A TOAST TO RN74 AS IT RIDES OFF INTO THE BURGUNDIAN SUNSET.
Why it rocked the wine world — and why now it’s time to close
RN74 is going out in a blaze of glory.
As the restaurant approaches its Saturday, Oct. 7, closing date, it’s stoking the blaze: hosting its bygone staff, replaying its greatest hits. It’s offering some sweet deals: Bottles from the market list are half price on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and if you’re willing to drop $250, the staff will open up a bottle listed at $750 or more — practically wholesale cost.
Sommeliers of RN74 past — Rajat Parr, Christie Dufault, Dustin Wilson, Eric Railsback — have each returned to pour wines. Former chefs Jason Berthold and Adam Sobel have given encores from the kitchen. For anyone interested in some RN74 nostalgia-waxing, it’s on offer.
After eight years in business, the Burgundy-themed San Francisco restaurant is clearing out of its space at the base of Millennium Tower to make way for the Mina Group’s newest blockbuster: International Smoke, a barbecue restaurant in partnership with Ayesha Curry.
It can feel, to the wine geeks who loved RN74, like an unfair contest, pitting the celebrity against Burgundy. One is a newly minted cover girl, the new host of “The Great American Baking Show” and the better half of one of the Bay Area’s most beloved sports heroes. The other smells, on a good day, like a swamp.
It’s not that simple. Now is RN74’s time to close. Exhilarating in 2009, RN74 no longer makes sense for 2017. In its bright, brief life the restaurant captured the wave of excitement that was building around Burgundy wine, and then, as prices surged, got wiped out by the wave. In many ways, it was a victim of its own success.
But it leaves a hefty legacy, having made more than a few wine careers. Its former-employee roster is to the wine world what “The Mickey Mouse Club” is to 1990s pop stars. It paved the way for a new generation of wine-driven restaurants with ultra-humane markups — think of Augustine in Los Angeles, or Pearl & Ash and Rebelle in New York.
RN74 was a moment: a restaurant of and for a particular place and time. The moment has passed. But the moment was extraordinary.
It all began when Raj Parr told Michael Mina that he wanted to open a wine bar. Parr had been working with Mina since 2002, first as a sommelier at Aqua, then as the wine director at Mina’s eponymous San Francisco restaurant. There, Parr compiled a killer wine list — so killer, in fact, that he had to reprint the lengthy menu daily because he was constantly selling out of the last bottle of something.
That dilemma sparked an idea in Parr: Why not open a wine bar called the Last Bottle, where rare selections could be rotated on a board, like departures at a train station?
“That’s too good a concept for a tiny bar,” Mina told Parr.
In Parr, Mina says, he saw magic. “I had never in my life met someone who could explain wine like Raj could,” Mina says. “I knew he was dynamic enough to carry a whole restaurant.”
The notion of a sommelier “carrying” a restaurant was then a relatively novel one. To be sure, San Francisco temples of wine attached to famous names — Rubicon, Bacar — lived on, if only in memory, while a newer spate of neighborhood spots, like A16, were drawing crowds for their idiosyncratic wine selections. But there hadn’t been a restaurant that prioritized wine so unabashedly as RN74 would — or that matched its ambition to have a wine list worthy of a Michelin three-star restaurant, without aiming to be a Michelin three-star restaurant.
This turn freed Parr from the Last Bottle strictures, allowing him to narrow his focus on the wine region nearest to his heart: Burgundy. They would name the restaurant for the main artery that traverses the Côte d’Or, the Route Nacionale 74.
The timing didn’t look favorable. In 2009, the city was reeling from the previous year’s financial crash. “People would call up (the restaurant) saying, ‘We are coming in with a group of 10, will you give us half price?’ ” Mina recalls. SoMa, yet to welcome Salesforce Tower and today’s tech explosion, resembled a ghost town. “You could not see a person walking here,” Parr says.
It made for a rather depressing backdrop to a Burgundy blockbuster. “Look, it was a time people were saying fine dining was dead,” Mina puts it. Rather, it had become the era of the neighborhood restaurant — the Nopa set. Cloches and white tablecloths seemed tone-deaf, garish.
Parr’s proposal: Abandon the tablecloths. Put the waiters in jeans and Converse sneakers. Break the established wine markup rules — instead, charge two times wholesale cost, at most. Offer crazy wine deals: a different $1 bottle every day.
“There was not going to be any ‘Are you getting a middle course?’ ” Parr says.
It wasn’t just the $4.5 million opening budget that helped them to achieve this vision. It was also the addition of venture capitalist — and baller wine collector — Wilf Jaeger as a partner in the restaurant, whose 30,000-bottle wine cellar padded the RN74 wine list.
Parr assembled a sommelier dream team at the outset: Christie Dufault, Eric Railsback, Justin Hall and Bernabe De Luna. According to Mina, all of the restaurant’s waiters were, at minimum, certified sommeliers.
As the opening date approached, Parr amplified the hype on Twitter: “The RN74 ‘Last Bottle board’ is up. I will send the opening list on Twitter only. Prices are stupid. Get ready !!!! ” he tweeted on the eve of the opening. Right out of the gate, the list boasted deep verticals of impossible Burgundies, like Henri Jayer’s Cros Parantoux. The La Tâche bottles — that famous monopole from Domaine de la Romanée-Conti (DRC) — dated back to 1934. Offerings from Chateau LafiteRothschild, one of Bordeaux’s first-growth estates, were as old as 1870.
