When Wine Isn't the Focus, But Should Be: Restaurant Week Wine Flights at Fleming's Prime Steakhouse, Boston

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When Wine Isn't the Focus, But Should Be: Restaurant Week Wine Flights at Fleming's Prime Steakhouse, Boston

Posted 08/11/2008 at 07:44 PM by Cathy

It makes sense to choose your destinations for Restaurant Week based on the restaurants' special prix fixe menus. Once in a while, though, you'll see that a restaurant you've had your eye on because of their wine list – and not necessarily because their food – is participating in Restaurant Week.

That's the day you call yourself lucky.

You've been wanting to go there anyway for the selections from their wine cellar, plus you get three courses from their kitchen, all for an incredibly reasonable price?

Sign me up.

That's what happened this week with Fleming's Prime Steakhouse & Wine Bar, on Stuart Street in Boston. I'd heard about their wine list – a cool one hundred of them, all available by the glass – but, what's more, Fleming's makes the list user-friendly by dividing the wines into manageable categories and further organizing those categories by level of intensity, from lighter- to fuller-bodied, from less to more tannins, or whatever the case may be.

Fleming's also offers wine flights, composed of three two-ounce servings. And this is where Fleming's distinguished themselves for me: they are one of the few participants in Restaurant Week who seem to have considered their wine selection just as carefully as they considered their prix fixe menu. Our server told us about two flights, one of Pinot Noir and the other of Chardonnay, that were chosen specially to match the Restaurant Week menu.

Since we were ordering both the Prime New York Strip steak and the New Zealand King Salmon filet, we took advantage of both flights as well.

And that's where things started to turn sour. Or at least they threatened to.

I didn't like two of the three Chardonnays in the flight. The 2006 Louis Jadot was lovely; Louis Jadot normally is. The 2004 from Marimar Estate in the Russian River Valley was not lovely. The third wine – a 2005 Cuvaison – was perfectly drinkable if not extraordinary.

The floor manager touched our table about three times from the time we sat down to the time our appetizers were served. The third time he said, "If there's anything I can do to make your experience better, please let me know."

So I did.

I told him I was not digging on the second Chardonnay, from Marimar Estate. He immediately brought over the wine list and, together, we looked for another option. We landed on the Rodney Strong Chardonnay and that, to my palate, was a vast improvement.

Would I have said anything if the manager wasn't so available? Maybe, but I was much more likely to, because he made it so easy. Since he did, and since I did, I walked away with a distinctly better experience rather than a just-okay one that may not have lived up to my hopes for the place.

Here's the bottom line: Fleming's gets wine. Better, they get wine service. In my book that gives them a huge thumbs-up, Restaurant Week or not.

P.S. The Pinot Noir flight had no foul balls whatsoever; the 2006 Paul Dolan from Mendocino, the second of the three wines, was as far from a foul ball as any Pinot I've had recently. And the champagne-infused Brie that's served pre-meal with crudités and crostini? That I'd call a home run.

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About the Author

Cathy Huyghe

Cathy Huyghe writes about drinking wine every day in the Boston area. She finds the quirky characters, the after-hours events, and the surprising stories that make up Boston's vibrant local wine scene. But no matter where she is, what she's doing, or who she's with, she mostly just wants to drink the stuff.

Her first restaurant gig was at Chez Panisse, when she knocked on the kitchen's back door and asked if she could work there. She's also worked for Jean-Pierre Vigato in Paris and Thomas Keller in Las Vegas. She went to graduate school at Harvard (twice), and her writing has run in Boston magazine, the Boston Globe, the Washington Post, Edible Boston, and on Nevada Public Radio and Grist.org.

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