Sometimes it pays to take a risk
Adventures Of A Black Belt Sommelier
The crazy story of how we won the Wine Spectator Grand Award at The Wild Boar Restautant
Well, come back to the adventures of the Black Belt Somalia, I suspect that some of the stories I tell you, you suspect that they're apocryphal, but I promise none of them are. This one isn't in the, as I've said before, in the late 1980s, early 1990s, I owned a couple of restaurants in Nashville called F. Scott's in Tukin, F. Scott's was a really fine restaurant. One day, this fellow from Atlanta, from a Knoxville named Tom Allen, all of a sudden, he was like our best customer. Out of nowhere. And he was ordering the best wines we had, spending a lot of money tipping extravagantly. Anyway, eventually it turned out that he wanted to buy my two restaurants and wanted me to come to work with him to build a company similar to the Buckhead Life Group in Atlanta with F. Scott's as a flagship restaurant. And that was because his daughter-in-law was a restaurant manager, and she wanted to be the manager of F. Scott's as part of this group of restaurants. And he also was looking for a job for his son. So he was going to create, he was very wealthy, he was going to create this restaurant company in Nashville. And then with, ultimately, the idea is that we would have a handful of really fine restaurants in Nashville, and then we'd go to other cities like Nashville, say Charleston, Charlotte, places like that, and do the same thing. With me is the Director of Operations fairly early on in this, we bought a restaurant called The Wild Boar from a local restaurant named Mario Ferrari, and Tom decided that he wanted to make The Wild Boar the best restaurant in the world. So we hired a chef named Boris Keller from the Ritz-Carlton Lagooninigale, who was previously the executive chef at a Michelin 3-star restaurant in Munich called the Antoelel, and he brought with them the major D from the Ritz-Carlton Lagooninigale. And the only ingredient, I was the Director of Operations, but I was also going to be the sole A. So we needed a pastry chef. I had learned through the grapevine that the assistant pastry chef at Lesurk was looking to leave New York City, so I went up, spent some time in the kitchen at Lesurk, observing Furt Walworth work, and Furt was a genius, or is a genius. Now he's actually a class sculptor. But so we hired him, and he came. We opened a pastry shop for him, retail a commercial pastry shop for him, and then he was the pastry chef at The Wild Boar. So we had a Michelin 3-star chef. We had the major D from the Ritz-Carlton Lagooninigale, and we had a pastry chef from Lesurk as the sole A. So I think I was the weak link. Very quickly, The Wild Boar became a very, very, very fine restaurant. Tom spared no expense. We had silver domes for the dishes that came out covered. He actually at one point bought some apartments so that we could recruit chefs because they would have no rent to pay. So chefs would come and we could get really, really talented high-profile chefs come work for us because they could live rent-free. The Hostess wore Armani dresses. I mean, it was crazy. We bought, I think it was Versace China for the private dining room. We even had gold flatware that we surprised one guest each evening by setting, just at random, by setting their table with gold flatware. So it was, I mean, it was crazy how great this restaurant was. And there's a lot of stories about really famous people to date there and extraordinary dinners that we had. But anyway, we were about three or four months into this process and Tom said, called me as offices. So we've got this restaurant that's as good as any restaurant in America. How can we get that word out? How can we make this restaurant famous? And I said, well, there are basically two ways we could get three stars or five stars. I'm sorry, from the mobile travel guide. This is the mission guide didn't exist in the United States at this time. Or we could get the grand award from Wine Spectator. I said, three, five stars from the mobile travel guide will take several years. You have to establish longevity, credibility, dependability. It doesn't happen overnight. But if we have the wine program required to win the grand award from Wine Spectator, we can get that the next time they publish the results. So I said, how much do you think we need to invest in a wine cellar in order to win that award? I told him what I thought he wrote me a check. Well, he actually wrote me a check for that much plus plus 50%. Then we built a couple of wine sellers, one for the red wines, one for the white wines. Then, you know, renal glassware, decanters, you know, everything you need to have a really high profile wine program. And then I realized two weeks after this conversation that the deadline for submitting the wine list to the Wine Spectator was about a month away. So I didn't really have time to create the wine program that would win the grand awards from the Wine Spectator before we had to send them our wine list to be considered for the grand award. And I knew that if Tom gave me that much money to build this program and we didn't win the award, he was going to go crazy. So I actually mocked up a wine list. I wrote a wine list completely out of thin air that I thought would win the award. And I had it bound and leather, gold embossed with the restaurants name on it, and sent it off