One of our pet peeves about dining and drinking out is the insanely short pours served at some restaurants, especially when you’re paying a pretty penny for a glass of wine. This latest example was especially egregious. It happened at the Peninsula Hotel in Beverly Hills on New Year’s night. And what else were we drinking, but champagne?
The first clue that something was amiss were the flutes set down at the lobby bar table. They looked like something you might buy at Wal-Mart, glassware certainly not befitting of a hotel on the level of the Pen. The waitress poured about two thirds of a glass of some expensive bubbly into the excuse for a flute. We called over the hostess and asked for the manager, but instead the same waitress came back and said that’s how they did it there–and walked away.
Looking at each other with puzzlement, and realizing how easy it would have been to simply fill up the glass from a customer service standpoint, we went on with our celebration. One glass later, apparently with a new dose of common sense, the server came back and filled the glasses nearly up to the top, where they should have been the first time around. So we continued with our night of merrymaking, cheap glasses in hand, and later left without further complaint.
