Exposed! The Most Common Restaurant Scam Ordered by Bosses: Servers Reveal ‘Re-Potting’

Brain fried from your last meeting, you leave the office feeling dazed by the day’s events. Basically, you’re as withered as the houseplant in your living room: without regular sunlight and watering, your poor Monstera is struggling to survive… To remedy this, you quickly meet up with your best friend at an outdoor café. On the agenda: light therapy, gossip, and glasses of Chablis. You too needed a bit of sunshine (and a little watering). You decide: when you get home, you’ll pay more attention to your thirsty Monstera.

The waiter brings you two glasses of wine already poured. The Chablis is a bit sharp, but you’re not too picky. The free bowl of green olives that comes with it makes both the drink and the bill more palatable. However, unbeknownst to you, you’ve just been scammed. “It’s a technique that several servers have told us they’ve used under orders from their boss to make a higher margin”, explains Mathieu Hennequin, a journalist from Le Parisien, who investigated this practice. It “even has a name in the industry and is called ‘re-potting'”, the journalist explains in his report. But what are we talking about exactly?

In fact, this scam “involves serving a cheaper wine than the one ordered by the customer”, Mathieu elaborates. The sommelier assisting him in his investigation confirms: the Chablis they were just served on the terrace is actually… Sauvignon! “The color is not the same. On the Chablis, I see a bright straw-yellow hue, but the glass offered to me this morning is more of a silvery color.” The taste, of course, is nothing alike. The sommelier’s verdict? “I think we were duped this morning”. But how do the servers pull it off? Well, this is where the infamous “re-potting” technique comes into play. Sarah, who has been working in a Parisian restaurant for 30 years, explains: “I might end up combining leftover wines into a single bottle for happy hour”.

This dubious mix is then served directly to the customers in glasses. The servers’ advice? “If you are with a group, don’t hesitate to order a bottle: the risk of being scammed will be minimal”, the journalist reports. And as we know, even without any trickery, ordering a bottle almost always turns out to be cheaper than ordering wine by the glass. Now you’ve been warned.