Down Under Diary

The daily diary of a wandering restaurateur Down Under
October 31 - Shorncliffe, Queensland

Weekends are for relaxing and we have certainly been doing that. There is a totally different pace when staying with friends than when staying in a hotel. I will include the travelogue details on the page below, but I need to say a few words about restaurants.

For dinner, we went to a little café on the park in town. The meal was memorable for being incredibly inexpensive (how about $21 for four of us!) but also for being another Aussie institution, the BYO restaurant. These places do not have a license to serve alcohol but you are welcome to bring your own beer, wine, liquor or whatever. They will provide you with glasses, ice buckets and keep your stock cold for you if you like. Some charge a corkage fee, many don't even do that. These are more common outside the cities although you can find them all over.

The feeling of the locals, right or wrong, is that BYO restaurants have better food because they are not distracted by trying to run a beverage operation. It certainly is less expensive to bring your own wine than to buy it from the restaurant. My experience is that, because the wine purchase is a separate transaction, it makes the cost of the meal seem a lot less, even though you may be spending a good sum when you add everything up. (Not all BYO restaurants are as inexpensive as the one we went to last night.)

(By the way, with our $20 dinner, we had another $20 of good Aussie wine - also inexpensive because it is not heavily taxed here. We had a Meerea Park Cabernet Merlot from the Hunter Valley and a Hugh Hamilton McLaren Vale Unwooded Chardonnay. There seems to be several unwooded Chardonnays being made and it is an interesting twist on a familiar taste.)

The locals - or at least Bob & Pam - feel that the markup on wine in a licensed restaurant is a rip-off and in many cases I have to agree with them. While the BYO practice is less common in the states, I know that it can be done. When I lived in San Francisco, I remember a little French restaurant in my neighborhood that was BYO until they could get their liquor license processed. I went there a lot during that period because it seemed like a bargain. Once they got their license and I could no longer bring in my own bottle, I stopped going.

I bring all this up merely to raise a possibility for some of you. If your local laws permit it and if a liquor license is either unavailable or prohibitively priced, BYO might be a great way to create a point of difference in the market. "I go there because . . ."

Happy Halloween!

For photos of a more travelogue-like nature, click here.

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