How Eating Out Has Changed, From the Menu to the Tip – The New York Times

Wine Lists in Flux

How did the pandemic change restaurant wine lists? A dozen restaurants will give you 12 different answers. Popina, a wine-oriented restaurant in Brooklyn, sold off much of its collection early in the crisis. But subsequent business has been far better than expected, said James O’Brien, an owner, so he has rebuilt the wine list. The inventory, he says, is now worth more than ever, roughly $100,000. “I was able to buy a lot more wine,” he said, “and I was also buying stuff when other restaurants were not.”

In Columbia, S.C., Lula Drake Wine Parlour, which opened in 2016, once had 170 bottles on its list. Now it has 15, with another 35 wines by the glass, said Tim Gardner, the proprietor. “The big cellar was a lot of work, and I was always here,” he said. “Now, I can actually leave, and it’s OK.” Rocket Farm Restaurants, based in Atlanta, operates 19 restaurants in the Southeast; at the 11 that focus on wine, the selection looks much as it did prepandemic, said Eduardo Porto Carreiro, Rocket Farm’s beverage director. If anything, he said, consumer behavior seemed to change more than the restaurants did. At first, people spent less on wine at the group’s luxury restaurants than they had previously, though they were spending more at its midrange places. “Now,” he said, “things have evened back a bit.”
— ERIC ASIMOV