Rock-star sommelier finds home in Houston
Mastro’s wine chief builds stellar collection at Fertitta’s Post Oak development
Keith Goldston knows irony. He also knows serendipity. His remarkable path to becoming one of the planet’s leading wine experts has been chock-full of both.
Goldston presides over what’s now a Wine Spectator Grand Award-winning cellar worth nearly $4 million at Tilman Fertitta’s Mastro’s Steakhouse/Post Oak Hotel. But consider his roots. Although he was born in Napa, the epicenter of American wine, there was no place for alcohol of any kind in the family home. The Goldstons were Mormon. And when, at 15, he went to apply for his first job — Caymus needed a cellar rat, no experience necessary — he took one look around the tasting room and fled.
“I saw all these wine bottles and wine stuff,” Goldston recalls. “It was super intimidating. I was
like, ‘Whoa, this is the devil.’ I didn’t even fill out the application. I got on my scooter and went straight home.”
That scooter is an essential element of his biography. Why? Because he wanted a for-real motorcycle instead. But his mother told he’d have to pay for it himself, which meant finding work. He quickly was hired on at a hole-in-the-wall Italian cafe in Napa — he can’t recall if it even had a wine list, but, six months later, a friend who had landed a job as a back waiter up valley at Domaine Chandon’s Étoile, one of Napa Valley’s first true destination restaurants, helped him get on there. And that’s where his excellent adventure began.
“Daniel Shanks, who went on to become the usher at the White House, kind of oversaw everything there,” Goldston said. “I just got very lucky. Daniel was passionate that everyone received some wine education. He was able to get into my young, rebellious head. He’d take me on staff trainings. I don’t know how he legally pulled it off, but, at 16, I was barrel-tasting with Bob Mondavi. I was thinking, ‘Wow, this old guy has got some real cool stories.’ Daniel’s energy was infectious. Those two years I worked there were the launching, the great unveiling of this wonder world (of wine) for me.”
Also, he got the motorcycle, a bad-boy Kawasaki 500. And 15 years later, at the age of 29, Goldston earned his prized Master Sommelier lapel pin, becoming the youngest ever to pass all three parts of the exceedingly difficult exam — theory, service and tasting — on his first try.
The journey continued in San Francisco, where, though still a teenager, he landed a spot with Masa’s, the French Laundry of its time. “Like a lot of kids in Napa then,” he said, “I was like, ‘Get me out of this farm town as fast as I can go.’ ” There, he learned an important lesson while working under Mike Bonaccorsi and, later, Burke Evans. Despite the Master Sommelier Bonaccorsi’s wealth of knowledge, he struggled translating his wine wisdom tableside. Burke, in turn, wasn’t the same kind of walking encyclopedia, but he connected beautifully with the diners.
“If you can’t relate,” Goldston said, “knowing a lot doesn’t help you.”
Goldston’s next move, in 1996, took him to Las Vegas. His girlfriend wanted them to buy a house “for less than we were paying for rent in the San Francisco Bay Area, and Vegas seemed more exciting than, say, Phoenix.” He had offers from Charlie Trotter’s, which was set to open, and Wolfgang Puck’s Spago. He opted for the latter: “I’d just done four years of fine dining, so I decided to go with something more casual and crazy. I went from like 80 covers a night to 1,500. It was eyeopening — and what a blast.”
Goldston spent his first two years there “being the annoying server that kept asking him about wine — ‘Why don’t we have this or that on our list?’ I wore Wolfgang down. He told me, ‘Why don’t you help me with it?’ A part-time job transitioned into full time managing the bar program. Here I was, a 26-yearold kid, being told, ‘We’re doing a million dollars in revenue every month. Don’t mess it up.’ Talk about being thrown into the deep end.” Next stop two years later: Steve Wynn’s new game-changing hotel, Bellagio, and its marquee restaurant, Picasso, where he was reunited with a former Masa’s boss and James Beard Award-winning chef Julian Serrano. But Wynn proved to be a stiff test of his persuasive skills, unlike Fertitta many years later. “(Wynn) was coming from Mirage and Treasure Island, where the wine inventory was maybe $150,000,” Goldston explained. “He told me, ‘I make millions. Why do I need a big wine list?’ I said, ‘Mr. Wynn, we’re trying to be more than a casino. If you’re going to have that level of food and that level of guest, we need to be the whole package.’”
