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East Boston restaurant wants to sell entire bottles of wine; city councilor, police oppose idea
By adamg on Wed, 04/05/2017 - 1:46pm
The Boston Licensing Board tomorrow decides whether to let Bohemios Restaurant, 30 Bennington St., sell entire bottles of wine to customers, rather than individual servings.
Bottle service is normally something only nightclubs in places such as the Theater District seek, to sell entire bottles of hard liquor to a table.
At a hearing today, restaurant owners said they want to offer more varieties of wine to their customers, but the problem is that they don't have enough demand every night, so if they opened a bottle to serve a couple of drinks, it would only be good for a couple days and then they'd have to pour it out, losing them money. Currently, the restaurant only offers three types of wine in single-serve bottles.
An aide to City Councilor Sal LaMattina said the counselor is all in favor of tiny single-serve wine bottles but that he and the local Boston Police district would oppose selling an entire bottle of wine to a table because it would just let patrons get even drunker faster.
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Comments
Oh come on
Bottle service at a nightclub is nothing like selling a bottle of wine at a restaurant. Plenty of restaurants are able to sell bottles to their customers. What makes the police and city councilor think that this one should be different?
More to the point
Why are the police and the city councilor presumed to be correct in their objections to this plan?
Is this not a thing in Boston?
I thought it was fairly normal for restaurants to sell wine by the bottle? I could swear I have seen this in Boston in neighborhoods like the South End, but perhaps I am somehow misremembering.
If the board is going to deny the ability to serve bottles at one restaurant (especially one in a lower-income part of town) while letting downtown bistros pop bottles all night long, they better have a very good justification beyond "sometimes people get drunk."
The restrictive rules about alcohol in Boston are annoying. But the arbitrary and discretionary way the city and state apply the rules are flat out unjust.
It IS a thing in plenty of
It IS a thing in plenty of restaurants in Boston. I ordered a bottle of wine at dinner last week.
Genuinely don't understand this argument from the city councilor/police.
I'm gonna play the SES card
Every nice restaurant in the city sells wine by the bottle. Because this place has a clientele that are not rich mucky-mucks, then different rules apply to them? I call bullshit!
P.S. Buying a bottle of wine is NOT "bottle service".
That side of Bennington
That side of Bennington street has a couple of whole in the wall bars, several stabbings have occurred in the past years near or outside of these bars, this part of Bennington Street is a "Problem Block" especially when there are high profile soccer matches being showed at these bars, people gather outside and then start fights ending in stabbing like several that happened in the past summer. As a longtime East Boston resident, I really think there are far too many restaurants in that immediate area with liquor licenses, mind you, there are residents who reside on that block of Bennington street , how would one react if there are a pack of drunks pouring out at 1 in the morning walking up Bennington or driving drunk in a residential neighborhood potentially harming or killing someone driving or walking home late at night, please, I'm definitely against this idea, East Boston is a community please don't treat it like if it were Marci grad in New Orleans.
I've lived in East Boston for
I've lived in East Boston for 20 years and I have never known of a stabbing after the soccer games... yes we see Bennington Street get packed with young people screaming and chanting because some team in South America won but I have never seen an act of violence during these celebrations!!! Yes stabbing have happened on Bennington Street and in fact in different neighborhoods in Boston but those are things that have been controlled by the police in the past years and their doing a great job at identifying the wave of violent crimes that have summerged!!!
Argument against makes no sense
So we need our City Councilor policing how much wine patrons decide to consume? No thank you, we are adults. Please let the restaurant work in peace.
WABAC machine
Wowzers, it was 9 years ago almost to the day that I posted a blog about how Boston and South Carolina developed asinine blue laws simultaneously and mirroring. When I was there in the late 1960s...by cracky, I had an onion on my belt, which was the style at the time...SC only allowed sale of booze in mini-bottles, a.k.a. airline bottle.
Selling whole bottles was OK. Selling individual drinks was against the blue laws. The only other legal option was to brown bag a bottle of hooch, check it was the waiter, who allegedly put it in a locker, and then pay an absurd amount of money for a "setup," the ice, soda or other mixer.
This silliness reminds me of that silliness.
Fur chrissakes, let the people be adults and make reasonable business decisions. The owners have rational ideas on how to please customers without wasting a lot.
Very good move by the police and councilor
This kind of wanton disregard for civic mores could lead to dancing.
Except that, in Boston, allowing dancing
on a business premises requires an entirely separate license.
If my memory of film history is correct
...they might leave the premises and dance in the street, which would cause a car to crash into a fruit vendor's cart
To say nothing of
the plate glass window being carefully carried across the street when the car goes careening through it.
The guys carrying ladders
Might then turn back and forth seeking the source of the hubbub and causing further pandemonium.
Or lead to
uttering.
Guys, here's the thing. It's
Guys, here's the thing. It's usually as simple as a couple loud neighbors don't want something cuz of X,Y,Z nimby reason, so the district councilor will oppose said thing. If people supporting said thing also emailed and called the councilor in support, he/she would probably not oppose said thing. Not getting into right or wrong, just saying that's how 99% of these things go down.
