Thirst Behavior is a project about wine, taste, and the social performances that form around them, the rituals of enjoyment shaped by status, media, money, and desire. Wine is the entry point; the real subject is how taste gets made, circulated, and contested, especially in New York and the Hamptons, where leisure and tastemaking overlap most visibly.
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In 2016, shortly after Ace Hotel, New Orleans opened, I walked into an interview wildly overdressed for a June day. I was in my beloved double-breasted Theory suit with these cool pleated trousers. Feeling perhaps over-confident, and also quite sweaty, I did my best to dazzle the F&B director with my big city bona fides. They needed a wine guy and I was that guy. I proposed a structure I’d seen work in New York: hourly wage for wine admin and staff training, tip pool cut for selling wine on the floor. I followed up our meeting with a detailed proposal about the value I’d bring to their new operation. To my amazement, they went for it.
A year later, they eliminated my job.
The comptroller cited concerns about a “non-revenue-producing position.” The servers had complaints about sharing tips with someone whose work, moment to moment, didn’t look exactly like theirs. The alternative Ace offered was the job of outlet manager: run the rooftop bar full-time, with maybe some input on wine, provided that it went through the property’s dedicated beverage manager. They still wanted my wine brain. They just didn’t want a line item for it.
This was not an isolated incident. Before Ace, when I was in New York, I’d written a lengthy cover letter for an AGM job at Reynard in the Wythe Hotel — a dull-sounding and poor-paying management gig I pursued for the privilege of getting to help Lee Campbell with wine buying for Andrew Tarlow’s restaurant group. I was not called upon for this opportunity. Before that, I sat through an excruciating interview with Thomas Carter at Estela for a position billed as “server with wine knowledge.” He asked me to evaluate my own wine knowledge on a scale of 1-10, and had me name my six ‘favorite varietals.’ I gave what I thought was the most defensible answer: Chardonnay, Chenin, Riesling, Pinot Noir, Gamay and Cab Franc. He said, “Interesting…” and never moved onto the next question.
Stories like these will sound familiar to anyone who has invested heavily in their own wine education, but wanted to avoid the fate of stagnating in middle management. I cannot tell you how many times a manager has said to me, “your wine knowledge will be really useful here,” and propose exactly zero compensation for it.
Now, I know what you’re thinking: is it possible that I am just not actually that good at wine? Yes, that’s totally possible. But my own frustrations aside, I think real sommelier jobs are rarer than they should be. And it’s not because of a talent shortage. It’s because restaurants don’t know how to value this kind of expertise, and therefore, they think they can get it for free. They fold wine into someone’s management job or dangle it as the perk that makes a boring AGM role worth taking. Or maybe they give a server an extra side of responsibility and call it professional development. You get an admin day to handle cellar work if you’re lucky and a title if you’re luckier, and the restaurant gets to trade on an acumen they don’t understand.
This arrangement functions, in the narrow sense. The list looks fine because it’s probably been vibe-coded by a manager with a tiktok account, an expensive graphic designer, and a few savvy wine reps; the by-the-glass selections take care of the bottom line; and the rest of the list doesn’t really matter. At no point is it someone’s main job to stand in the dining room and translate the list to the people reading it. That labor — the real-time interpretation of the list for the benefit of the guest — simply disappears. Servers default to what’s easiest. Guests default to what’s safest. The middle of the list, the part someone put thought into, goes cold. Nobody notices because nobody was tracking it in the first place, and they’re just glad they don’t have to reprint too often.
What’s strange is that this is happening at the exact moment wine has never been more central to how restaurants signal who they are, and who they are for. The right producers, the right regions, the right price-to-cool ratio circulate on Instagram. They get photographed. They perform the cultural literacy of the place. Restaurants want the cellar as a cultural document. They want the signaling. They just do not want to fund the person who writes it, maintains it, activates it, and has an actual point of view. The industry has gotten very good at separating the performance of taste from the labor that produces it.
Some operators have been burned by lazy or pretentious somms — the guy who treats service as the gap between big tables, who stands around in a tie clip waiting for a whale to enter the room, who disappears when the dining room gets weeded, who terrorizes servers rather than helping them. He is real, he is a problem, and he has done more damage to the economic case for the position than any comptroller’s COGS spreadsheet. But he’s also a useful villain. He allows the industry to treat a structural problem as a personnel issue. The tie-clip guy is not why the position is precarious. The position is precarious because the industry’s theory of value does not know what to do with labor that generates revenue indirectly — through return visits, through reputation, through cultural positioning through the continual enfranchisement of the right kind of guests.
There’s also the tip-pool problem, which I totally understand. I have stood in front of servers who do not want to share their tips with someone who, at times, resembles their manager. This is totally fair, and it means the somm has to be useful in ways that have nothing to do with wine. Here are some suggestions: Run drinks. Reset tables. Seat guests. Polish glassware. Run food when the kitchen is drowning. Be fucking helpful. Do not behave as though you are above the job of a busser. If you can be the person the servers are genuinely relieved to see on the schedule, the tip-pool conversation gets less awkward.
And this is the thing: that versatility is not a concession. It’s the whole point.
There is no other role in a restaurant where you can go from the dish pit to a ten-minute conversation about Burgundy’s newest wave of micro-negociants. I have done it. That range — cellar to floor to dish pit to a table ordering Roulot — is not a compromise you make to justify your existence. It is, for me, what makes the job worth doing.
A good somm, the kind who did the jobs that lead up to being a somm, can do anything. The hard skills are unglamorous and specific: bussing, clearing, folding napkins, polishing glassware, resetting tables quickly, expediting. The soft skills are harder to teach: salesmanship, emotional intelligence, de-escalation, the ability to read a room and know what it needs before anyone asks. And then, layered on top of all of that, the somm holds the most esoteric information in the building. They know what a wine list is supposed to communicate, and they know how to communicate it to someone who may have zero frame of reference. They understand the overarching theory of hospitality the restaurant is aiming for — why a room feels the way it feels, why a guest decides to come back — and they can execute it at every station in the building.
That person is worth the hourly, and their spot in the tip pool. They are worth the title and the dedicated time, even if they get to self-manage a bit more than your average line employee. But the argument only works if both sides hold up their end of the social contract. The somm has to actually work — and I mean work, not just sell wine and look cool. The operator has to fund the role like they mean it, not like it’s a line item to be engineered around. A cellar does not maintain itself. A list does not develop a point of view by accident. Staff training is not a distributor with thirty accounts reading aloud from a tech sheet at pre-shift. Good wine programs don’t happen when it’s someone’s second job.
Wine is everywhere and it’s more visible than ever. The person who makes it mean something is not. That gap is fixable. It just requires that everyone stop pretending the work is free.
Hands down best part of the job is being a busboy who gets to wear whatever they want to work 🙏🏼