Regardless, me.: Mondays

February 20, 2007

Mondays

On Monday nights I get together with friends downtown at Barriques, which is a coffeeshop / bar.

We knit or cross-stitch or really do whatever the mood strikes. Sometimes it involves dinner, there or elsewhere, but mostly it just forces us to be downtown once per week to talk about stuff. It's something I look forward to each week.

Barriques does a terrible pour of wine - it's what you'd expect if you were at a tasting just enough to let you taste it, except it's $5-$7. I always felt slightly insulted when I got a glass of wine, but it's nice sitting there with a bunch of friends drinking wine.

Ellen and I talked though this expense, and realized we could buy one of the myriad of wines they sell by the bottle on the wall, and for a small corking fee, drink it there. And thanks to a new law, if we don't finish it, one of us can have it recorked and take it home, which is super cool. As long as we each have a glass and a half of wine (which we always do, we almost always get two glasses of wine if we are drinking wine), we come out waaaaaaay ahead of the game financially, and we get full glasses of wine rather than two shots.

So we've done this the last two times we've gone.

Last night, we get there, pick out a Pinot Noir from Chile for $9, take it up there and the guy at the counter who looked like he'd been through this a few times, said "I have to let you know that we've raised the uncorking fee to $5."

I'm fairly certain that my jaw dropped, and I managed to ask him how they justify that given that it's screwtop, which hardly justifies a $5 "uncorking fee."

So he read a prepared statement about how they have to bus the tables and wash dishes and uncork the bottle and keep up the wine glasses, and blah-de-blah. The statement also mentioned "if you bought this bottle in a restaurant it'd cost...."

And after a quick consult with Ellen we decided to get the bottle (which financially we still come out ahead but...) but that's the silliest thing I've heard in a while from little Madison. First, Barriques makes you bus your own tables, so that line is bullshit. I've had to remove other people's dishes from the table to be able to sit down, so they should pay me a "bussing fee." And if I bought this bottle in a restaurant, it would come with some good table service, a heated restaurant, and no coffee counter.

Given how much money we've paid in the last year going each Monday night and often as not getting dinner and dessert as well as beer, wine and tea, Ellen and I are probably going to talk through whether or not we want to drink wine there anymore. We can get a bottle of water there for much cheaper and as far as I know, they won't charge me to open up the plastic screw cap.

We are also going to actively look for a different place to hang out on a Monday night, Madison has lots of restaurants that know how to pour a decent sized glass of wine.

Posted by Heather at February 20, 2007 09:44 AM