Ever since when was buying a
Ever since when was buying a bottle of wine for the table considered to be some crazy thing??? I have been to many restaurants where they had listings by the bottle and by the glass. Heavens I've even been to suburban casual dining restaurants that brought over pitchers of sangria! "Balls" of beer! Don't tell me there are tables without bottles on them in the North End right now as we speak.
Now the problem could be with this particular establishment and their interactions with the surrounding community. Which is perfectly ok but, that is why we have hearings , right?
There's something missing in this article
Is "bottle service" at a nightclub, a whole bottle of distilled spirits at the table, the same license that allows bottles of wine to be sold?
Practically every restaurant in Boston with a liquor license sells wine by the bottle.
Is Bohemios licensed as a restaurant or a nightclub?
Something just doesn't make sense here.
You can definitely get
You can definitely get bottles of wine in restaurants in Boston.
What this sounds like isn't buying a bottle of wine and drinking it at the restuarant, but buying a bottle of wine and taking it home with you if you don't finish it. That would be unusual (and possibly violate open container laws).
There's a simple, cheap solution to this problem, and it's
called VacuVin. Serve wines by the glass, use a bunch of two-dollar air-evacuation stoppers (after you've bought a $9 pump once) on your unfinished bottles, refrigerate them overnight, and voila! Your licensing problem goes away That little rubber dingus will extend the shelf life of an open wine from a few days to a week or more, mostly crushing your feared shrinkage issue. Some serious wine bars install expensive inert-gas systems to protect their open wines from oxidation and spoilage, but you needn't go that far.
I'm often horrified that many fancier places don't bother with this dead-simple measure. I had a couple of glasses of rotten wine at self-styled wine bar and crap national chain steakhouse Fleming's in Park Square, then figured out why when I visited at the beginning of a dinner service. They don't bother to protect their BTG wines, just stick corks back in the unfinished ones at the end of the night. It doesn't take those wines very long to spoil. It's a lot like leaving milk open on the counter. It's a live food: bacterial ferment will make it undrinkable within a few days. (Not sure why, but reds seem to go off quicker than whites.)
I've decided this ignorance of how quickly wine disintegrates is why many people hate vermouth: they treat it like spirits, leave an open bottle sitting on their home bar for months or years, and wonder why it smells and tastes like ass rubbed with moldy gym socks. Fortification gives vermouth a slightly longer shelf life, but it still goes unpleasantly funky in a matter of weeks. I VacuVin and refrigerate my unfinished bottles of still wine, vermouth and other fortified wines, and you should, too. (Air-evacuation stoppers don't work with sparklers: you just need to finish those puppies in one sitting.)
Aside: the assertion that people can't take home half-finished bottles of wine in Boston is false. That issue was resolved a few years ago. The restaurant has to package the wine properly to go: they have to put the cork back in, put it in a paper or plastic bag, and staple the bag closed with a copy of the meal's bill attached to prove to any authorities you might meet on the way home that you aren't violating open-container laws. I have done this many times at Boston restaurants that know this rule and are prepared for it (not all are). It's very useful when I want to get a glass or two of wine that's not on the by-the-glass list but don't want to finish a whole bottle. It's good for the restaurant, too.
I've been hearing some
I've been hearing some restaurants are installing "wine machine" , for lack of a better term. Maybe wine kegs? Where the wine is dispensed by the glass from a spigot and the machine takes care of the rest. I am sure only certain wine companies participate in this but it sounds like it could be a good solution for those restaurants that do not have a ton of selection and are afraid of opening too many bottles.
Offensively wrong
"Bottle service" in a restaurant isn't the same thing as bottle service in a club. I can't understand how the writer could make that ludicrous claim in good faith. It's a totally normal practice in many dining establishments.
Also, the fact that they're arguing about serving full bottles of wine to clienteles in Eastie is a BIG red flag; no problem serving to Back bay, North End people etc. but in a less gentrified area? They say hell no.
Bottle service
"Bottle service" in a restaurant isn't the same thing as bottle service in a club.
It is in Boston, which has many strange and wondrous rules related to the sale and service of alcohol.
Bohemios already has a license to sell beer and wine (and liqueurs). Here is the agenda for the licensing board's meeting yesterday. Scroll down to item 10:
Eastie Restaurant's Sale of "Full Bottles of Wine"
Boston's "solution" to problem bars is to block off traffic at bar closing time. That's just stupid! Shut the bar down and set a rule on how many such establishments can operate in already congested areas.
Bars where patrons tend to overheat (& overdrink) when their sports team wins/loses should be penalized for their lack of supervision. You DO NOT block/penalize new, well-run establishments for what happens in the bad joints. That's a form of racial profiling that City Council Prez Michelle Wu should be addressing.
BTW, "bottle service" applies only to the sale of whole bottles of liquor. As far as I know, this is not allowed in Massachusetts. On the other hand, full and half-size bottles, as well as wine by-the-glass is what a wine and beer license is all about.
Lastly, all neighborhoods and all restaurants - whether a 4-Star establishment or simple pizza joint - should have equal access to alcoholic beverage licensing.