Wow that’s pretty crazy. $340 will get you a lot of REALLY nice meals around town.
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It was completely ridiculous.
What can I say? I’m easily swayed. 
For my own (miniscule) wine drinking at home, I certainly don’t mind buying something w/o a rating, if the price is okay. I just feel really bad if I bring something crappy to a party. 
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I want to comment that what makes both Lincoln Fine wine and Wine house good is the customer service (and K&L for that matter). I tend to go to WH because like with books I love to browse but if I need someone they are friendly/knowledgeable and like Dutton’s of old is a good browser’s store.
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Yikes, I just took a brief look at the wine list online. The restaurant is offering one of my favorite champagnes, 2005 Philipponnat Clos des Goisses, for $490 a bottle, when one of my favorite wine purveyors where I know the sourcing and storage to be pristine, is selling the bottle for $175 retail. I would say the wine markups are pretty high, especially because a lot of wine friendly restaurants take lower (not higher) markups on high end bottles. On the low end, the restaurant has wines like the Bonterra Viognier 2015 for $53, when you can pick up a bottle retail at Wally’s for $11.70.
Ironically, I would say that Wally’s is most certainly not a restaurant for wine lovers, except perhaps for the 1% and Russian oligarchs.
And $125 does seem a tad high for sea bass unless it was the most amazing sea bass you ever ate (and even then).
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Those are some extreme examples.
A quick look at their champagne list, I found Krug for $190/bottle. This retails for ~$150 so this is an exceptional value.
If you view Wally’s restaurant as a standalone, the wine list pricing isn’t too bad by LA standards. Though it’s definitely inconsistently priced across the board, with a “flat” $50 corkage on some bottles like the Krug @tailbacku mentioned, or 1.5x to 3x on other bottles. I saw a bottle of rose that has more markup in terms of dollars than the Krug for example! Suppose it’s just priced on what the market will bear.
I appreciate a more flat markup as the price of the bottle escalates, but unfortunately it is less the norm in LA than in other wine-loving cities (in the U.S., but especially Europe).
Alcohol is a huge part of how restaurants stay in business.
I agree that the Krug is a good value for those who are Krug fans (I’m not - I just had the 2004 Krug which I thought sucked for close to $300 a bottle retail), but I really think that if you go through the wine list, the non-vintage Krug is an outlier. The Zind Humbrecht Calcaire Riesling 2013 is offered for $69 a bottle when Wally’s is retailing it for $26 a bottle. I don’t think you have to cherry pick to find markups like that.
I do believe the markups are on the high side, especially for what looks like from the pictures to be bistro seating. Also, not sure what kind of stemware they are using and what the wine service is like. I doubt I would ever pay those kind of markups for wine, but I would be happier doing so if I were in an elegant environment, drinking from top of the line stemware rather than in a noisy bistro like Wally’s Beverly Hills (where I have no memory of the stemware, but I don’t think it was high-end).
It’s been a while since I’ve been to Wally’s (Bev Hills) but I remember they had a flat markup for their wines based on their wine shop prices (which is usually a bit higher than KnL or Wine House). I remember it being $35 or something close to that but could be more like @DTLAeater says. So with that model, the cheaper wines are always going to be a worse value when ordering at the restaurant than the higher priced wines. That may be why the markups for the cheaper bottles you mention have a higher percentage markups than say the Krug.
I see plenty of bottles on their menu that reflect less than a 50% markup and don’t believe that Krug is the outlier.
You are all way too nice. $100 for a roast chicken? You have to be kidding me. $125 for sea bass? This is an absolute rip off given the other choices in town.
FIFY.
Now, could you please pass the Grey Poupon?
I think the US has one of the worst QPR dining out.
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I’m only defending their wine prices. Yes the food is ridiculously over priced.
While I agree with you that the price is too damn high, I do think that if the chicken really is the best chicken in town then FTC is absolutely the place for people to say that. Plus it’s not as if that area is exactly a cheap area getting suddenly gentrified; that’s walking distance from Capo, Melisse, and plenty more of the most expensive spots in town.
The tab might seem more reasonable if Wally’s parsed out the prices with an “exotic wood interior decoration” surcharge.
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Mom WAS right. Seafood IS good for the brain.
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Are you positive that Haeldaur tipped 20%? That changes the game.
No, I mean the actual price charged when the bill came to my table was $125. I then tipped 20%. With tax and tip, it was 160.
@Haeldaur, you never actually said how that $120 sea bass tasted. Was it amazing? Was it only for 2 or could it have fed 3? Was it filleted or did you get the whole fish?
The Wally’s menu says it is French sea bass aka loup de mer aka branzino. Almost all of that stuff is farmed. Could this have actually been wild caught, justifying the price? I think we paid $80 for whole wild-caught fish (forgot the species) at Il Pesce, which was quite good and which seemed about the highest fair price for a whole wild fish.
By the way, I just looked online at the Wally’s Beverly Hills menu and they also offer the $100 chicken and the market price sea bass.
The chicken price actually doesn’t shock me if it truly feeds 4, because that is the same price at Le Coq Rico, a chicken centric restaurant in NYC (and Paris), but Le Coq Rico does brag about the provenance of their chickens. Wally’s says its chicken is HERITAGE GALLUS BRUN, but unlike Le Coq Rico they don’t actually say where it was raised and how many days it was aged.