Introduction

From Dale:

Alex Rychlewski was in NY from Bordeaux this weekend, we decided to have an offline in his honor. Now, everyone here knows Alex is a tireless advocate for both less-regarded Bordeaux appellations and less-regarded vintages. Since we had already done a satellite offline this year (and there's not many decent Bordeaux Supérieurs to be found in NYC!), we decreed the theme would be "Good Wines in Iffy Vintages?". Arv Rao arranged a no-corkage dinner at al-Baraka, a Turkish restaurant in Midtown East.

All seemed fine, till 2 days before. Suddenly the restaurant owner realized it was Ramadan (how could he not have known?) and got nervous re having wine in restaurant. Pretty daunting thinking of trying to arrange an offline for 11 people on a Saturday with 2 days notice. Arv girded his loins with the righteousness of the winegeek, and did battle with the owner. He finally got the owner to agree- on the condition we kept the bottles under the table. Seriously.

A bit of a wierd night. Waitstaff totally ignoring us at first, with owner scurrying over to whisper "hide, please hide" if a bottle came topside for a minute. I was scared to go to the restroom, as I was near the middle and had open bottles on each side of me. At one point the owner said "people are fasting, it will be ok we can take your order after dark." !?!?!? There was a restaurant full of people eating. Finally, finally, they took our order. The appetizers were really good - good hummus, very good smoky baba ganoush, decent grape leafs, a very tasty stuffed eggplant, vegetable samosas. They were out of lamb chops, but most of us good varied kebabs (with a couple going for the lamb shanks). The shish kebab and chicken kokta were very good, the beef kebab unfortunately quite tough.

Flight 1 (12 notes)

Closing

Overall, I was pleasantly surprised by the wines. I think everyone did a good job finding if not diamonds in the rough, at least some jewels.

Here are the table's votes (based on a 3, 2, 1 point vote for 1st, 2nd, 3rd favorites:
Palmer (28), Sociando (13), Cos (8), SHL (5), La Gaff (4), Poujeaux (4), Baron (2)

The under the table thing was bizzarre, but didn't really bother me. It's a good thing we weren't tasting blind, or it could have gotten very confusing!

I think the restaurant was understaffed and the service was about as bad as one could imagine bad service being until the place cleared out and they could pay attention to us. The food was very good. I guess I'd go back under different circumstances, but I wouldn't rush out and recommend it.

A disclaimer: I'm a pretty tough grader, so these are decent marks for me.

Thanks to everyone, especially Arv and Dale. It was a treat to finally meet Alex.