When to bring your own wine

More and more restaurants are posting both their menu and their wine list on their website, which makes it easy to decide whether or not to bring a bottle of wine and if so, what to bring that will pair nicely with the food they serve.

On Saturday, instead of celebrating Bastille Day in French fashion, my boyfriend and I decided to go out California-style. We made a reservation at Salt & Pepper restaurant in downtown Tiburon, a restaurant featuring California cuisine.

When I looked up Salt & Pepper online that afternoon and realized that they didn't have a website, I knew I should bring a bottle of wine to dinner.

At the restaurant, we were seated at a table in front of the small bar where the wines were displayed upright. It was warm inside the restaurant, so my first thought was, they should be storing the wines--on their side---in a temperature-controlled environment.

My next thought was, thankfully we brought our own bottle. Their wine selection consisted of the kind that you'll find stacked on the first or second shelf at Safeway. I love finding great wines for $10 a bottle, but I refuse to pay three times that at a restaurant for something that won't be that good. 

So for $15 corkage fee, it was worth bringing a bottle of the 2009 Dutton-Goldfield Devil's Gulch Pinot Noir ($48/bottle). With rich blackberry fruit flavors, nice spice, and good concentration, the wine was amazing!

I wish I could say the same about the restaurant.

Although the small space had charm, the dining room was so close to the kitchen that it filled up with smoke about half-way through our meal despite the overhead fans. It didn't get so bad that we had to evacuate, but my eyes stung and it smelled like smoke. When I went to the bathroom, the sloping floor made me feel like I was on a boat out at sea.

For a restaurant called Salt & Pepper, we joked that they didn't use enough seasoning. The menu sounded great, but the food was bland. The crab cakes were teeny tiny and Doug's pork chop was undercooked.  It was also weird that we were the youngest customers by about forty years (I am not exaggerating).

For consistently yummy food in Tiburon, check out the Boathouse (which ironically, is directly across the street from Salt & Pepper). Doug and I have only been to the Boathouse once for lunch (the chicken pot pie was the best I've ever had), but we go for brunch at least twice a month for the eggs benedict. We will definitely go there for dinner before we go back to Salt & Pepper.

And when in doubt, bring a bottle of wine to dinner. You can always decide not to open it if you see something more interesting on the wine list. Life is too short to drink bad wine with a 300% upcharge.

P.S. If you do bring your own bottle, don't make a stink about the corkage fee.