Carnage, chaos and cabernet: event planning as a top sommelier

Our anonymous secret sommelier gives us another glimpse into the messy, wild, and sometimes scary world of the upscale restaurant industry

There are empty bottles everywhere and my white Argos fridges have been ransacked (Getty)

We are a month into the restaurant being open, and I’m now fully acquainted with every glaring error that was made in the construction of my workplace. There are small issues (like glasses racks being too high for our shorter waiters to reach), medium issues (like a glass washing-machine that seems to break as many glasses as it cleans), and large issues. My largest issue, currently, is the lack of wine fridges. Instead, there’s wine stored all over the restaurant. Bottles are always being broken, spoiled or stolen.

I’ve been petitioning the directors for wine fridges since I started, but I’ve fallen at the second hurdle: we don’t have any money. Opening was pushed back and back – we’ve spent months paying rent without trading, and I’m going to be without specialist refrigeration for nine months, at least. The compromise has been three white, domestic fridges, hidden under the bar in the smoking area.

The lack of funds doesn’t just affect the wine department: The bar doesn’t have enough glasses for busy nights, the kitchen only has one oven, and the “Events Team” isn’t a team – it’s a second email address belonging to our general manager.

One way to make money quickly, especially in a new restaurant, is events. Events mean you can charge for all sorts of wonderful extras: room hire, staff costs, menu printing. Each of these otherwise normal facets of service are itemised, costed and added to a bill. In our first month, we’ve said yes to every event that’s come our way: corporate luncheons; politician’s weddings; fortieth, fiftieth and sixtieth birthdays; a wake. Events are our bread and butter. They’re the only way we will have money for glasses, more staff and proper storage. They are (as a sommelier) mind-numbingly dull.

The most interesting part of my job is finding the right wine for a customer. I stare at the shelves, or flick through the list, trying to figure out which bottle is like a beaujolais, but full bodied, and less than 50 quid. Getting it right makes me feel giddy, getting it wrong means I can try again.

Being a sommelier for an event is an entirely different proposition. I have already sat down with the happy couple, bereaved wife, or EA to the CFO to do a tasting. Nine times out of 10, an hour of trying wines from across the list ends with the same sentiment:

What’s the cheapest wine you have, and how much of it can we get?

I answer:

House red, house white, prosecco. Done.

Tonight’s event is a record launch for a young pop star. The young pop star’s sound check has boomed through the building and it very quickly becomes evident that the forces catapulting her to fame are her youth, beauty, and thinness. Talent is, notably, absent from the mix. When the sound check finishes, she skips (skips) over to me. She’s been eyeing me since she entered the building. She’s noticed, correctly, that I’m the person in charge of the booze.

She asks me for a drink. Wine? Beer? She says she doesn’t mind. Red? White? She says she doesn’t mind. I pour her a glass of the house white and hand it to her – she looks at me without blinking and asks, in the affected baby voice that got her a record deal, “Can I have the bottle?” So it begins.

The event is carnage. It’s a 20-year-old’s record launch. It was obviously going to be carnage. The young pop star played to a crowd of ten because half the audience was late and the other half were in the smoking area. Canapés have been trodden so deep into our rugs that they’ve changed its colour (the rugs being another glaring error in the restaurant’s design).

The drummer from a newly-successful South London punk band has thrown a punch at the bassist from a long-established North London punk band. They both threw punches at the security guard who was tasked with kicking them out. The guests have drunk the record label’s entire bar tab by 10pm, and the news that the free bar has become a paid bar does not go down well. You can just about get away with selling a small bottle of beer for £8 at a top London restaurant, but not if the chairs and tables have been removed and replaced with angry punks.

Getting people to leave the restaurant after an event is normally impossible but tonight, having turned off the pipeline of free booze, it’s relatively easy. The final stragglers are in the smoking area: the young pop star, her entourage and, strangely, the woman who looks after the restaurant’s PR.

The general manager tells them (again) that they have to go and they finally stumble out of the garden and onto the street. As they do, I notice the bottle of champagne – rare, vintage champagne – that the PR is swigging from. My general manager does, too. Without saying a word, she takes my hand and walks me behind the bar.

There are empty bottles everywhere and my white Argos fridges have been ransacked. Every bottle with a screw top or poppable cork has been opened and half-drunk. The only ones that haven’t been touched are the ones with normal corks – evidently, a delicious white burgundy is of no use to a young pop star without a corkscrew.