Bear with me on this one....

So I have this friend. He likes to go out to dinner, he likes to pay, and he does not really care what it costs.

Every now and then I get invited along for dinner, sometimes I think it is just because I know the wines, but we do have fun. And I don't really argue. Every now and then I am able to provide some reciprocal value.

Bear, the eponymous new place owned, ostensibly (more on that later) by Ray Bear, he of the Prince George and then Gio fame, was about to open before Christmas, and I managed to find out the first night they would be offering the full menu to paying patrons. So we booked a table and went - 6 people.

We ordered everything on the menu, pretty well, as a sampling of what the place was all about. The food started coming, and we asked the Sommelier to just bring what he thought was appropriate, after all, he did spend a couple of months thinking about it.

Although there were a number of things I could not eat, what with the old shellfish thing I have, I can state that the food was excellent across the board. The decor was criticized by some of my table mates, but I liked it. You come into the middle of the place, on Barrington just next to Talay Thai, and to your right is the holding bar, very nice, with lots of comfy chairs. Dining is to the left, and there are a number of high stools that allow you to sit, eat, and look right into the kitchen. That looked like fun, but we were over in the corner booth. Big round booths are my friend's natural habitat.

Staff at Bear have come from some of the best places in Nova Scotia, inspired to work there by the chance to serve Ray Bear's food, and to work for Wade Dhooge, who took Saege Bistro from startup to one of the best places to eat in town, especially if you enjoy fine wine, in Halifax. Wade is not an uptight guy, and apparently very easy to work with. He also has a knack for creating wine lists that make the restaurant money, offer lots of variety, and are unique to his restaurant, something that is not easy in our wine variety limited city. The reason is he works hard at it. More than anyone in town.

The wine list that opening night was, in my opinion, the best in the city, for value, quality, variety and how it matched the dishes on offer. Yes there are good lists elsewhere - Seven has the largest, and in that measure, the best; Cafe Chianti has a very cool list; Five Fishermen's list is great; but Wade manages to make lists for people who love wine and are "wine-curious" without upsetting the people who only know about Yellow Tail.

So we had an amazing evening of food and wine. Our bill was somewhere around $900. My friend tipped $500, so I heard later.

I recommend the duck. Bear does duck best.

If you want more food coverage of the place, someone else was there the same night, blogging away. She seemed to have fun too. Check this out - she had a camera.

with bite


And now for the postscript. I wrote the above back in early December and did not publish it here. Ray's partner, the money guy, is someone from the states who apparently must not have approved of Wade and his laissez-faire style. So now Wade is gone (as well as another manager since, I hear), and the wine list mark up is noticeably higher - enough that I will probably give the place a pass, or end up drinking wine well below the quality of the food. Plus, the wine list is rife with misspellings, a pet peeve of mine (but not one I care about on this shabby blog, of course, so don't bother to look, I don't care).

My point - this city is already full of good places to eat with patrons drinking wine in them that is better suited to match with burgers at Wendy's. If Ray Bear, or any good chef, wants people to enjoy their dinner to the fullest, then why rip them off by charging $150 for a $60 bottle of wine? It takes no more time, effort or storage for that $60 bottle to reach your table than it does for a $20 bottle. Pick a markup rate and use it. Maybe it's $40. Fine. Charge $60 for the $20 bottle, and $90 for the $50 bottle. They all cost the same to get to the restaurant, store, schlep to the table and serve. And you make $40 (OK a bit less) every time anyone buys a bottle of wine!

Now some places (Seven, Cut) have wines that they have sourced on their own, and wines that they have aged in their cellars for some time. Those wines are expected to be marked up. I'm talking about wines I can go out and buy tomorrow myself.

We had a bottle of Felton Road Pinot Noir that night (I have some in my cellar). It costs about $60 at Vin•Art, a private wine shop in Clayton Park. It is one of the best Pinot Noirs in New Zealand (some say the best) and it was great with all the duck parts I was eating. I think we paid $110 for it when we ate there. Now it costs $150. So IF they sell another bottle, they will make $40 more, but in the meantime, they might have sold three more bottles of this fine wine, and showcased the food that much better. Instead they have sold wine, but lesser wine, lessening the overall dining experience. Without affecting profit, they could have provided their patrons with a better dining experience; and isn't that what people in this business tell us they want to do?

People who pay percentage markups on fine wine in restaurants are either ignorant of the actual cost of the wine they are buying; or don't care how much things cost (like my friend). How many people in those two groups will be going out to dinner in the next year in Halifax? Any bottle of wine sold for more than $50 over what it cost to buy is a rip off, unless it has been aged for a long time by the restaurant, or is a special order, only available there. The sad part is that charging more money to open and serve an expensive bottle than a cheaper one actually hurts a restaurant that wants to be the best.

Combine this ancient practice with the restaurant industry's "head in the sand" approach to the BYO rules which I discussed earlier, and one simply knows that many of the local places won't survive this year. Do you think that people will still be looking to eat out, but will want to do so more frugally? I do. We do need to eat.

Come let us eat. And drink. And pay fairly when we do.