More restaurants offering BYOB to lure customers

Bringing your own bottle of wine to your favorite restaurant is getting cheaper and more popular.

With sales and traffic dwindling, many restaurants are either offering BYOB nights or chopping the "corkage" fee to open bottles bought elsewhere, to entice more wine-drinking diners to pay for a meal out.

Bringing your own beverages isn't allowed everywhere – the rules vary depending on where you live.

But for eateries that can offer the option, it can be a way to boost traffic in tough economic times – especially for the fine-dining restaurants that have been hardest hit in recent months as even higher-income consumers cut back on pricey meals.

Chris Cannon, owner of the Manhattan restaurant Alto, decided at the end of last year to suspend a $60 corkage fee through September – a move he said has brought in more customers.

"Basically, we had to accept the fact that we were going through a recession," Cannon said.

Bringing your own bottle may not have the cache of ordering off the list, where wines are sometimes paired with menu items to showcase the flavor of the food. But it can save you quite a bit of money. Restaurants frequently charge diners triple what they've paid for a wine. And David Henkes, vice president at Chicago-based food industry consulting firm Technomic Inc., said they typically charge as much for one glass as they paid for the entire bottle.

Nick Valenti, chief executive of Patina Restaurant Group, waived the $5 corkage fees at all of his 15 California restaurants through 2009 except the flagship Patina in downtown Los Angeles

"Given the time, we thought it would be an appropriate thank you to guests who are interested," Valenti said. "Our job at the moment is to accommodate whatever they want."