The Corkage Policy at Restaurant Gougé

Recently, there has been some grumbling in the press about the corkage fees here at the World Famous Restaurant Gougé. While we do not feel that we need to justify the $150 corkage fee, Restaurant Gougé is the proud recipient of Three Michelin Tires as well as the prestigious Just for Men® Beard Award after all, we did feel the need to clarify our generous corkage policy. Just so you’ll shut the hell up.

First of all, Restaurant Gougé is under no obligation to allow any patron to bring in his own bottle of wine. What the hell is wrong with you? We’re trying to make money, and you’re bringing in some poorly stored, overpriced trophy wine from your own collection? We have an award-winning wine list filled with poorly stored, overpriced trophy wines! We don’t need yours. And then you expect us to charge you only $25 for the privilege of serving you your own bottle of wine as some kind of thank you for choosing us for your special occasion? How about this? We take $25 off the cost of your meal and then we get to open your “special occasion” wine and pour it down the sink. That’s pretty much what you’re doing anyway when you serve it to your idiot friends, only now, at least, you get $25 out of it. That works for us. Hey, $25 is two martinis that cost us $6 in ingredients—we’re fine with that.

Our generous corkage fee helps us to employ the many sommeliers who work here at Restaurant Gougé. Many have initials after their name, like M.S., or C.S.W. or LOL. These men and women work for virtually nothing so that one day they'll be able to add Restaurant Gougé to their résumé. It’s really cool. We get to pay salaries far below industry standard just because we’re such a famous restaurant and these clowns hope our misplaced good fortune will rub off on them. We’re proud to be known as the industry’s premiere Sweat Shop of Sommeliers, and your generous corkage fee contributions go a long way to sustaining this indispensable form of sommelier slavery. When you pay the corkage fee at Restaurant Gougé, you can sleep peacefully knowing that somewhere a sommelier is being vastly underpaid thanks to your reverence for our dining establishment. Surely, there is no way to measure in dollars what that’s worth. At Restaurant Gougé, we solemnly promise that not one single penny of your $150 corkage fee will see the inside of a sommelier’s pocket! It goes straight to our bottom line with no regard for the folks serving you, just as it should. You have our word.

There are enormous costs involved in having a great wine list. When you are widely acknowledged as one of the great dining establishments in the world, you simply cannot serve pedestrian wines. Not unless you’ve gone to the trouble to find them encased in bottles with very fancy and famous labels. At Restaurant Gougé, we promise that every great bottle of wine on the list is authentic enough to fool any auction house expert regardless of what’s actually inside it. Can you say that about your own wines, even the ones you bought at some shady New York auction house? And even if you don’t care about that, what about us? We’re running an upscale restaurant, world famous, patronized by some of the biggest food and wine fame fuckers you could ever imagine, do you think we can afford to have those bozos see us opening your lame old bottle of Sterling Cabernet and setting on the table?! Are you nuts? Might as well just fart the opening eight bars of Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody.”

There are some restaurants that will list all the expenses involved in running a great wine program—the cost of storage, the ridiculously costly inventory, the expensive stemware, the salaries of the sommeliers—and say those costs justify their exorbitant corkage fee, but that’s just a smoke screen. It’s like saying the food is expensive because we have to pay for all those goddamned plates we serve it on, and have you seen the cost of knives and forks! The Chinese are right! No, here at Restaurant Gougé we make no claims that our corkage fee is based on anything other than greed, vanity, and contempt--the very qualities that personify our best, most regular clients. Sure, we could charge a lot less than $150 to open your wine, but what sense does that make? You didn’t make a reservation with us to get a bargain! You dine with us for the ambience, for the experience, for the bragging rights. The big dinner tab at the end of the meal is critical to your enjoyment, and you know it. Tacking on a mere $25 is a slap in the face, and that’s not how we treat our clients. We respect you, and your ability to cough up $125 for the privilege of having our sommelier turn up his nose at your measly little wine. We wouldn’t have it any other way. Your needs always come first at Restaurant Gougé.

If you are mortally offended by restaurant corkage fees, we encourage you to vote with your wallet. Sadly, those of you who complain about our $150 corkage policy have little girls’ wallets and no one here gives a tasty Samoa’s sphincter how you vote. There are countless restaurants with countless corkage policies, but they’re not Restaurant Gougé. Go ahead, write a scathing review about us on Yelp. OOOH, we’re shaking. Yelp is just pinheads talking to other pinheads, a carnival sideshow of sadly deformed humans making a public spectacle of themselves. We’re Restaurant Gougé, we’re review proof now. The more the little people complain, the more the 1% want to be here, away from your lousy table manners and sentimental cheapass celebratory bottles. They don’t want to see you dining in their restaurant, they want to see you busing the tables, washing the dishes, and carefully fetching their Teslas from the valet lot. So please gripe about our corkage policy, gripe as often as you like. It’s exactly what we want.

