Kate Zambreno

The poised yet breezy voice on the message is instantly recognizable yet hard to pinpoint, like if you suddenly heard your local newscaster over the loudspeakers or a voiceover on a commercial that sounds like what's her name, that Hollywood celebrity who was in that movie, you know the one...:

"Hi Kate, it's Alpana. Just confirming our interview for noon tomorrow at Everest, wanted know if there's any kind of angle you wanted to take with the piece, yadda yadda yadda...okay, call me back if you'd like."

Two things particularly struck me about this voicemail left by Alpana Singh, the 27-year-old wine prodigy and new host of WTTW's restaurant-review show "Check, Please!" First, only a seasoned interview subject knows reporter lingo, concepts like an "angle," the direction you want to take with the story ("Alpana Singh is super friendly," "Alpana Singh is not super friendly," and so forth) and a "piece," which is the story itself.

Then I remember that I first learned about Singh when she was named one of Crain's Chicago Business' "40 Under 40" back in 2001. Since then a slew of both local and national magazine and newspaper articles have been written about the master sommelier, especially since she started appearing on TV this fall. She's no neophyte to publicity.

The second thing that amused me about Alpana's message was the "Seinfeld" speak, the "yadda, yadda, yadda." No matter how intimidating her resume (at 21, she became the youngest American to pass the advanced test of the Court of Master Sommeliers, the international examining body for wine knowledge, and then last year passed the master sommelier examination, which has a 3 percent pass rate) she doesn't sound stuffy. In fact, she sounds like fun.

French chef Jean Joho's four-star restaurant Everest, where Singh has for the past four years worked as sommelier, presiding over the 1400-bottle wine cellar with a specialty in wines from Alsace, is located on the fortieth floor of the Chicago Stock Exchange building. Everything about the décor exudes old money and opulence. "It's very Liberace," agrees Singh, rushing in with her backpack.

We sit in the "river room," where employees eat their meals at the long conference table, with the same panoramic view of the Loop as in the dining room. The service professional, dressed in all black (sommelier's uniform) and a moss-green blazer, is obviously accustomed to being a host, both at Everest and on television. She seems much younger than she comes off on TV--in person she is theatrical, pounding the table for emphasis, collapsing into giggles or snickers, making faces, launching into voices when relating a story. Singh chats about the Progresso lentil soup she just warmed up. "I always thought it was kind of cheesy that I was eating Progresso lentil soup, like, oh my God, what if people found out. And then I'm reading this thing in Food & Wine magazine, the interviewer asked the general manager at French Laundry, what do you guys have stocked in your pantry? She was like, Betty Crocker cake mix, and Toll House chocolate-chip cookies, you know, Progresso lentil soup. I'm like 'Yes! I'm not the only one,'" she peels off with laughter, an eruption that occurs often in the conversation.

Something approaching a mythology has started to surround Singh. With little provocation, she launches right into her story of how she came to get so into wine, a story I already knew, kind of. The child of working-class Indian parents from Fiji who emigrated to Monterey, California, Singh has described her background like "Bend it like Beckham." When she was 15, she hosted at the nearby Bakers Square. "It's funny, when I look back on that now, I would always want to do the next big thing. I saw that the servers made a lot of money so I made all this effort to be like, 'Hey, can I pick up this table for you when it's slow'? So instead of making $7 an hour I would make $7 on a table. It was like, 'Hey, this is pretty good.'" She demonstrated this entrepreneurial spirit at an even more tender age, when a 12-year-old Singh sold roses on Monterey's Fisherman's Wharf. "People were buying a dozen roses at $3.99 a pop, whatever it was. But some people just wanted a single rose. I figured okay. So I bought a dozen, broke them down, sold them for a buck a piece."

