414: Randall Restiano Shares Strategies for Buying Wine

I'll Drink to That! Wine Talk

Levi Dalton

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4.8 • 1K Ratings

🗓️ 14 March 2017

⏱️ 71 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

At the time of this interview, Randall Restiano was the Wine Director of the Eli Zabar restaurant group as well as the Eli's List retail shop in Manhattan.

Randall Restiano discusses wine buying strategies for restaurants and for retail. He suggests finding out what you don't like, thinking for the long term, being careful about large purchases, and focusing in on no more than two countries of origin for wine. Randall also has several principles that he keeps in mind when he evaluates every potential wine purchase. He shares those principles and more from his personal experience of wine buying in this interview.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	I'll drink to that where we get behind the scenes of the beverage business.
0:05.1	I'm Levy Dalton.
0:06.1	I'm Erin Scala and here's our show today. Right. Rendo Resto Restiano of the Eli Zabar Restaurant Group in New York,
0:27.8	closer, how are you?
0:28.8	Very good, how are you?
0:29.8	Very nice to see you.
0:30.8	It's good to see you as well.
0:31.8	So where did you grow up? Westchester County. It was very nice. I grew up with my grandmother from Italy, so she really taught me a lot. I cooked with her every day after school. We owned a restaurant, so my great-grandfather opened the restaurant,
0:45.0	and when he came over right after World War II,
0:48.5	it was passed on to my uncle,
0:50.3	and so the restaurants were always around in our life as I grew up with my
0:54.8	grandmother and so I spent a lot of time with her and we cooked a lot.
0:57.6	A Italian restaurant.
0:58.6	It was an Italian restaurant, yeah.
1:00.4	We're originally from a place called Frozignone, which is just south of Rome.
1:05.0	And then yeah, it was a very classic Italian restaurant, not so much the Italian-American
1:09.7	restaurant you see now more classically Italian when they first opened it. They were in the Bronx
1:14.8	when they opened and they would cook for the Yankees when they finished. So Joe DiMaggio,
1:19.7	Lou Gehrig, we have all the photographs with my great-grandfather who was the chef and my great-grand-unkel would have been in front of the house and that was all passed down.
1:29.0	You used to run around now when you're a kid or they tell you to stay out?
1:32.0	Oh no, I was I was there every holiday.
1:34.7	We were in the restaurant.
	...

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