Thursday night dinner... pick food or wine first?

Epicurean Exploits - Food and Recipes
1

Thursday night dinner, or Friday en famille, do you generally:

  • A. Pick a bottle, then decide what to cook or order
  • B. Decide the food, then pick the bottle

0 voters

I got to thinking about this after the thread on cellar diversity, and began to wonder about larder diversity…

2

More often than not, the wine choice comes after deciding what’s for dinner as what to eat for dinner tends to be a more collective family decision rather than a unilateral one by me. Though, there are times when I, or others in the family, want to open a particular bottle(s), so I’ll curate food around that

3

Food needs to be newer than the wine. That is my criterion.

4

Food 1st then wine.
Of course champagne goes with everything!

5

So what do you serve with a century egg?

6

The pedantic in me wants to retort saying century eggs aren’t actually a century old [snort.gif] but if you want take it literally, some madeira could do the trick neener

7

While I expected B to predominate, I’m a bit surprised by the zero for A, this is a wine forum! I was expecting a few wine first people here.
I may have done this poll wrong (my first poll!) … may have been better as ‘how often do you pick the wines first’ ; never / occasionally / often / always.
I’m somewhere around occasionally. As chef I get to make the meal decision and there’s usually at least a couple of options in the fridge as well as several in the freezer - steaks and chops bagged for sous vide, stews sauces etc.

8

I think that once one has procured enough wine, and that doesn’t have to be very much, they have enough diversity in their collection to be flexible on a casual night. Now, I would bet most of us, when we open a special bottle, do plan the food around or after the wine.

9

Food first 100% of the time in the scenario you described. Only time I pick the wine first is if having friends over and there is a wine theme agreed upon ahead of time.

10

In all my years of cooking and wine drinking, I don’t think I’ve ever planned a menu around a bottle of wine. I always select the menu first, then open a bottle that would go well with the food. With my luck, if I ever built a menu around the bottle it’d be corked or pre-moxed!