{"id":2571,"date":"2007-08-01T13:24:04","date_gmt":"2007-08-01T21:24:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/wordpress\/archives\/2007\/08\/you_can_buy_stuff_that_tastes_good_but_you_cant_buy_good_taste.html"},"modified":"2007-08-01T13:24:04","modified_gmt":"2007-08-01T21:24:04","slug":"you_can_buy_stu","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/blog\/archives\/2007\/08\/you_can_buy_stu.html","title":{"rendered":"You Can Buy Stuff That Tastes Good But You Can’t Buy Good Taste"},"content":{"rendered":"

Lady, please put down the cosmo<\/a>:<\/p>\n

The Bordeaux was flowing, the foie gras abundant and the well-heeled epicures at Daniel were having a refined old time when suddenly all eyes turned toward a table against one wall and all conversation ceased.<\/p>\n

Jean-Luc Le D\u00c3\u00bb, a sommelier in the restaurant, looked in that direction, too. And he saw her: the woman making like a dancer on a pole at Scores.<\/p>\n

She stood facing the rest of the dining room. First she took off a vest or a jacket, as best Mr. Le D\u00c3\u00bb remembers. Then she went to work on her blouse.<\/p>\n

Just as she was getting to her bra, the ma\u00c3\u00aetre d’h\u00c3\u00b4tel got to her. Thus her drunken, wobbly stint as a stripper ended, and so did her dinner. She and her date, a smiling, sloshed man who had seemingly egged her on, were escorted to the door.<\/p>\n

“She was not necessarily attractive or young, so it was disruptive,” complained Mr. Le D\u00c3\u00bb, who left Daniel several years ago and now owns a wine shop in Greenwich Village. “If she were beautiful, it might have been different. People might have been cheering her on.”<\/p>\n

At Daniel? Hard to believe. But then Mr. Le D\u00c3\u00bb’s story provides a reminder that a 1985 Burgundy casts the same dark spell as a 2007 peppermint schnapps. That in a four-star temple as surely as a starless dive, some diners drink too much: way, way too much.<\/p>\n

. . .<\/p>\n

“If anything, a large bank account enables one to forgo normal levels of decorum, because you don’t have consequences,” said Rocky Cirino, a manager at the restaurant Cru, who previously worked at Daniel. “I’m thinking of several people whose station in life has enabled them to bypass normal civility and caution.”<\/p>\n

. . .<\/p>\n

Sometimes drunken diners don’t even bother to seek a private sanctuary for their libidos.<\/p>\n

“People are often doing things underneath the table,” said a veteran server who has worked in many of Manhattan’s premier restaurants, including Gotham Bar & Grill and Fleur de Sel. The server asked not to be named for fear of angering past or future employers.<\/p>\n

“The darker the restaurant, the more romantic the restaurant — there’s going to be some activity,” she said.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Lady, please put down the cosmo: The Bordeaux was flowing, the foie gras abundant and the well-heeled epicures at Daniel were having a refined old time when suddenly all eyes turned toward a table against one wall and all conversation ceased. Jean-Luc Le D\u00c3\u00bb, a sommelier in the restaurant, looked in that direction, too. And […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19,2,26],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2571","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-class_war","category-feed","category-tragicomic_ironic_obnoxious_or_absurd"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2571","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2571"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2571\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2571"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2571"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2571"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}