When Singh graduated from high school, to the dismay of her parents, she couldn't figure out what to study. She applied to wait tables at a fine-dining restaurant where she had heard her tips at Bakers Square could be more than tripled. "The woman looked at my resume and said, 'What do you know about wine'?" Singh remembers. "I was probably 18 at the time, and I said, 'I know it's made from grapes'... I was pretty proud that I knew that." She was declined for the job and told to come back when she had more wine knowledge. "I'm thinking, well, how hard can it be, you know, what is there really to know about wine? And I saw some of these people that waited tables at these restaurants and, being a smart ass, I thought, if they can do it, why can't I do it?" So Singh bought a couple of books, memorized whatever she could, and was offered a waitressing position when she reapplied. The restaurant had an intensive wine-training program. "I fell in love with it. It was just great. It was," she sighs, delving into her ready-made answer, "everything that I had ever wanted to study sort of encapsulated in this one nice neat little package--you know, history, science, food, travel, the chemistry aspect of it, the geography, the sociology." The manager running the wine program, also studying to be a master sommelier, encouraged her to study and take the exam.

"And so I ended up leaving school, my parents freaked out, and I got a job at a retail store part-time selling wine, and then working at the restaurant. But what did I do then," she whispers to herself. "I've told this story so many times I should have it memorized by now." "Didn't you start studying for the exam?" I coach her. I'm right. Singh traveled through Europe, started teaching wine classes and working at the retail store full-time, and set to the task of preparing for the advanced portion of the exam, which involves identifying six wines, their vintages and varietals. Singh accredits her success to "practice practice practice. It's a great deal of memorization. But you have to understand, if you were doing what I did, eight hours a day, for two years straight, you'd be good at it too." At the retail store she was tasting up to a hundred wines a day. "And you just get good at it. And there has to be a portion of you that has to work really hard to memorize sense." It's like palette building. "I have a very sensitive sense of smell because I've just practiced a lot. It's like a muscle."

"She's like an idiot savant," whispers the general manager at Everest, as we watch Singh pose for her photo shoot. Like the other staff, the chefs snickering by the bar, he seems both protective of their prodigy and amused by her attention in the press. He swears that of the four years he's worked with her, he's only seen her have to actually taste the wine five times to identify it. The rest she does with her nose. "There is a sort of an idiot savant thing about it, absolutely," Singh said earlier. "I don't know a lot about this world. I don't know exactly what's going on in the world. I'm starting to now get into classical music but I've never seen an opera in my life. I have yet to visit the Art Institute." "Oh, you should go," I encourage her. "Oh, I would love to go," she whispers theatrically. "I have interests and all that. I just started learning about baseball."

Later she inquires about my last name, if I'm related to the Cubs' pitcher Carlos Zambrano (I'm not), and jokingly refers to Kerry Wood as her "future husband." In fact, in answer to the question "What would people be most surprised to see Alpana Singh doing," she says, "If they see me during a Cubs game, sitting on my boss' rooftop, chugging Miller Lite. People are so surprised I like Miller Lite," she says in a wondering tone. Singh is not the least bit pretentious about her beverage consumption, especially about wine. As long as it's not boxed, right? I joke. "You mean that Franzia stuff?" she says. "It's surprisingly not bad. You know, throw a couple of ice cubes in there."

After Singh passed the second level towards becoming a master sommelier, a story about her landed on the front page of the business section in the local California paper. "All of a sudden my parents were really accepting of the whole thing," she says. "That's the funny thing about Indian parents. Just as long as other people think you're successful, it's okay." This was Singh's first lesson in the press. "There's a lot of hype, and I tell you the truth, if you are one of my friends, you probably wouldn't even tell the difference," she says. "I like to think that. Before and after. I don't have anything framed in my house. I have all of the articles, put in a cardboard box in my bedroom, and I just keep throwing them in there."

"Do you know Alpana?" a female Everest employee asks of a man who just wandered into the conference room, a representative from a wine company. He looks at Singh blankly. "Yes, yes, very nice to meet you," he shakes her hand. After they leave, Singh looks at me deadpan. "He had no idea who I was," she says, as if to say, "See? See? You can't believe the hype." Later, as I'm leaving, I see the same man beeline towards Singh as if she's a long-lost friend. "Alpana!" he says, probably freshly briefed on who she is. She goes up to me after that. "Did you see that?" she mutters under her breath, rolling her eyes.

Singh seems endlessly bemused by her "It" girl status, but still, regardless, has "It," whatever "It" is. "Chicago's been very good to me," she chuckles. But this image of a sommelier's day as all glamour is pure fiction, she says. "That blows me away. I'm here, pulling up boxes, getting stuff stuck in my hair." A typical day for Singh before service at 5:30pm is pretty "grueling," she says. She has to check in deliveries, carry boxes that weigh forty pounds, clean up the cellar. This is not the polished image people see at dinnertime. She shows me her forearms. All muscle. "It's from this," she makes a lifting motion.

