Help for Diners Seeking BYO-friendly Restaurants
If you’re a budget-conscious wine consumer like me, you know that wine at restaurants is frequently overpriced. A great way to save a few bucks when dining out is to bring your own wine—hopefully a wine with an outstanding QPR that you discovered on Cheap Wine Ratings. But how do you find a restaurant that will let you BYO? That’s where GoBYO.com hopes to help.
GoBYO.com is a new website designed to help diners find BYO-friendly restaurants. It let’s diners search restaurants by region to find those that will allow them to bring a bottle of their favorite wine. Additionally, GoBYO posts a few different ratings. At first I found all the different ratings to be overwhelming, but after a couple minutes it starts to make sense. They post a “composite” rating, which is an average from multiple published restaurant guides, Yelp reviews, and they have their own “wine-friendly” rating based on the restaurant’s wine list, allowance of BYO and corkage fees.
Speaking of corkage fees, I hate them. They put me on total tilt. My favorite thing about GoBYO.com is that they list the corkage fees so you know what you’re in for before you get there. Of course if the corkage fee is more than you’d pay for a bottle of wine to begin with, you may not want to go to that restaurant… and some do charge that much.
Another feature that I appreciate is if a restaurant uses OpenTable, GoBYO provides a direct link to make reservations online. If you’re not yet familiar with OpenTable.com you should be. It lets you make reservations online, and you earn reward points toward dining discounts—another way to stretch your dining dollar.
GoBYO.com currently only has information for 10 major metropolitan regions: Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Los Angeles, New York, Philadelphia, San Fransisco, Southest Florida and Washington DC. Unfortunately for me, my region is not on their site. And they don’t currently have plans for expansion, but I’m hopeful that they will eventually have info on restaurants in my neighborhood.
Although I’m sad that I can’t use it yet, it seems like a handy website. And so I thought I’d give them a shout out so you can check them out.
Thank you so much for sharing this! I’m moving to Boston this summer and I have a feeling this will come in very handy.
To MCB above, on the Island of Martha’s Vineyard about a mile from Cape Cod, most of the towns are dry (except Edgartown and Oak Bluffs), and the restaurants allow patrons to bring their own. They do charge a corkage fee (helps to defray the trash disposal costs)…
Check it out for a weekend trip…
Wine Road, thanks for the suggestion — I know we’ll want to spend a weekend sometime at Martha’s Vineyard. But I have to say, the idea of a BYO-only place charging a corkage fee is a bit bizarre. Are they typical corkage fees ($20+ a bottle) or nominal fees (say, $5 or less per bottle)?