Backstreet Cafe’s Sean Beck earning reputation as eager expert.
Backstreet Cafe’s sommelier earning reputation as eager expert on pairing wine with different dishes
As Backstreet Cafe celebrates its 35th anniversary this month — deeply discounted Cristal for the masses! — Sean Beck is having a private party within a party for himself. It’s a time for reflection, and fun recollections, because, although he’s only 42, Beck has been the head of the venerable restaurant’s wine program for 20 years, which makes him one of the most tenured sommeliers in town.
Bear Dalton, Spec’s longtime buyer, affectionately calls Beck “the Dean” and, indeed, his run in what another local sommelier recently described as “a churn and burn” business has been remarkable. Time flies when you’re having fun, and Beck, who was born in New York but finished high school in The Woodlands before attending the University of Houston, most assuredly is. He still sells wine with a kid-in-the-candy-store mentality.
And, though he has met plenty of bottles he hasn’t liked, he has rarely met one he wasn’t eager to try.
Oh, the changes Beck has seen over his two decades. The Backstreet list he inherited from owner Tracy Vaught in 1998 consisted of 60 selections. They were all mainstream labels, and the most expensive, he recalls, was a 1994 Silver Oak, at $55. One of the most popular by-the-glass pours back then was, of course, a white zinfandel.
Beck dumped that early on despite, he concedes, “lots of blowback.” But, interestingly, he redirected the customers who wanted their sugary pink juice not to a classic Provençal rosé but to riesling, wisely reasoning that it was the sweetness they were looking for. He became — and remains — one of the city’s passionate champions of the great whites from the Moselle and Rhine Valleys.
California zinfandel turned his head straight away, too. Beck calls them his “first epiphany wines.” Although a waiter/bartender at the time, he remembers being invited to join Vaught for a tasting with a local wine rep, who offered them the Cigar Zin from Cosentino. She reacted with disdain, saying, “Oh, I don’t like this at all.” And what Beck calls his “quiet-as-a-churchmouse” persona — “I was always very quiet, trying to absorb (knowledge) and not say anything stupid” — flew out the window.
He blurted in response, “Are you crazy? That’s a classic example of a Napa Valley floor zinfandel! It’s got that great jammy red fruit you want!”
Vaught didn’t fire him on the spot. Instead, laughing, she stood up and said, before returning to the kitchen, “I’m going to let you guys finish this (tasting) on your own.”
From that point forward, she encouraged Beck to immerse himself in the world of wine, a beverage he was preternaturally programmed to appreciate “because I’ve always had a really strong sense of smell.” It didn’t take him long to become Backstreet’s wine buyer, and these days he does it for all four of the popular Vaught and chef Hugo Ortega’s restaurants. The others, of course, are Hugo’s, Caracol and Xochi, the last of which ranks No. 1 on Chronicle critic Alison Cook’s 2018 Top 100 Houston restaurants list.
The Backstreet list itself has grown to some 300 wines, and collectively the four spots feature more than 600. It’s a complicated dance given how the cuisines differ, but Beck insists the challenge makes the job more compelling. When it comes to pairings, he and Ortega tend to finish each other’s sentences.
Back in the day, to get himself up to speed, Beck read every magazine or book on wine he could find — the internet wasn’t an easy option — and he dutifully learned from his elders. He credits Dalton, Cafe Annie chef Robert Del Grande and Del Grande’s Master-Sommelier-in-the-making, Paul Roberts, for playing influential roles in his evolution. Another was Jeb Stuart, then the chef at the nearby Daily Review, who became a regular after-work-Saturday-night wine-drinking buddy.
He fondly remembers Tim Keating, who ran one of the city’s best kitchens in the Four Seasons downtown and is now the head chef for a group of high-end Orlando, Fla., restaurants, for having “the best wine lunches. He’s probably still the most acute chef I’ve ever run across in terms of pairings. I’d sit at Tim’s chef ’s table and take detailed notes on how he was working with the food and the wine, making them fit perfectly together. And Robert had this very unique way of describing wines in a food context, expressing how they were ‘round’ or ‘cloudy’ to him.”
My lasting recollection of Beck from the first times we conversed around the turn of the 21st century was how passionate he would get over something he was recommending. If he said, “You’ve
got to try this,” I stuck my glass out, no questions asked. Most of our “cool-kid” somms take this approach today, but Beck was far ahead of the curve. He admits he drove the wine salespeople crazy, peppering them with questions when they wanted only to get him to sign the invoice so they could move on to their next call.
“I was caught in this wasteland of sorts, where the lists (around Houston) were either super-corporate or really old guard,” Beck said. “I tried to tread a line, but I know I annoyed the hell out of a whole generation of distributors and wine reps. They’d come in, and here was this kid — with
braces — and I’d just beat them up with questions about vineyards and cellar techniques. I wasn’t afraid to say, ‘That’s just bad! You need to rethink that wine.’ Really, I was a square peg trying to fit into a round hole.”
But when a rep got “Becked” — loosely defined, that’s being yelled at for bringing in over-priced, uninteresting bottles or inundated with geeky inquiries — at least the poor soul knew it was coming from a guy who was getting worked up for the right reasons.