Bob Bob Ricard to cap wine markups at £50
Soho’s Bob Bob Ricard will next week launch its new wine list, which will undercut some of London’s best restaurants by as much as £700 a bottle.
Leonid Shutov and Richard Howarth, who launched the British restaurant at the end of last year, have capped wine markups on Bob Bob Ricard’s reserve list at £50 in order to offer diners a wider range of choice.
Under the new price structure, a bottle of Chateau Haut Brion 1er Cru Classe, Graves, 1985 will cost just £318 at Bob Bob Ricard, £682 cheaper than the same bottle at Gordon Ramsay at Claridges, while a bottle of Bollinger Vieillles Vignes Francaises 1999 would save a diner £416 than if they were eating at Maze.
Speaking to BigHospitality, Shutov said the price cuts were made out of a need to work harder to attract diners than more established restaurants in the area.
“Because we’re a new restaurant we’re scrutinized more harshly than other more established restaurants,” he said. “But we’re giving people a chance to have some bigger wines to transform their experience and complement their food, that they otherwise wouldn’t have chosen. A £50 surcharge per bottle is more than sufficient to cover the cost of selecting, sourcing, storing and serving big wines beautifully.”
While the wine list will change over next month, Bob Bob Ricard has stocked most of the wines for the past few weeks, and according to Shutov, the revised price structure has already proved popular.
“People choose to go for it because they know a similar bottle in another restaurant would cost around £250 more, and at £175 they think it’s a great deal - they are focusing on the value of the product and not its price,” he said. “It makes a big difference to peoples’ enjoyment of the meal and enhances us beyond any other restaurant.”
Bob Bob Ricard’s new wine list will become available as of 14 September.
