Oregon Wine Country's Allison Inn & Spa

[Jim Gullo]

I'm sitting in the alcove of the bar that is attached to one of the fanciest and best-regarded restaurants in town, watching the champagne cork on the floor, and thinking pungent thoughts about service. To wit, what constitutes good service? Should we always expect it in a place that claims to have it on every press release and web page? Should we be embarrassed to notice and write about glaring gaps in service? What the hell is this, Downton Abbey?

The champagne cork had flown off of a bottle a couple of minutes ago and landed on the floor a foot or so from the end of the bar where the waitpersons place and pick up their orders; it now rests in a fairly high-traffic pathway that leads from the bar to the hostess station of the restaurant, and it's bobbing around as if it were a cork in the ocean. Maybe, let's say, a cork that was popped on a cruise ship whose power is about to go out, and twenty-four hours from now sewage will flow down the stateroom walls of the unsuspecting champagne quaffers.

The Cork and Me

But I digress. The brunette server with her hair pulled back and rubber-banded into several peaks and pigtails steps over the cork. A waiter with a tray full of beers in elegant pilsner glasses dodges it. A third server spins away from the bar with two glasses of pinot noir on her tray, and her foot catches the cork and sends it spinning. Two other servers stand a foot away and chat and giggle while they wait for their orders to come up. I sit and watch this little Life of Pi drama -- a lonely cork far away from home -- for a good five minutes before the hostess, cruising like a battleship to her station, finally reaches down and picks it up.

I'm allowed to have this profound reverie because in the five minutes I have been sitting here, none of the waitpersons has noticed me, either, or approached me, or offered me so much as a green olive on a toothpick. I am feeling a profound empathy, a sense of kinship, with that cork.

Take My Bag. Please.

Stuff like this had kept popping up from the minute I arrived at The Allison Inn & Spa, which is the single most elegant and upscale lodging in the Willamette Valley of Oregon, which is the nexus of Oregon's marvelous wine industry and, coincidentally, where I live. Built on a hillside in the town of Newberg, Oregon by a local family who had made good with a dental-equipment business, The Allison instantly became the go-to lodging for upscale travelers when it opened in September 2009. The place is gorgeous, all stone and glass, with a waterway that flows past the spa, which was named tops in the country by Travel & Leisure last year. The JORY restaurant, where I watched the cork drama unfold, is elegant and expensive and a fine place to spot local wine barons and out-of-town celebs. The place reeks of class.

But when I arrived for an overnight stay that afternoon, carrying my stuffed garment bag like it was filled with a lifetime of burdens, the cheerful guy at the door greeted me but never offered to relieve me of said burdens. I checked in with the utterly cheerful front desk staff, and then another guy materialized to lead me to my room...and still nobody offered to carry the bag. So manfully, I carried it myself.

Chateuneuf, Scorned?

Then I couldn't get a drink to save my life as I watched a cork get kicked around on the floor of the bar. When my dinner guest arrived we repaired to the patio and practically had to tackle the pig-tailed server to get a drink order placed. Moving to the dining room after we finally got those drinks, nobody offered to carry them in for us, which is the de facto standard of service of practically every other $350/night establishment that I've frequented (and they are legion). And the sommelier vanished after grudgingly producing a bottle of Vieux Telegraphe -- as if he had a long-standing grudge against the entire Chateauneuf region -- leaving us the arduous task of refilling our glasses, over and over again.

I feel slightly embarrassed recounting these trials -- I repeat, which floor of Downton Abbey do I think I live on? -- but I'd just like to point out that you can build the nicest place in rural Oregon, and you can shave any number of things into carpaccio on the dinner menu, but it is the cork on the floor that some people will remember. You know, those kinds of people.

Do you think I'm making too much of this?