Restaurant reviews | buzz about Best Food Reviews Sarasota Florida

                                                         

29 Apr 2009
Sarasota BYOB’s an interesting distinction?

This past weekend, we visited a restaurant which had a policy of Bring Your Own Bottle, “BYOB.”  The review will be posted in the next week or so.  We brought a New Zealand Pinot Noir recommended by our friends at the Wine Warehouse of Sarasota which was excellent, but I digress.

We thought it would be a good idea to provide a listing of restaurants which allow you to bring your own wine for lunch or dinner.  So we created the BYOB category on our site and set out to work.

Now this is where it becomes interesting.  In fact, very interesting!  We started reaching out to local SRQ restaurants to inquire about their “BYOB” policy and found the following:

1) Most Sarasota area restaurants allow patrons to bring their own bottle for a corkage fee. This is a standard practice.

2) The range of prices for the corkage fee were from $0 to $25…yikes!

Now we do not begrudge a restaurant for charging a fee for the “BYOB” service.  It is only fair to pay something for the service and to help defray the restaurant’s lost revenue from the wine sale.  However, we feel $25 is excessive and not consistent with the spirit of the category we are trying to build.  So we had to make a decision on how to represent this on our site and we did.  We are listing “BYOB” restaurants with a corkage fee of less than $15.

What do you think?

Return to Press Releases