We hope to see you soon at Restaurant Gougé! Remember, we're not happy unless you're not happy!

Valentine's Day at Restaurant Gougé

It’s almost Valentine’s Day. Don’t panic. There are still plenty of tables available here at Restaurant Gougé, and we’ve got something very special planned for you and your Valentine. Chef Juan Toque Oberdelein has created a special menu, which will be paired with wines from our famous Wine Spectator Grand Award of Markup Excellence. Restaurant Gougé is very proud of our wine list, which has received countless kind reviews on Yelp.

“When we asked Sommelier Larry Anosmia, MS for a Champagne recommendation, he asked if I was going to use it to christen the old tugboat I was with. Nice touch.”—Barry M. Enema

“I didn’t recognize a single bottle of wine on the list. When I mentioned that to the sommelier, he said I should be grateful not to know how much the wines were marked up. ‘Imagine how happy you’ll be when you go to a wine shop to buy another bottle and it’s 80% cheaper!’”—Sam N. Ella

“I asked the sommelier to describe what Trousseau Noir tastes like. He said, ‘Like you’re an utter failure.’ He was right.”—“Red” Blotch

Your Valentine’s Day dinner at Restaurant Gougé begins with a celebratory glass of sparkling wine. Let’s hope you’re the one who gets here first and gets to drink it. Latecomers get a celebratory handshake. Then you and your Valentine will be treated to Chef Oberdelein’s signature appetizer of candied vinegar, water and cranberry juice—that’s right, his legendary Amuse Douche. Now you’re ready to steal a kiss!

You’ll love the romantic ambience of Restaurant Gougé. All the rooms are candlelit, and, so you know, we did, too, pay our fucking electric bill. And for Valentine’s Day, we’ll have strolling street musicians wandering the restaurant for your enjoyment. All we ask is you remember to check the back seat of your car before you drive home. The valets often let the street musicians sleep there. Yes, your Valentine’s Day will be one to remember if you’re wise enough to make a reservation at Restaurant Gougé.

Valentine’s Day is a day we look forward to every year. Yes, it’s a lot of extra work printing up menus with higher prices, and Chef Juan Toque Oberdelein spends all morning making certain the portions are smaller than usual, but it’s all worth it to see the looks on the faces of the people who don’t know any better and dine out on Valentine’s Day. It’s that stunned look of recently bolt-gunned cows, perhaps the very ones you had for dinner, that restaurant folks really enjoy.

We strongly recommend that you choose to order Master Sommelier Larry Anosmia’s wine pairings to go with your Valentine’s Day prix fixe menu. Working with Chef Oberdelein, Larry has selected only the finest Natural, Authentic and Certified Sensitive® wines to accompany each dish. But we’ll let Larry tell you a little bit about how he selects the appropriate wines.

 
“As Restaurant Gougé’s sommelier, it’s my feeling that most of the people dining with us on any given evening are here to meet me and be educated about wine. Dining, and conversing with loved ones or business associates, is obviously secondary to learning all I have to teach them about wine. So I’ve assembled a list of wines that guests are certain to be unfamiliar with in order to insure that they spend their money on the right sorts of wines, wines I like. I don’t buy wines based on scores, or cult status. I buy wines that make me look smart to other sommeliers. I could give a shit what customers think of me. For the wine by-the-glass program, I select only the finest closeout wines. Receiving deep discounts from importers and distributors eager to move wines otherwise dead in the water allows me to expose customers to wines they’d never be able to taste otherwise, because local wine merchants and prestigious discount chains won’t buy that crap. Our guests taste adequate wines, and Restaurant Gougé upholds its long tradition of outstanding profit margins. It’s a Win-Win!

“For Valentine’s Day, I was lucky enough to acquire some seriously discounted wines which are all from Natural Wine producers. What’s important when it comes to pairing wine with food is inconsistency. Just as every course from Chef’s kitchen comes out quite a bit different every time, a tribute to his ability to substitute lesser ingredients at the last minute, so will each bottle of these Natural Wines taste very different. Yes, occasionally two bottles in a row will taste remarkably consistent, but, for the most part, each bottle retains the right to taste different from the others in the case. By not adding sulfites to their wines, these fine Natural Wine producers take the guesswork out of trying to figure out what wines from their appellations taste like, no need to wrestle with that ol’ bugaboo Terroir, while at the same time providing a kind of Wine Lottery—and we all know humans enjoy a lottery! Heck, even I’m not sure what these wines were intended to taste like. Aside from bacteria soup.”