DRC, that coveted producer whose least expensive bottlings fetch over $1,000 on a restaurant wine list, and whose priciest bottles can cost a diner $25,000, was served by the glass — maybe not from the Romanée-Conti vineyard, but the likes of Échezeaux or Romanée-Saint-Vivant. A glass cost around $90, as Parr recalls, and in the restaurant’s early days, it was always available.
On opening night, April 24, 2009, Parr counted about 50 people waiting outside the restaurant at 5 p.m.
“It was electric,” says Mina Group President Patric Yumul. “It was intoxicating.”
Parr’s Twitter feed from that first year, announcing which bottles he’d opened in the restaurant, reads like a portent of the Instagram bottle-shaming yet to come. 1985 Robert Groffier Bonnes Mares. 1990 Rousseau Chambertin Clos de Bèze. 1989 Dauvissat Chablis Les Preuses. 1976 Krug Champagne. 1940 Château Latour; 1955 Château Mouton Rothschild, “and my Lakers win,” Parr tweeted in spring 2009, as the basketball team secured the NBA championship. Twitter followers rushed in to snag last bottles before they disappeared from the ever-rotating train board; $1 price tags graced the likes of 2007 Marcel Lapierre Cuvée Lapierre. One night, both 2007 Raveneau Chablis and 2000 Ponsot Chambolle-Musigny Les Charmes were available by the glass (for $20 and $39, respectively).
“The excitement stayed pretty vibrant for a good three years,” Parr says. So vibrant that the Mina Group and Jaeger opened a second RN74 in Seattle, in 2011. (Now that our RN is closing, the Seattle location gets its leftover wine inventory.)
Then, changes. By 2012, Burgundy prices had skyrocketed — a perfect storm of lavish Chinese investment in the region and a streak of freakishly low-yielding vintages. A new sort of global evangelism for Burgundy, in which Parr undeniably plays a role, didn’t drive prices RN74 was going through old trophy bottles at the rate it always had, but it was getting harder and harder to replace them.
“We used to drink grand crus every day,” Parr says. “Now even I can’t afford to drink Burgundy.”
In 2009, The Chronicle’s restaurant critic Michael Bauer named it one of his favorite restaurants of the year. In 2011, he downgraded his original three-star review to 2.5. Not just wine, but food prices, too, were creeping up. What’s more, the thrill was gone.
“It seems as if RN74 is losing its unique personality; it feels trendy but a little rote,” reads Bauer’s review. “Like a great wine, it’s missing that indescribable quality that makes me long to return.” (Bauer upgraded the restaurant to 3.5 stars in 2014 under chef Adam Sobel.)
At some point, the $1 bottle became nonviable. To compensate for the diminishing presence of affordable Burgundy, Parr added more bottles from California and from the Rhône. “I didn’t want this to become a museum of wine,” he says. But that fate was beyond his control.
Parr moved to Santa Barbara in 2013. Though he remained a partner in the Mina Group until 2014, he stopped working the floor. “I was tired of working in restaurants,” he says. He went full throttle on his wine brands: Domaine de la Côte, Sandhi, Evening Land, RPM.
Whether Parr’s departure caused or merely followed RN74’s denouement is anyone’s guess, but it certainly confirmed its demise. “The restaurant still does well,” Mina says. No knocks on current wine director David Castleberry and sommeliers Jeremy Shanker and Margaret Spillane; the wine list maintains a superlative Grand Award from Wine Spectator.
“But does it have that same magic it had in those first few years?” Mina poses. “No.”
Closing RN74 wasn’t in the plans, Mina swears. But as the Ayesha Curry project began to take flight, the swap almost seemed preordained. He looked at 30 locations for International Smoke, and every time, Mina says, he kept thinking that he wanted something just like RN74.
“Finally I said — it just makes sense to put it here.”
In every way International Smoke makes more sense. What better restaurant to capture a new audience — an audience that populates Salesforce Tower, and an audience that the Mina Group needs to win — than a barbecue concept? It may not have Échezeaux by the glass, but it will almost certainly have Drake.
If RN74’s denim-clad waitstaff seemed revolutionary in 2009, it would scarcely bear noting in 2017. Today we don’t blink when a restaurant like Lazy Bear opens, serving $185 tasting menus on bare communal tables.
What comes after RN74? For Burgundy lists, for wine restaurants in San Francisco? As Burgundy rarefies, are the region’s wines becoming less an object of wine geekery, and more a token of conspicuous consumption? Did natural wine succeed it? Newer hotticket wine lists are more likely to champion their focus on minimalist winemaking (Ordinaire), on gender equality (Tartine Manufactory), on allaround obscurity (the Morris).
There’s a temptation, as stories like these unfold, to imagine successors and heirs — an evolution, not a death. But maybe some restaurants, and the ideas behind them, aren’t meant to keep their bloodlines alive. What made RN74 so thrilling in its earliest days is gone, I think irreparably. At least, it’s gone for any restaurant that would stake its identity on Burgundy.
Which makes RN74’s final glory-blazing all the brighter. I’ll be stopping in this week for a final glass of Montrachet — or, the way prices are looking these days, Saint-Aubin.
“I had never in my life met someone who could explain wine like Raj could. I knew he was dynamic enough to carry a whole restaurant.” Michael Mina, on RN74’s founding sommelier, Rajat Parr