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Bottle Service under Attack |
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Įrašė Moacir P. de Sá Pereira
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2006.08.23 08.07 |
 Half-asleep this morning, I heard the newscaster on the radio define bottle service for her listeners. At first, I was amused that there might be people out there who don't know what bottle service is. Then I paused to wonder why on earth the newscaster might be talking about bottle service in the first place. As the Chicago Tribune reports:
But the Illinois Liquor Control Commission says [that] bottle service ... is illegal under state law.
Why on earth is bottle service illegal? Simply because selling an entire bottle of liquor
does not allow the staff to properly supervise alcohol use by its patrons, which can result in overconsumption.
I guess there's a problem with being overserved in Illinois.
Various clubowners in Chicago then bend over backwards in the article to explain how, in fact, bottle service does not lead to overconsumption (people pool money to buy a bottle, there are often party minimums for a bottle, there is food included in some bottle service, a single server pours the drinks, allowing him or her—for some reason I assume her—to monitor the consumption), but the best reason is offered by Harlan Powell, an attorney for the clubs:
"What customers are buying is not the actual drink, they're buying real estate," Powell said. They're buying the right to take their parties to the front of the line, to be escorted to a separate area in a crowded club, and to feel important, he said.
Now, considering the bottle service available at a certain wildly popular restaurant referenced frequently on this website, this article reads like it's from another world. Free food? A server monitoring and pouring? Cutting lines? Real Estate? I know nothing of these things. What I do know, however, is the answer to this question: why buy a $60 bottle of vodka? Since if you break that liter up into discrete shots, it'd be far, far more expensive. Plus, you don't have to wait for the waitress, it's chilled for you, and if you're already going to spend three hours there before, say, a soccer match, you can, theoretically, plough through it with only a little extra focus.
So, in other words, absolutely every reason given by Powell ends up being something like the opposite of why one would get bottle service at Kunigaikščių. As for being overserved, I'm sure that's never happened there.
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