Welcome to our series Secret Weapons & Hidden Gems, a photo series where we highlight the most impressive staff in the restaurant industry. From bar backs to beverage directors, hosts to line cooks, meet the people making your favorite restaurants run like well-oiled machines.
Saludo in the restaurant’s wine cellar, which holds around 3,000 bottles of wine. Not a bad place to get stuck, right? Photo by Jesse Dittmar.
L’Artusi is known for their pastas; the linguine nero with rock shrimp, cod, chilies, and chorizo is a staff favorite. Photo by Jesse Dittmar.
The most expensive bottle of wine ever sold at L’Artusi is this 1985 Sassicaia from Tuscany. “It is difficult to say how many bottles of this are still out in the world presently, since most of them are in private collections,” says Anncherie. Photo by Jessie Dittmar.
Some of Saludo’s favorite wines, from left to right: A 1974 Emidio Pepe Montepulciano d’Abruzzo 1974; a 2013 Miani Sauvignon “Saurint”; and a 2014 Giuseppe Quintarelli “Secco Ca’ del Merlo” Bianco 2014.
Anncherie Saludo, Beverage Director at L’Artusi
Anncherie Saludo, the beverage director at L’Artusi, holds a bottle of Roses de Jeanne, “Les Ursules,” a Pinot Noir grower champagne by Cédric Bouchard. “I’m a big fan of sparkling wine throughout my meal, and his champagne is always a treat,” she says. Photo by Jesse Dittmar.
The most expensive bottle L’Artusi has ever sold cost $6,000.
It was a 1985 Sassicaia, a Cabernet Sauvignon-Cabernet Franc blend from Tuscany with a very royal-looking blue-and-gold label. It has been called a perfect wine by people in the know, and Anncherie Saludo is one of them. She sold it to a table at the darkly elegant Italian spot in New York’s West Village, where she has worked for the last seven years. They were so ebullient about their experience that they left a $2,000 tip and offered her a glass of the wine so rare that the restaurant only carries a few bottles.
“It’s all about the long game in the restaurant industry,” Saludo tells me at the bar of Anfora, another of Epicurean Group’s spots just around the corner from L’Artusi. “You want people to come back. So it’s about giving every table love, attention, and a curated experience.”
Joe Campanale, executive beverage director of the entire Epicurean restaurant group (and the one who usually gets interview requests), has long been a champion of Saludo. He was the one who pushed her to take on the management of L’Artusi’s wine cellar, where an alarm rings out the second its temperature gets out of whack and a full-time apprentice “cellar hand” makes sure everything is stocked and up-to-snuff. He is no less effusive about Saludo than the Sassicaia drinkers were.
“If someone else had described it, or not developed that trust, we may not have sold it,” he says.
Saludo works over 60 hours a week, and she has taken her share of flack. Her physician father and food chemist mother met at the 1964 World’s Fair in Queens, and she grew up going back and forth between New York and their home country of the Philippines. She got used to erratic school schedules and high expectations. “My parents didn’t even think this was a prescribed job path,” she says. “You don’t see Filipino wine directors.”
She purposefully wears heels and blazers to work to lend herself credibility; her fellow beverage director at Anfora Tara Hammond leans over the bar to tell me she used to wear fake glasses to get more respect on the job.
“Older gentlemen sometimes look at you like you’re a little girl, because you’re younger and a woman,” Anncherie says. “Then you start to talk and they realize, ‘Oh, this little girl actually knows something.'”
Yet despite the occasional tough customer and her apartment’s zip code (she lived in Williamsburg for years, and recently moved across the street from the Brooklyn Navy Yard) Saludo says that her West Village restaurant feels like home. They kept her on staff through her mother’s battle with cancer, as she finished her Master’s degree, and even took trips around the world.
“I like to live it up,” she says with a smirk, citing recent wine-related trips to Italy and study abroad experiences in Hong Kong and Paris.
The loyalty appears to be mutual.
“The sergeant from the 6th precinct still comes here to eat and say hi. I knew him back when he was an officer, so I sometimes forget to call him Sergeant!” she says. She credits their loyal neighborhood crowd for keeping them in business, even when reviewers were calling them “L’Awful” (literally—that was the headline of GQ’s 2009 review of the restaurant, which opened in the midst of the 2008 recession.)
“We have people who come eat here every time their friends or family are in town, who had their first dates here and are now coming for anniversaries. It’s a really tight-knit family,” she says.
It’s sometimes said that women actually have better palates than men; several scientists have even found compelling proof that it’s true. Saludo demurs.
“It’s a very multi-sensory thing, tasting wine,” she says. “You create a palate memory over time, and you can never let yourself lapse. It’s a lot of practice.”
It’s always nice when practice pays off.
