the grandaddy of all outbursts at Fish and Farm a few months ago. A patron broke the owner's $2,700 plate-glass window with a bottle of wine she was brandishing while yelling at the top of her lungs at her significant other. "I think she was calling him an a- at the same exact time the bottle slipped through her fingers," Klein remembers. She paid the bill, wrote a check for the window and left. The rest of the diners got one heck of a show. "We're paying a lot less attention to how we eat in the sense of manners than what we eat," Twiss says. "In some corners it's more acceptable to be drunk and horny in public than to be overweight and eating Mallomars." Yes, there is the sex. Charlie Hallowell of Pizzaiolo in Oakland says at least once a year his bathroom sink gets ripped out of the wall by folks who couldn't make it home or to a hotel. The Oakland restaurateur says he loves his customers, but he's seen some doozies. There was the woman who brought her own Coke - that's Coca Cola - to the restaurant. (We'll get to the other kind of coke later.) "She offered to pay a corkage fee, but I told her she couldn't do it again," says Hallowell, adding that he doesn't serve cola because he abhors anything with high fructose corn syrup. So BYOC - bringing your own Coke - is forbidden. But the Coke lady didn't get the hint and tried to smuggle in bottles on other visits. Hallowell booted her from the restaurant. Possibly Hallowell's most memorable moment was when "some guy came in with a (woman) who proceeded to get very drunk and started pole dancing in the middle of the dining room." Word has it, the pillar near the restaurant's bar is quite accommodating for this sort of activity. Nick Peyton, now co-owner of Cyrus in Healdsburg, remembers a woman who wore a wrap dress to the Dining Room at the Ritz-Carlton and, little by little, became unwrapped as she nuzzled with her boyfriend in the middle of the restaurant. "She was wearing very few undergarments," Peyton says. At Cyrus, his patrons manage to keep their clothes on. Some even come a little overdressed. "We have three people who have been here at least four times," he says. "They come in down parkas, like for zero-degree weather, woolen caps and gloves. Then they complain that it's still too cold." In Los Angeles they don't wear coats, just their latest plastic surgery. Sommelier Paul Einbund recalls working at a restaurant there, where one diner's lips had been so pumped full of collagen she couldn't eat her soup. "She would hold the spoon to her mouth and it would just dribble down her chin," he says. "Finally, she just started lapping it up with her tongue like a little puppy." Einbund says the L.A. restaurant scene used to be legendary for more than just its food. Supposedly a lot of meals started with an amuse bouche - a line or two of cocaine in the bathroom. Einbund says L.A. is over its little obsession with the powder. Still, he recalls not too long ago at San Francisco's Coi, where he worked, a guy coming in with two beautiful women - one on each arm. They sat in the lounge smooching, sporadically going to the bathroom two at a time. Einbund suspects they needed privacy for some illicit activity. Restaurant workers in general can only grumble; it's not like they can prove that a crime has been committed. But, not everyone in the business is complacent about it. As one San Francisco line cook so poetically tweeted on Twitter: "Dear douche bags, please stop doing coke in the Nopa bathroom. Thank you." Coming Sunday in Food & Wine: Cooking with spring's young vegetables. E-mail Stacy Finz at sfinz(a)sfchronicle.com. http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/04/09/DDFT16SDJ3.DTL This article appeared on page E - 1 of the San Francisco Chronicle -- ------------------------------ * Dr. James Ellingson, jellings(a)me.umn.edu * * University of Minnesota, mobile : 651/645-0753 * * Great Lakes Brewing News, 1569 Laurel Ave., St. Paul, MN 55104 *