And Now, the Main Course : Waiters and Waitresses Serve Up Thrills, Spills at Newport Beach Race

Staci Beech spilled her wine before its time.

But the 36-year-old waitress wasn’t the only one. Few of the 25 local restaurant owners, managers, and waiters who braved the second annual Beaujolais Nouveau Race emerged from the treacherous parking lot obstacle course unstained.

In berets and aprons, the intrepid competitors from a dozen upscale Orange County restaurants balanced two glasses of the French wine on their trays and then scampered over a four-inch wooden beam, through six tires and across a wobbly sheet of plywood. If their wine and meatball trays survived the trek, the participants quickly served a table of lucky “customers” before darting to the finish line.

“I feel like a dumped bottle of wine,” said Doris Cormack, who posed as a customer and tried to keep dry by wearing a tablecloth up to her chin.

The event at Le Meridien Hotel is one of scores going on nationwide to trumpet the annual delivery of the imported wine, which sells for about $10 a bottle. The modest import is the first wine to market each year, traditionally on the third Thursday of November.

The wine’s arrival in the United States presents a particular challenge to restaurateurs looking for new ways to hype it. In years past, some American restaurants have even flown in the new wine on the supersonic Concorde.

Thursday’s makeshift obstacle course was the brainchild of Le Meridien’s food and beverage director, Jean Pierre Lortal, who finished his own course in a respectable one minute and one second.

Pascal Olhats, a French native and owner of Pascal restaurant in Newport Beach, said the heralding of the wine was “more fun here than in France. Over there, the waiters have to run through the streets, sometimes a mile or more.”

For Beech, the event could have gone better. The waitress, who represented The Cannery in Newport Beach, made her misstep inches from the finish line. In a rush, she dropped wine on a customer’s shoes.

“I’m used to solid glasses,” she said. “Those plastic glasses aren’t very sturdy.”

As the next entrants lined up to negotiate the course, she shouted some advice: “You should have a glass before you do it!”

After several heats, a sure-footed Taras Young, a waiter at the French restaurant La Fayette of Garden Grove, won the contest by speeding through the course in just 37 seconds.

“I thought I was going to lose,” Young said. “The hardest part was putting on the apron. I’m used to tuxedo jackets. The rest was easy.”

For restaurants owners like Bill Hamilton, 70, more accustomed to managing than working for tips, serving customers proved a challenge. After his 1:03 finish, the owner of the Cannery admitted he hadn’t waited tables for almost 20 years.

“It was a little sloppy but I was a little nervous,” he said. “The tires, they were tough. I stumbled there a bit. But I think I still won the senior division.”

As tricky as the event was, the course organizers are already thinking of how to make it even tougher for future contestants.

“Next year, said George Blanckensee of Le Meridien, “we might add a rope climb.”