By SHELLY BRANCH
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
One trick is the table plant, where alluring bottles are placed on the table
in advance to encourage
a "visual sell." Then there's the fast-pour, which borrows from an
old sommelier's ruse of
replenishing glasses sip by sip in order to turn more bottles.
In the quest to sell diners expensive designer water, waiters have moved well
beyond the simple
query, "regular or bottled?" Now they are honing their water rituals
down to a ruthlessly
manipulative science.
Consider this carefully choreographed maneuver from waiter Todd Goodrich, who
worked until recently
at Manhattan's Town restaurant. Mr. Goodrich says he'd bring two bottles of
water for a table of
four, filling all of the glasses before casually drawing the empty bottle behind
his back. Then he'd
place the second, open bottle discreetly on the table. "They don't realize
I've done it ... As I
walk away, I have the empty bottle in front of me so the customers never see
it," says Mr. Goodrich,
who now works at another New York City restaurant, 71 Clinton.
In a slow economy, restaurants are looking everywhere they can to squeeze out
extra revenue. Some
charge as much as $14 for a one-liter bottle of Badoit or Alpenrose water. While
the typical markup
on wine is about 300%, the bottled-water markup is anywhere from five to ten
times wholesale cost.
At the Ritz-Carlton hotel chain's big-city properties, for instance, bottled
water accounted for
about 5% of beverage sales in 1999. That figure is now close to 15%, and the
chain hopes to see it
rise to 20%.
Waiters are getting a piece of the action. A new CD-ROM training manual from
Nestle SA's Perrier
called "Pour on the Tips," declares: "You can earn an extra hundred
bucks a month or more simply by
offering bottled water instead of tap." This can be achieved, the disc
advises, with extra tips
gotten "by converting just 20 guests per shift from tap to bottled water."
Meanwhile, high-end alcohol sales have suffered in this downturn. "If
you can't sell booze or beer,
I say push water," says Ian Maksik, a Ft. Lauderdale consultant who has
trained waiters at such
restaurants as Sardi's in New York and the Ocean Reef Club in Key Largo.
"When you serve dessert, you bring it in low through the room so everyone
can see this luscious
dish," he says. "It's the same with water. I come out with this gorgeous
silver bucket and all the
tables to the right and front and back are watching. You approach right foot
in, like a ballet move,
and pour the water as if it were a fine wine. Others see this, and that tempts
them to buy it
because they want the same protocol." Mr. Maksik also suggests that bottled
waters be poured into
special crystal goblets, further differentiating who has taste and who has tap.
Bob Brown, a former Washington, D.C.-area waiter who is now a restaurant consultant
in northern
Virginia, has a technique he calls "By the Way." After rattling off
various cocktail and entree
options, he says, " 'By the way, we also have San Pellegrino or Panna.'
I find it's best to mention
it last, and not to offer it as an open-ended question."
Mr. Brown's script doesn't end there. "You must watch carefully. Every
time a glass is half empty
you should refill to two-thirds or three-quarters -- more than you would wine.
The goal is of course
to sell more water." To that end, he snuggles up to the person he has identified
as "the lead" buyer
at the table. "I say 'Would you like to have a couple more bottles chilled
down?' Most of the time
they say yes. It feeds their ego."
Waiters point out that once the bottled water spigot opens, customers are unlikely
to trade down.
"It's easy to go from tap to bottled, but to go from bottled to tap is
like going from a $90 bottle
of wine to a $15 bottle of wine," says David Welch, a waiter at the Wildwood
Restaurant & Bar in
Portland.
And some pros confess to savoring customers' water angst. "I get great
pleasure out of making each
of those ladies who are trying to impress their friends ... repeat the word
'tap' back to me," says
a server who goes by the name "Dollfinn" at the Waiter's Revenge Internet
message board.
Restaurants rarely list or mention the price of bottled water. At Town, part
of Mr. Goodrich's sales
pitch was to describe an obscure brand called Hildon. "It comes from England
and one of the owners
is from the same region and thinks its the best," he'd say. "People
are like, 'Oh it must be good,
then' -- until they get the check and see that three bottles cost $27."
"By now, everybody knows the price of San Pellegrino," says Barry
Wine, a former New York restaurant
owner. "But if you know that some of these waters aren't on store shelves,
you can justify the price
-- maybe."
When it debuted in Boston last year, a new French-Indian restaurant called
Mantra wanted to grab
customer attention with a bottled-water import called Voss, which is available
primarily in hotels
and restaurants. Tall and sleek like a perfume decanter, each 800 ml bottle
of Voss goes for $8.
Mantra chose the Norwegian brand in part for its distinctive look but also because
of its anonymity.
"Customers cannot compare the retail price with our prices" says beverage
director Christian
Vassiliev. "So yes, of course that was a factor in our choosing it. But
I'm not supposed to tell you
that."
Publicist Mariana Field Hoppin recently had dinner at Mantra with celebrated
chef Julia Child and
didn't appreciate the water pressure. "You turn around and your glass is
full again," she says.
"It's the only time I can think of that they can get you like that. They
have to ask if you want
another bourbon or another chardonnay."
Even family-style restaurants are paying attention to water sales. At Albalonetti's
Seafood
Trattoria in Monterey, Calif., "We make a point of not saying 'tap,' "
says manager Stuart Babcock.
"It just doesn't sound very professional." Until recently Mr. Babcock
wasn't selling much of the
bottled water that took up space in his storage rooms. "I needed to figure
out a way to make it
move," he says.
So a few months ago he instructed his staff to place green bottles of San Pellegrino
and Panna on
the tables as props to complement the restaurant's sea-foam decor. "It's
easy to say 'no' to
something, but when you're looking at it, your mind tells you, 'go for it.'
" The suggestive sales
tactic, he says, has at least doubled his bottled water sales.
Sometimes, customers find it hard to say no. At a business lunch in midtown
Manhattan, David
Zinczenko, editor-in-chief of Men's Health magazine, recently tried to dodge
the Hobson's Choice --
"still or sparkling?" -- by asking for "regular" water.
When the waiter returned with an open,
chilled bottle of still water instead, "I just had to swallow it,"
says Mr. Zinczenko, who declines
to name the restaurant. "There's all this schmooze going on at a business
lunch, so you've got to be
careful about making a big deal over something that seems so insignificant."
Write to Shelly Branch at shelly.branch@wsj.com
Updated March 8, 2002