to the Wine Spectator as if we had that wine list. And then, of course, I started accumulating wine. And eventually we had much more than what was on that Airsoft's wine list. A few months later, you know, this is kind of before the internet. So we wouldn't know whether or not we'd won the award until the magazine came out. We were really hopeful because we did invest a lot of money in the wine sellers and the glassware and the canners. And as it turned out, I went because we were putting so much money into the wine program, I went from being the Director of Operation Sleshela to just being the soleo. Well, the Wine Director for all the restaurants that we owned one night. And we did end up having, you know, a list that was well worthy of winning the award one night. I was standing with my back to the dining room because I was decanning some wine. And there was a like a buzz like somebody who somebody famous had walked in and it was our senators, US Senator, and Thomas Matthews, the senior editor for Wine Spectator. And he was there to have dinner and see if we were in fact worthy of winning the grand award. Fortunately, you know, obviously, if there was a buzz in the restaurant with Thomas Matthews walked in, you know, he's not Leonardo DiCaprio. So there were a lot of people in the restaurant that night that were really, really serious about wine. There was a lot of really amazing wine on the tables in the dining room, you know, old Bordeaux, old burrities, champagne, et cetera. So it did make an impression on him that, you know, it seemed like every table in the restaurant had something really special. Being drunk, being enjoyed. And he had a nice dinner. I think they drank a bottle of Leo Chatelet of all us costs, which is really fabulous wine. And then the next day, he came to see, you know, to just, you know, see the wine seller seat. And he had that wine list that I had sent him. And he wanted to be sure that we actually had the wines that were on that wine list. So he started reading wines off the line, let's, you know, show me this, show me that, show me that. And honestly, we had them. But of course, this was months after I sent him that list, we would have sold out of some of the wines. And it wasn't really that big of problem that we didn't have every single wine that was on that wine list, because we would have sold them. You know, that was the purpose of having them was to sell them. We had most, we had most of the things that if, you know, he said, show me at 53 Lafitte, I showed him 59 or something. And we had lots of large format bottles, old port, old Madeira. I mean, it was an extraordinary list. There were about 3000 wines. At one point, he asked me to show in the 1921 Chatelet account. And I was panicking because I couldn't find it. I wasn't panicking because I couldn't find it to show it to us, panicking because I couldn't find it, which meant it had been stolen or something. And he laughed and reached over my shoulder and pulled it out and showed it to me. We had six bottles, I think, at that time. And so, you know, we went, had lunch at my old restaurant, F. Scott's, for him to, you know, take a look at that restaurant too and see what it was like. And then we waited. Then he flew back to New York and we waited to see what was going to happen. One night, the owner of state industries, which is the largest manufacturer of water heaters in the world, was had dinner with the owner of the Marine Corporation, which is the second largest manufacturer of water heaters in the world. And, you know, money was no object to these two guys. So, I actually opened, I think, four vintages of penfolds grains for them to enjoy with dinner because South Court owns penfolds and owns green. So he was kind of drinking his own wine with my friend John Lindall. And, of course, I tasted them and they had a nice dinner. The next day, the phone rang and it was a dish jockey in Sydney, Australia. The magazine had come out there because, you know, the clock's 12 hours ahead there. So they'd already gotten their magazine and we'd won the award. And this dish jockey in Sydney said, "How can you have this amazing wine program in Nashville?" I didn't think you even wore shoes there. I said, "Well, we wear shoes sometimes." And he said, "Do you have any Australian wines on your wine list?" I said, "Well, I actually opened three bottles of penfolds grains last night." Anyway, so that's how we found out we won the award. And overnight, the restaurant change, our business change, people were coming from all over the place to drink these great wines that we had. And, of course, Boris's extraordinary food and Abby's beautiful service and Kurt's beautiful desserts and everything. The incredible restaurant that it was. We went from kind of getting along, okay, doing well, serving very nice meals to being one of the most in-demand restaurants in the world because at that time, there were only 100 grand award-winning restaurants. People, you know, one night I walked into the bar and Mickey Mantle was sitting there and he wanted to drink a great bottle of wine. He wanted to go on a tour of the wine cellar and wanted to drink something really great. He ended up drinking a bottle of 53-year-old feet. Anyway, that's my story of how we won the grand award at the Walt Board in 1994. Thanks for tuning in to Adventures of the Black Well Family. We appreciate your interest and support.