5 Special NYC Wine Destinations to Try
New York City is known for its fine dining, and what would fine dining be without the wine? What follows is a roundup of some truly special destinations for the forbidden nectar in the Big Apple:
Sell More Expensive Wine With a Digital Wine Menu
You’ve put a lot of work into making your restaurant a wonderful place to be. You have beautiful ambiance; the dishes that you serve are delicious, healthy, trendy, and fairly priced. You have a great wine menu and are good at getting people to order wine—but they only order less expensive wine, and you need your restaurant to make more money. If this sounds like you, you might need to be employing more sales techniques to convince your guests to buy higher ticket items. If you feel like you don’t want to jeopardize good relationships with your regulars by being a pushy salesperson, here are some tips and tricks for how you can get your digital wine menu cross-selling and upselling for you to sell more expensive wines, beers, or cocktails. Read more
Wine-Chocolate Pairings: Hitting the Sweet Spot
The concept of pairing wine and chocolate together is a popular one. Considering that the fermentation process of wine involves essentially the same substance that’s involved in processing cocoa beans to produce chocolate, it’s no surprise that the idea of pairing the two items together appeals to people at such an instinctive level. However, anyone who’s been to a handful of weddings – where chocolate cake is often served around the same time as champagne – also knows that not just any type of alcoholic beverage is a good match with chocolate, and the wrong combination can leave a lot to be desired. Read more
Romantic Dessert and Wine Pairings for Valentines Day
Valentines Day is the sweetest of holidays, but for the restaurant business, it’s also one of the most competitive. The best way to get couples into your restaurant this year is to celebrate the pairing of couples with the pairing of romantic desserts and wine. We’re sure you’ve already decided on your Valentines menu offerings, so we’re spreading the love by giving you four dessert and wine pairings you can use on your menu. Lavender, honey, figs and basil will bring love to your menu, and pairing them effectively will make your customers fall in love all over again–this time with your restaurant. The weather may be cold (and with that polar vortex it’s getting colder every day), but the inside of your restaurant will heat up when you serve these fun Valentines Day aphrodisiac dessert and wine pairings. Read more
Wine Flights: Welcome Aboard!
If it seems like moving your wine inventory is a tricky business, you are not alone – but there’s good news: offering wine flights is not only a great way of addressing much of what’s challenging in balancing the contents of your wine cellar, but many patrons love the idea in and of itself. Offering flights of wine is an obvious draw for customers who are interested in wine-tasting – or for those who simply want to learn more. One might even assume, therefore, that the popularity of wine-tasting is how flights first got their start. Actually, however, the concept was invented in the first place with the aim of using faster-moving menu items (in this case, servings of alcohol) with slower-moving items: several strange dessert items that no one seemed interested in ordering – until an inventive restaurant worker suddenly got the idea to get patrons interested in those misfit desserts by selling them with a glass of wine. Read more
Hosting Wine Dinners in Your Restaurant
Do your customers come in and order the second least expensive item on your wine menu again and again? It might mean that they just like your second least expensive wine offering, or it might mean that they don’t feel confident in their wine ordering abilities to upgrade their order. Of course, a digital wine menu can help to educate and inspire your customers’ ordering habits, but here’s something you may not have thought of: hosting a wine dinner. Hosting a wine dinner at your restaurant can be a great boost for your restaurant business during the slow season, and if you set it up right, you can get not only build new regular customers, you can also get those regulars ordering expensive wines with their meals. Here is the step-by-step guide to hosting your restaurant’s wine dinner. Read more
Will Your Servers Make These Wine Pairing Mistakes Tonight?
It’s a Friday night and your restaurant is packed. You made sure your servers clearly understood each of the specials, and that they are upselling things like specials. You’ve trained them to walk diners through each detail and ingredient of your menu, and you even know that they can discuss how each dish is prepared. You’ve done a good job hiring servers who are kind and attentive to your customers’ every need, but, we’re sorry to tell you, unless you’ve trained your servers about good wine pairing, they are destroying your return business and not maximizing your profit. Here are three common wine pairing mistakes that your servers are making right now.
Does Your Menu Hold This Sweet Wine Disaster?
Your customers have had a wonderful dinner. They are loving the world, they are singing praises of your restaurant to their waiter and sending back compliments to the chef—they’re even posting on Facebook about the great meal they just ate. Now, they’re ready to order dessert, and their good mood makes them want a great sweet wine with their dessert. They read the pairings that you’ve set up on your digital wine menu (hint, hint), and they order the most decadent dessert menu item you have: the Chocolate Cake with Buttercream. They’re really indulging, so they also order the champagne, which your menu has recommended as a great celebration pairing with that fabulous cake. They love the cake, and their champagne catches the light as they toast your restaurant. They love champagne. Then, they take a sip and disaster happens. Do you know what went wrong?
Diverse Wine-By-The-Glass Programs can Differentiate Your Restaurant
It’s hard to differentiate your restaurant’s wine program among many competitors in your area and really make it stand out. Nearly every restaurant considers it table stakes to have a well trained staff and diverse wine list so there is something for everyone on the list. But did you know that expanding your by-the-glass offerings can be one of the best ways to appeal to customers and increase your sales?
Having a big, diverse list is great, but not if there are very few by-the-glass options. Many diners want to try new and different things, but aren’t comfortable spending a lot of money on a bottle they’ve never had before. Enter your glass program, where diners could taste multiple different wines without committing to a bottle.
Fleming’s, the national steakhouse chain, has done just that. By providing 100 by-the-glass options to diners, the steakhouse has seen sales increase 4.2% this past year while all their competitors were declining. Providing a diverse glass list can allow you to provide multiple pour sizes as well, by going smaller with a 3oz taste portion or providing a larger 9oz pour like Fleming’s does.
One of the challenges of expanding the glass list is having wine go bad if it isn’t ordered frequently. There are several things you can do to address this and make glass pours more profitable with less waste: Read more