“I get really upset with people who are snobby, who sniff the cork…and I feel really bad for the people they’re dining with,” says Alpana Singh, the 26-year-old sommelier at Everest. “Pretension for me is a cover-up for ‘I don’t know, so I’m going to mask it with all these rituals.’ And with wine there’s just so much to know, you can’t know it all.”
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Singh’s great-grandparents, indentured by the British as overseas laborers, were moved from their native India to Fiji. Her parents migrated to Monterey, California, shortly after Fiji achieved independence in 1970. Singh’s “humble background” also has roots in the food-service industry: her father is a chef at a French restaurant in Pebble Beach, her mother is a waiter in a Carmel restaurant, and her younger brother manages a tasting room in nearby Carmel Valley.
Singh began waiting tables when she was 15 and went on to work at several retail wine stores. In 2000 she met Joho at the Masters of Food and Wine festival in Carmel. The Alsace native had just finished preparing a dinner when Singh approached him, telling him she’d never worked in a fine restaurant but wanted to work at his. “I said, ‘Right now it’s two o’clock in the morning and it’s too late to do an interview,’” Joho recalls. “‘If you want to come to Chicago, I’ll be glad to talk you.’” But he says he was so impressed by Singh’s love of food and ability to talk casually about wine that he knew right away he would hire her.
It’s easy getting people to order bottles from Joho’s famous Alsatian collection, she says. “If you have the Alsace food, you’re not going to have the experience if you don’t have the wine….The only problem that I have is trying to get it out of people’s minds that the wines are sweet.”
Everest is at 440 S. LaSalle, 312-663-8920.
