The "right" glassware?
I'm not usually a stickler for having high-quality glassware. A lot of people are very particular about being able to drink their wine from an appropriate vessel. I mostly don't care.
Recently, though, I'm having glassware issues. First there were the stunted little tumblers at Tory Row. Now it's the water glasses at Tupelo. Or should I say water vats?
I don't have a whole lot of complaints about the restaurant, as you'll read on Wednesday. But I hate the ginormous Mason jars they're using as drinking glasses!
1. I can barely wrap my hand around the thing.
2. They only fill them about halfway anyway. Why not use the more manageable standard-size Mason jar, then?
3. I'm not sure about how I feel about the glasses as a representation of some sort of "poverty chic" aesthetic. If you can't afford drinking glasses and are making the most of what you have, that's one thing. But at this point, IKEA glasses are probably cheaper than Mason jars. It's not, actually, cool to be poor.
Do you care what kind of glassware your beverage comes in?
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One mistake I see is the use of absurdly oversized glasses for wine. Rocca used to use these awful, heavy-glass, parfait-type things when they first opened. I didn't think it was authentic (I doubt such glasses are widely used in Liguria, for instance) and they were awful for wine. They started carrying regular stemmed wine glasses for patrons who requested them, and have abandoned those other glasses since.
I've never been a fan of the stemless wine goblet, which I've seen used at a few places. I don't mind a rustic tumbler type of glass, which I have seen in enotecas and other modest wine bars around Europe, but it seems to me it should be smallish, sturdy, and easy to hold, which those stemless, round-bottomed goblets aren't.
Context is important. I fully expect L'Espalier to serve their pricy wines in elegant stemware. But I'm okay with The Beehive serving me modest wine in the sturdy, cheap snifters, they use, too.
I hated those glasses at Rocca, too.
When I am in a restaurant that purports to serve southern food, they BEST be giving me my drink in a Mason jar. I don't think it is poverty chic (at least all the time). It's authentic and a little piece of home for a transplanted southerner. Also, sweet tea tastes better in them. True story.
But then again, I was probably 10 years old before I realized that the jars weren't actual glasses and that not everyone used them. :)
I don't mind drinking out of mason jars, though it is puzzling why an establishment would use such big ones. But I don't mind the size of the glass as much as I would like it to be a glass. I hate, hate drinking out of plastic.
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