Every so often, it's satisfying to treat yourself to a meal at a nice restaurant. Sometimes, you just want to sit back, relax, and shell out some cash on a dish that your favorite, affordable restaurant just can’t replicate.
However, more often than not, diners feel pressure to spring for the more expensive bottle of wine when out at a nice restaurant -- even though they might not be able to discern any strong difference between two nice (but differently priced) bottles anyway.
Jay Rayner, a 50-year-old restaurant critic, is here to tell you to stop that practice in its tacks. Per the Telegraph, he recommends that customers buy the cheaper bottles on the wine lists, if only to stick it to snobby wine connoisseurs that try to make diners feel inferior for choosing a less expensive bottle.
Per the Telegraph, he told the Cheltenham Literature Festival: "I refuse to be intimidated by a wine list.
"Wine lists are fraught with problems but mostly because of the b------- spouted by wine connoisseurs. They irritate me profoundly.
"I do not hold to being intimidated by anything in this life and if a wine list irritates you just buy the cheapest on the list and tell them all to p--- off.”
Let’s be real; it’s not like any of us are paying much attention to the flavor profile of our wine toward the end of the bottle anyway, right?
Rayner went on to describe his experience dining at Jason Atherton’s London restaurant called City Social, where he was able to figure out that one of the establishment’s own waiters didn’t know the details of his wine list because it was so costly and lengthy. When Rayner asked his waiter to find him a bottle of Pinot Noir for under £50, the waiter scoffed at him; until Rayner was able to point one out, there on the menu, for £49.
Rayner didn’t stop there though; he also has a vendetta against those who criticize others for ordering take-out.
"There is a group out there who will make an assumption and wag their finger at you and say 'if you don't cook everything from scratch you will be unhealthy’.
"The evidence based on all the academic papers I have looked at is not conclusive on that and it is the home cooks, the ones who absolutely love cooking at home, who can also turn out to be the greedy b-------. So you just can't make an assumption,” he concluded.