A not-so-successful wine dinner

The doctors' association at my hospital had a Spring Dinner last week and we held it at the Central premises of the Hong Kong Medical Association. I had tried to match a few dishes with wines and also brought a couple more as general all-purpose wines for the banquet style meal. With local cuisine, when we eat at home or informally at restaurants, the dishes are all brought to the table to be eaten concurrently with each other. In a banquet style meal, the dishes are served one after another. This contrast is much like the service a la francaise (exemplified by an overloaded table with wonderful set pieces of the time of Louis XIV) as opposed to service a la russe (a series of dishes served in succession, like Western meals nowadays).

That night, despite a reasonable experience with wine service one week previous, the waiters were not very good at ensuring the right bottles were opened in good time. The kitchen was worse, with a cluster of dishes arriving on the table in quick succession, before the previous dishes were consumed so that up to four separate courses were present at the same time. That of course meant that people had no time to try pairing the wines with the dishes. The lesson learnt is, not only have you got to instruct the waiters with the order of the wines; you also have to communicate with the kitchen to make sure that the next dish would not be ready before the last dish had been consumed.