I'll drink to that where we get behind the scenes of the beverage business.

I'm Levy Dalton.

I'm Erin Scala and here's our show today. Oh, Sam Erlich, the wine director of the Blue Ribbon restaurants in New York.

Hello, sir, how are you?

I'm well, Levy, how are you?

Thanks for being on a show.

Thanks for having me.

From this area originally, you grew up in New York.

I did.

I grew up from Brooklyn.

We lived on the Upper West Side

until I was three.

And then we moved to Flatbush where, you know,

I was walking up and down the strip with my resume and dropping it off and that was Blue Ribbon was the first call back I got. I have to confess, you know, at that point, I mean, you know, Blue Ribbon had been opened in the city for 11 years and the Park Slope Restaurant, which had opened in 2001.

I mean by the time I started there it had already been opened for two years, but I didn't know anything about it.

I had zero clue. You know when we went to restaurants when I was a

kid. Back before there was anything else on Fifth Avenue, there was a restaurant called

Kucchina, which was on Fifth, and it was there for a good long time. I mean, it had to have been there for a solid 15, 20 years before it closed.

And it was one of, at the time, when I was a kid eight nine years old that was where we went for sort of big family occasions

You know my family were all born in October so oftentimes as kids we would go for one big kind of birthday celebration my grandparents

would come down from Westchester and and that's where we went we went to

Kachina and I learned a lot about food in that room.

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