The Grog Tray

I grew up in an area of California called “the Central Coast,” almost exactly halfway between Los Angeles and San Francisco, in a town called Pismo Beach. As a child in the mid-1980s there, the most sophisticated thing I was exposed to was at the local steakhouse, McClintock’s. After dinner, they brought around a treasure chest with tiny toys like me to pick from. The adults had a server come around with an assortment of after-dinner liqueurs: Kahlua, Bailey’s, Disarrono amaretto, and some others I can’t recall. 

Fast forward 30 years and my social club, Wingtip, had a solid assortment of after-dinner beverage options: Cognacs, vintage Ports, Brandy, Fernet Branca (popular in San Francisco). But my feeling was always that if those drinks are just listed on the menu, even if it’s a smaller, curated Dessert Menu, it’s too easy for the guests to say no. If, on the other hand, a server was pushing a dim sum-like cart stocked with digestifs ready to pour into appropriate glassware, we would see significant uptake in after-dinner drinks. 

And then, a book I was reading about butlers introduced me to The Grog Tray. After dinner, the ladies would retire to the parlor while the men would retire to a den where the butler would present them with after-dinner beverage options from the grog tray. In fact, the Telegraph wrote up the renewed popularity of the grog tray just a couple years ago.

While not exactly the same idea, I was reminded about the grog tray when reading Will Guidara’s Unreasonable Hospitality. He talked about how Eleven Madison Park flipped the bill presentation from an awkward, transactional ritual to an eminently hospitable one. He does a better job explaining it than I can: 

This struck me as genius as I read it, especially if you know about bar & restaurant liquor economics (Cognac brands would be crawling over each other to be the brand poured). 

Unfortunately, I was never able to bring The Grog Tray™ to life at Wingtip. I would love to travel with the concept as part of executive dinners, . However, the patchwork liquor laws that vary state to state (and sometimes by county within a state), as well as the complexity of settling with the restaurant for liquor they didn’t buy and don’t have in their Point of Sale, makes it a non-starter. A dream until I someday open my own Executive Briefing Center with a liquor license…