This is an excerpt from Restaurant
Wine, issue 110, Nov/Dec 2005.
Jannae Lizza’s Wine Training At Passionfish Is Fun & Customized
Jannae Lizza
Wine Assistant
Passionfish
Pacific Grove, CA |
As Passionfish’s wine program expanded over the
years (the wine list has grown from approximately 35
wines in 1997 to 400 today), it required
ongoing attention to server wine training. Although he
devoted time to this, Ted Walter, as chef and wine buyer,
was already stretched thin with his time.
But a solution appeared in the restaurant out of the
blue, when Jannae Lizza was hired as hostess, soon after
the Walters purchased the restaurant. Lizza is a self-starter,
who had learned to bake at the café she had previously
worked at in order to save that restaurant money. She
says, “When I learned how much we were paying for
apple turnovers, I said, ‘I’m going to learn
to make these’”. And she did,
and
went on
to plan menus at the café,
as well as
teach
baking
to others.
She became interested in learning about wine when she
was put on the floor as a server (today, she is a manager
two days a week and a server the other three days). “I
didn’t know anything about wine. The other servers
told me not to worry about it, but to recommend Ridge
and Silver Oak, because everyone knows them. But I told
them that we have a wine list and we should know everything
on it, not just one or two wines because they are popular.”
Immediately afterwards, Lizza took the wine list home
and went online to find tasting notes and other information
about every wine. She copied the notes onto the wine
list, then posted this on the wall at the servers’ station
in the restaurant [see page 11]. “I thought everyone
else might be interested in what I came up with. For
example, one wine they had made only 300 cases of. I
thought that was a selling point.” Servers began
to refer to the notes, and the maps that followed, to
help them talk about the wines with customers.
Her next innovation: posting a wine question of the
day on the line, where food is picked up [see page 10].
The question usually was one she herself had been asked
by a customer or a server. “Whenever a customer
asked a question I wasn’t sure about-How does a
rose Champagne get its color?-I would go home, look it
up, and then post the question and the answer the next
day for the staff. I figured that maybe some of them
knew the answer already, and maybe some of them didn’t.
But I wanted to share the information, to make it readily
available.” (The question was printed on the front
of the page, the answer on the back.)
This is an excerpt from Restaurant
Wine, issue 110, Nov/Dec 2005.
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