Wynn yielded, and a new chapter in Las Vegas history began. Picasso helped turn the town into one where people “would go for a great meal, not just to go crazy,” Goldston said. “It was an exciting time. Vegas was booming. We’d do an ‘orphan’s’ Thanksgiving dinner late at night at my house because nobody could go home. We took a photo one year. Of the 18 people in it, two were Master Sommeliers at the time, and 10 were future Masters. It was the perfect environment. Everybody pushed each other.” Goldston hadn’t finished college — he was living fairly large in the restaurant business — but chasing Master Sommelier status provided him with an alternative, far more practical goal. Ron Mumford, now the vice president of on-premise wine for Southern Glazer’s in Las Vegas, became a mentor and chief dispenser of tough love, once summarily throwing him out of tasting class for not thinking through an answer he’d given about a wine the group was tasting.
“I probably wouldn’t be here today if not for him,” Goldston admitted.
More recently, Goldston held a prestigious executive position with Rosewood Hotels, based in Washington, D.C. But, finding himself a bit miscast and underutilized in that role, he was all ears when a fellow MS, former Houstonian Drew Hendricks, phoned to tell him about Fertitta’s grand plans for the Post Oak Hotel at Uptown Houston and Mastro’s.
“Drew asked me how I’d feel about cutting my hair off, taking a corporate job and moving to Texas,” Goldston said. “I told him, ‘The hair’s no big deal.’ But then I asked him, ‘What part of Texas?’ Dallas probably would have been a no-deal for me.” An exploratory first meeting with James Kramer, vice president of beverages for Fertitta’s Landry’s chain, and other chief Fertitta lieutenants went splendidly. Their respective visions and personalities jived, and the opportunity to assemble a hyper-serious wine component for a luxury hotel/destination restaurant checked all of his boxes. Goldston’s rockstar résumé checked theirs, too.
A one-on-one conversation with Fertitta followed — “surrealistically,” he said, in a mock-up of a room for the Post Oak Hotel. Goldston already had an offer on the table to rejoin forces with Puck on a global stage, but when he found the billionaire Houston restaurateur/ entrepreneur to be someone “I could interact directly with,” and who understood the inherent value in creating a reference-standard wine list, Goldston signed on. Fertitta’s mandate? Earn Grand Award status from the Wine Spectator. Just 100 or so restaurants in the world have it, and the two Pappas Bros. Steakhouses are the only other ones in Houston.
“Tilman made it clear to me, ‘This is something we want,’ ” Goldston said, adding that Fertitta didn’t blow up, nor even flinch, when told what some of the wines were going to cost. Goldston says as long as he comes armed with “facts” and “solutions, not problems,” he always has Fertitta’s undivided attention. “If I get an amazing offering for, say, a library release of Domaine de la Romanée-Conti (the greatest of all Burgundies) and I tell him, ‘This simply doesn’t happen very often,’ he’ll listen.”
Fertitta also gave him the latitude to build a top-drawer team. Shaun Prevatt, the wine director at Mastro’s, Travis Hinkle, the beverage director of The Cellar in the Post Oak Hotel and floor somms Julie Dalton and Charlie Berg are all Advanced Sommeliers, a notch below Master. David Anderson and Danny Steiner, also on the floor, Certified Sommeliers.
How Goldston went about amassing from scratch a cellar with 3,500 different wines, many of them from long-ago vintages selling for thousands of dollars each, is another fascinating story … but for another day. “I feel like I’ve kind of been building my whole career for this,” Goldston said. “I want the program to be one that, if somebody has it on their résumé, it’s a big deal.”