Despite being one of The Diners Club‘s best restaurants in the world, it took a full year before Manresa received a response to its request for stages. Scott McKinney was the first person to take the bait, working unpaid for two months with the sommelier of the Los Gatos, California restaurant before he was hired as assistant beverage director. While working the bar, McKinney drank in beverage director and sommelier Jeff Bareilles’ wine list and fell in love with Burgundy wines. McKinney returned to his hometown of St. Louis and became Randolfi’s sommelier, where he curates an Old-World wine list. Here are two meals from McKinney’s stint on the West Coast that changed his life.
LOCANDA, SAN FRANCISCO, 2012
“The food was great, but it wasn’t the food that was so alluring – it was my first real exposure to amari. I’d had fernet, but their amari list was so in-depth and so huge. (My friend and I) each did a flight of eight and got different things – that’s how extensive the list was. Our server set them down in a specific order, then went through and explained why and what you would get out of each of them. That’s one thing that stuck out: Our server knew just as much about the amari as the bartender. I don’t remember the name (of the most impressive), but I remember its profile: It was this amaro from southeastern Europe and the base of it was honey. So you got this burnt orange flavor, these honey flavors and floral flavors, but also that soft bitterness in the background you would get if you burned a pan of honey.”
DIO DEKA FINE HELLENIC CUISINE, LOS GATOS, CALIFORNIA, 2012
“Dio Deka is a Greek-inspired restaurant down the street from Manresa in Los Gatos. The Manresa people knew all the Dio Deka people, so it was this camaraderie kind of thing. We got treated like royalty whenever we went in. We would have nights where we would have like five, six, seven bottles of wine. That restaurant is the perfect place to hang out with your friends and spend a lot of money. They sent out some 90-day dry-aged, bone-in rib-eye, just a giant hunk of meat. We cut pieces off it, and then here’s this bone sitting on the plate. There’s still a little meat on the bone and – no shame – I pick it up and start gnawing the rest of the meat off it in the middle of a very classy restaurant. And the chef – it was an open kitchen – he sees me doing this and just gives me the thumbs up, like, ‘That’s what I’m talking about.'”
This article appears in October 2016.
