BYOB and why it works for restaurants

It allows restaurants to make money they wouldn’t have made otherwise – and to make customers very happy

A couple of weeks ago, the Wine Curmudgeon met some friends – not in the wine business – for dinner at a suburban Dallas Italian restaurant. The restaurant was empty when we arrived at 5 p.m. on a brutally hot Sunday, but by the time we left a couple of hours later, it was packed. And, believe it or not, almost every table had a bottle of wine or two on it. Which, of course, doesn’t happen all that much these days.

And what seemed to be the reason for that? How about a $1.95 per person corkage fee?

The WC has taken a lot of criticism over the years for advocating BYOB, or bring your own bottle — the practice where restaurants charge a fee for letting customers bring their own wine for dinner. I’ve never understood why so many get so irritated with me for supporting BYOB, since it brings in business that the restaurant probably wouldn’t have gotten otherwise.

That’s the only reason we were eating there that night – and I’m sure we weren’t the only ones. Many of the diners looked to be regulars in what seemed to be a very neighborhood kind of place.

The math makes perfect sense to me. The four of us spent around $120 for dinner, which included the corkage fee (though not tax and tip). We tasted a half dozen wines; everyone brought something, and we had much fun tasting and talking about them. If we had done that at a non-BYOB restaurant, we would have a split a couple of very ordinary bottles between us, not had as much fun, and the price of dinner could have doubled.

So what did the restaurant give up to get our $120 worth of business? Not a damn thing. It earned our $120 that it wouldn’t have gotten otherwise because we didn’t have to buy a couple of bottles of wine that were likely on the list for no particular reason save that the list needed to have a $30 or $40 wine. Or even have a wine list.

So yes, BYOB works – for both diners and restaurants

Finally, a note to the restaurant manager, who kept looking at all those wine bottles and worrying: We didn’t finish all of them, took several with us when we left, and each drove home safely.