You and your Valentine are in for gustatory Nirvana here at Restaurant Gougé. Many of you have called asking for a copy of the Valentine’s Day menu. We’re guessing it will be exactly the same as last year’s menu, but for slightly higher prices. We’ve asked Chef Juan Toque Oberdelein for the menu, but he’s busy defrosting several courses from the deep freezer labeled “2/14/2013.” Rest assured that your Valentine’s Day feast will be one you’ll remember for a lifetime, and one your soon to be ex-Valentine will eventually laugh about.

Just remember, you have been gougéd until you’ve been Restaurant Gougé’d.

The Wine List at Restaurant Gougé

Welcome to Restaurant Gougé (please, we prefer that you pronounce it Goo-zhay) and our Wine Spectator Finest of Top of Best of Ludicrous Award of Excellence Wine List. We are honored to have been allowed to pay $75 dollars to Wine Spectator so that some junior member of their editorial team who normally places wine bottles in brown bags, being careful to be certain the foil gives the important wines away, would approve of our list, a list that was carefully curated from the most highly overrated and obscure wines on the planet. Our award-winning sommelier, Rajat Anosmia MS, MW, M&M MJB, MP, MFer, guarantees that no matter which wine you select to accompany your meal this evening, it is unlikely you will ever remember what it is, or even want to. This is part of your Gougé experience.

Our sommelier has made every effort to ensure that the wines are complementary to the outstanding cuisine of Chef Juan Toque Oberdelein. However, the deciding factor in choosing the list is, as one would expect from a top sommelier, ego. Rajat Anosmia WSET, WKRP, WTF is widely regarded among the wine elite of the world as having the greatest palate since the late Robert Parker, combined with the nose of a bloodhound. This would explain the ticks. If you have any questions about the wines on the list, please ask our highly trained wait staff; Rajat may be on the trail of a criminal. Our wait staff has tried most of the wines on our wine list, primarily from wine left behind in unfinished bottles. They will be happy to point you in the proper direction when selecting a wine, keeping in mind the ultimate importance of their gratuity.

We understand that most of the wines on our James Beard Award Should Have Been Nominated wine list will be unfamiliar to most of our customers. This is strictly intentional. Our standard wine list markup is much easier to swallow if our guests are unfamiliar with the retail prices of the wines. You will find that each wine is accompanied by a brief description. Here it is:

“From a rare variety and an artisan producer, this is a wine worth nearly half its price.”

We pride ourselves that, unlike the vintages, our prices are always accurate and up-to-date.

Much like our award-winning sommelier on one of his usual junkets, our wine glasses are handblown. Yours may not be, but ours certainly are. We are happy to provide fine crystal stemware upon request, though only for wines with triple-digit prices starting with 5. We feel that our wines are crafted by the finest producers from all over the world who regularly taste them in cheap stemware. If it’s good enough for them, we feel it’s good enough for our guests.

Please expect delays of up to twenty minutes after you order wine. Our Certified Sanctified Sissified sommelier insists that our servers take a few extra minutes to worship each bottle he’s chosen for the list and express their gratitude for his wisdom, guidance, and mere existence. This should give the women in your party the time they need to prepare for the wine by applying lipstick. If you would like your wine decanted, we are happy to do so, but don’t blow out the fucking candle like an asshole.

Our wines are priced completely randomly with markups aimed at making you order a lesser wine you don’t really want, or at moving a wine that is essentially past its prime. This just seems like fun to us. The wines at Restaurant Gougé are also stored throughout the restaurant at completely random and fluctuating temperatures. Temperature-controlled wine cellars contribute significantly to climate change which is ruining many of the great vineyards of the world, none of which is represented on our list, but we care, dammit, we’re Restaurant Gougé! We are honored that Michelin saw fit to ignore their usual Stars and award us their rare and coveted Two Black Holes. Both have dined here.

We do have a generous corkage policy if you wish to bring your own celebratory wine to Restaurant Gougé. For each bottle of wine you bring to the restaurant we simply ask that you buy three extra entrées in order to satisfy the ungrateful pig that you are.

We do have a large list of Wines By-the-Glass. These wines are carefully selected by our Sommelier of the Year (Kazakhstan) from the greatest importers in the world’s closeouts. In addition, we are happy to pour you a glass of anything from our extensive wine list for no more than the price of the bottle.

And, finally, Restaurant Gougé believes that comfort has no place in the dining experience. In pursuit of excellence, our tables are close together, our chairs could give Mike and Molly hemorrhoids, our wooden floors and ceilings magnify the noise level, our menu choices are esoteric and inexplicably described, and our wine list obscure and baffling.

Bon Appétit!