Highest corkage fee in the world

Well, SOMEONE has to have the highest corkage fee in the world. It may as well be the French Laundry in Napa CA.

For only $150 they will extract the cork from your bottle of wine. Hell, I don't even let the restaurant pour the wine--it's just the tax we pay to be allowed the privilege of bringing our own wine to the restaurant.

Most restaurants pour only "baby" wines--they rob the cradle by buying and pouring wines that aren't even ready to drink yet. By the wine could have matured, it was already opened and poured for somebody. This is perhaps the greatest disappointment of the American Restaurant Experience. A few restaurants, such as Bern's Steakhouse in Tampa FL, have extensive wine cellars (OK, at Bern's it can't be underground, so it's a series of refrigerated warehouses), but those are more and more the exception.

It remains the best and cheapest way to have great wines for your dinner, to buy your own wine, age it for years in your own cellar, and take your bottle to the restaurant and pay a corkage fee. Why waste your money paying double or triple the wine's value, for a wine so young that you'll regret drinking it? Take your own bottle instead!

And never never never let the restaurant pour your bottle at your table. Tell them, right at the uncorking, that you will be handling the pouring. This is because the server doesn't know who wants how much wine, and indiscriminate pouring by the server will waste your wine into glasses where it won't be drunk.

Sad 2 Say, But Sonic Sux

When I was a young man working in the oil and gas fields in Oklahoma, New Mexico, and Texas, or (even before that) working on a U.S. Army Corps surveying crew in those states plus Arkansas and Missouri, every little town had a drive-in burger place that likely as not was the center of that town's youth social scene. Likely as not, that place was a Sonic.

The food was good then.  Yes, I know that once you have eaten at your share of great restaurants, your tastes can become more discriminating, but that is not the whole story. There is no reason that fast food cannot be good. Having spent my adult life working in corporations, it's clear to me that Sonic has succumbed to one of the greatest mistakes a company can make: Driving down quality in an effort to pump up profits. 

Talk about short-sighted!  

Today, their food (from their Wilsonville OR location) sits in my stomach like a mild form of poison. The bun (of course it was a crappy bun made with over-refined white flour and corn syrup) was stale. The condiments on the burger were cheap. The tots smelled like fish, and broke apart before I could even dip them in ketchup (and the ketchup was a cheap corn syrup kind). Even the iced tea tasted off. I'm sure that Sonic (like McDonalds, Burger King, and the other national chains) has legions of food scientists working to find cheap substitutes for older, better ingredients, so that they can increase profits. About 70 years ago the Nazis did the same thing--they invented pseudo-foods made from coal tar and stuff like that, and fed it to their concentration camp prisoners. Unlike the Nazi food delivery service, the server at Sonic today was fantastic, but she has no control over the food. 

The tomato on the burger was barely pink, much less ripe and red. And right now it's the height of fantastic local ripe tomato season! So the company doesn't care enough to exert the effort to increase quality.

Ice cream needs only a few ingredients: Milk, cream, sugar, and vanilla. Maybe eggs. Now look at modernpaleo.com's list of Sonic's ice cream ingredients: 

The ingredients in the ice cream are: Milkfat and Nonfat Milk, Water, Sugar, Buttermilk, Whey, Corn Syrup, Less than 1% of: Mono & Diglycerides, Cellulose Gum, Tetrasodium Pyrophosphate, Carrageenan, Artificial Vanilla Flavor, Annatto. (Whey? Corn syrup? Pyrophospate? And: "artificial vanilla flavor? Would it kill them to use vanilla?)

Good food reveals the soul and spirit of the chef. But when you cook cheap ingredients in a slapdash way, the food is lifeless, worthless, poisonous. 

When the operational strategy is to cheapen the ingredients and hope that most people won't notice, it is time to say sayonara to Sonic. In the Portland Oregon area, if you want to know what a great burger, fries and shake taste like, head to the Cruise Inn Country Diner (past Aloha), where you'll enjoy local healthy beef (grass fed), local potatoes fried in nearly-local healthier oil (rice oil from Sacramento), and local ice cream made from better ingredients. You won't pay much more but the food is great.

Meanwhile, please don't put Sonic food in your stomach, or your friends', or your kids or grandkids'. If enough people stop buying that crap, maybe the company will notice. Maybe.