ooops

Saturday was my second shift at Masa's Restaurant, and since Alan, the Head Sommelier there, was out-of-town, I got to try my hand at quite a bit of table-side service. Overall, I really enjoyed it, and I had fun explaining the different wines which had been selected to accompany each course.

There are three different menus at the moment, all prix-fixe: a four-course, a seven-course, and a seven-course white truffle menu. The selections of wine are as varied as the menus themselves, and I really enjoyed sharing some of the quirks and special aspects of the different wines.

There were, of course, a few whoopsies perpetrated by me:

First, I was asked to bring a Coke to a woman at one of the tables. For some unknown reason, I poured the Coke into a glass, and then decided to bring her both the glass, and the bottle with the remaining soda in it.

As soon as I placed both the glass and the bottle down on the table, I knew it was wrong. It just looked wrong. When do you ever see a bottle of soda left on the table at a fancy restaurant?! But once I had put it down, I had to walk away. I couldn't very well take it back, or draw her attention to the fact that the very small glass (for which we were probably charging her $10), barely held three-quarters of the bottle of soda.

So I just had to leave it there, and, once she had drunk some of the soda in her glass, I was able to empty the bottle and take it away. Plus, it was a very small, glass bottle, it's not like I left a gigantic two-liter bottle of soda in the middle of the table so that she and her date were having to look over it in order to see each other or anything. But still....

The biggest whoops, though, came when I opened a very nice bottle of Pinot Noir which a man and his wife had brought in with them. Before I went to pour the wine for them, I was obsessing about remembering to pour lady first. So over I walked to their table, and poured a glass for her and a glass for him.

Feeling pleased with myself, I walked back to my station behind the bar. Only then did I realize that I had forgotten to do the most basic part of the wine-pour at the table: the taste. I had completely forgotten to pour a small amount of the wine into one of their glasses so he or she could taste the wine and make sure it was to their liking.

In service, forgetting to do this is tantamount to just plopping down the bottle on table, putting two giant straws in it and telling them to have at it.

I am beyond happy that Alan was not there to witness my little blunder. The best excuses I can come up with are that 1. I was nervous, and 2. I was used to doing the pourings for the wine pairings with each course, and for those you don't offer a taste, you just pour the wine directly into the glass, remembering to always pour ladies first.

Oh well. This is why I am an unpaid intern at the moment. I return for another shift this week to pour again.