When Drinking Wine at Orso, Do as the Romans

Is this someone’s idea of a joke? Where did this idea come from?

“It’s the way they do it in Italy,” I have been told, on three occasions, when restaurants have tried to foist off tiny little water glasses with no stems as tradition.

Baloney. Fine restaurants in Italy serve wine in real, honest-to-God stem ware.

So dining in Orso the other night was another setback to the truth. “It’s the way they do it in Italy,” we heard again as the glassware brought to our table revealed itself to be squat, open-mouth little bowls better suited for finger washing or for sipping Cognac “neat” after dinner.

But not for wine. And certainly not for wine that needs to be swirled to get full enjoyment.

But the folks at Orso know better. Moreover, they know that in Italy, the wine bottles are uncorked and left for you to pour. So that’s the way it works at Orso, too. Isn’t that cute? Waiter approaches with wine, shows you label to approve, and after you’ve nodded, he pulls the cork, plops the bottle down and disappears.

What happens if the wine is corked or so badly stored that you want to reject it? I suppose you wave at your waiter as he whizzes past to serve William Devane his pizzetta. (Fortunately, our wine was not spoiled.)

The problem with this kind of non-service is its price. At the few Italian dining spots where I have experienced the water-glass/no-service regime, I have also paid next to nothing for my meal. These were quite literally roadside cafes where the wine is $2 a liter.

At Orso, the price of the wine is roughly three times wholesale, or twice retail. That, I contend, is simply too high for a non-wine-glass, non-service restaurant.

The list itself, almost all Italian, isn’t bad. Some of the better buys in white wines include 1985 Gavi Villa Scolca at $22; 1987 Antinori Galestro at $14, and a Frescobaldi Chianti (1985 Castello di Nipozzano) at $19. These are good wines for the money.

Three red wines worth trying are 1985 Chianti Classico Castello di Cacchiano ($20); 1986 Bruno Giacosa Barbera D’Alba ($21), and 1986 Luigi Einaudi Nebbiolo ($20).

But other wines are overpriced, such as the lovely 1987 Blange, an Arneis from Bruno Ceretto. This spicy and floral wine is $29 here, $15 on most store shelves. Also, to order the 1978 Lungarotti Rubesco Riserva ($45) and have it poured into a glass you can’t swirl is a waste of a good aroma.

To state that the prices here are too high for the glassware and service may seem unfair. Certainly I’m not comparing Orso to some roadside diner outside of Milan. The food is far better here, but it is annoying to be paying these prices for such “traditional” service.

The way things are going, some day soon I expect to enter a restaurant, order a bottle of wine and have the waiter bring it with no glassware at all. He will tell me that I am supposed to slug it straight from the bottle because, “Hey, the Romans never used glassware.”