My favorite restaurant in Los Angeles is Valentino. The size of its wine list is near the top of the list of reasons I love it. It's hundreds of pages long with thousands of choices. Perusing it over a glass of sparkling wine and an appetizer is a joy.
Yet, there's also something to be said for a small list. When Helen and I had dinner earlier this week at Savann in NYC (on Amsterdam just south of 80th Street), we were presented with a concise list of a few dozen wines, all of which were very reasonably priced, but which also clearly had been chosen to match up brilliantly with the French/Mediterranean bistro cuisine. By presenting us with a limited range of impeccable choices, the restaurant made life very simple. Do we want red or white? French or New World? Big or small?
Harvey Steiman reports on his interview with famed chef Thomas Keller:
At one point, for example, as we discussed wine, he suggested that wine lists are too big. That caught my attention, as his Napa Valley restaurant, the French Laundry, possesses a Wine Spectator Grand Award. It is a big list, with 2,705 selections and nearly 20,000 bottles in the cellar. He seemed uncomfortable with that, so I asked him why, and that led to one of his more pungent comments, that he thinks of a big wine list as “a pissing contest.” ...
He understands why an ambitious restaurant like the French Laundry or his New York outpost, Per Se, should have a deep cellar. But in the end, he believes (and this comment did not make it into the story): “Luxury is not about choices. Our culture has defined it as having all these choices. But to me, luxury is not having any choices at all.” ...
This caught my eye. One of the key insights of behavioral economics is that having too many choices can be paralyzing, as the New Yorker explained in a review of Barry Schwartz's estimable book The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less
In his view, “unlimited choice” can “produce genuine suffering.” Schwartz makes his case mostly through research in psychology and behavioral economics—research that shows how far real people are from the perfectly rational “utility maximizers” posited by classical economists.
In the real world, neither people nor firms maximize utility. Life is complicated, the options of the marketplace are numerous, and the human intellect is frail. As Herbert Simon, the 1978 Nobel laureate in economics, observed, any firm that tried to make decisions that would “maximize” its returns would bankrupt itself in a never-ending search for the best option. What firms do instead is “satisfice,” to use Simon’s term: they content themselves with results that are “good enough.” Schwartz, who is a close reader of Simon, worries that the profusion of choices we face—a hundred varieties of bug spray, breakfast cereal, extra-virgin olive oil—is turning us into maximizers, and maximizers, he thinks, are prone to misery and depression.
At the end of the day, however, I guess I prefer a world of choice. Some days I prefer to be presented with a wine list with 2000 options. Some days I don't. Thankfully, we live in a world where both are available.