But why is the press so endlessly fascinated in all things Alpana Singh? "It's an interesting story," she explains. "It's a really interesting story, and people are really fascinated by it, because it's not your typical image of wine--being young and Indian and female. We as Americans love to root for the underdog. We love the triumph thing. And that's part of the American spirit is we love to see people succeed and achieve the American Dream. Who doesn't love that story?" Everest's publicist refers to Singh's popularity as the "perfect storm," she laughs. "But you can't believe any of that stuff," she says, now serious. "I've seen people believe in their publicity and they start to think they really are what's written, because it prevents them from going to the next level and the next step. I'm not really done yet, by any means. This is just the beginning. Who knows what I want to do next, but, certainly, this isn't the end of all of it."

And what came next was "Check, Please!", with Singh stepping in this August as the third-season replacement for Amanda Puck. She tapes episodes on her days off on Mondays. I first heard people really talking about the new "Check, Please!" after an episode involving Searah Deysach, the flaming-pink-haired owner of the sex shop "Early to Bed," and two more professional types, not only for the "Politically Incorrect"-style casting, but for Deysach's recommendation of the Ethiopian restaurant Ethiopian Diamond, which I went out and tried the following week. "It was greatly cast," agrees Singh. "Because you have the ultra femme, the PR person, and then you have a suit. How much more suit can you get then that guy, David. Then you have the pink hair. That is probably the most quoted episode from people. They're like, 'What's up with the sex-shop operator?'"

Singh dove into this gig with typical drive and no television experience. "It's who I am. I don't think there's any difference between what you see on the television and what you get in real life. There really is no difference. I haven't been coached, I haven't been trained, I haven't had a makeover," she laughs, a little uneasily. "All the rumors that I hear."

Being on television has thrust Singh relatively recently into a sometimes glaring spotlight. "David [Manilow, the show's producer] had warned me before I took the position," she says. "He said, 'Now, I want to warn you, it's not all pretty.' I'm like, what do you mean? He said, 'Are you really prepared to be in the public eye?' I said, 'David, I can't honestly answer that question for you. I don't know what it's like to be on television.' Yeah, I've had some articles written about me in newspapers, but the next day it's lining someone's birdcage, so to speak. This is a completely different ballgame. Nothing he could have ever said would have prepared me." She gets recognized the most at the grocery store, and at the restaurant. "At Everest it's different because in the world of television I think people think that this is the only thing they do for a living, living off some trust fund or some million-dollar paycheck from PBS," she laughs. "Hello. They see me here with obviously less makeup and less of the hairdo and they're like"--lapses into whisper--"'My god. You look exactly like that girl from 'Check, Please!'"

The show, which airs three times a week, features three everyday people reviewing each other's favorite restaurants, with Singh acting as host, throwing in tidbits of restaurant expertise and wine knowledge here and there. "It's a great show to get people out there, to sample other restaurants, but it's kind of taken on what I think of as a cultlike status as far as people being like, 'Oh my God, I watch it all the time.'" Appearing on this show about everyday people being critics, Singh has had to answer to some critics herself. "It's been interesting trying not to take it to heart. You know, when somebody comes up to you out of the blue, they don't know you, and they tell you they like you hair better up than down. That stuff's really awkward." On the WTTW message board for "Check, Please!", there's an ongoing debate on the relative merits of Amanda vs. Alpana. The Amanda loyalists are brutal in their derision of Alpana, what they call her monotone speech, her "giggliness," her amateurish, as opposed to Amanda Puck's "puckishness." "My voice, my inflections...Yeah, I stopped reading that. They don't know who you are, they don't know what's behind it. And, yeah, it's expected. I look at myself, and I catch myself saying things about people on television. I'm a huge fan of Oprah. I love Oprah. But sometimes I'm sitting there, going, what's up with the hair, Oprah?

"Some people didn't like the change at all, and there's nothing you can do," she continues. "Some people always want Amanda to be on the show." Despite rumors that Amanda Puck had developed the show and was fired, both Singh and WTTW say that she simply didn't want to do it anymore. Nevertheless, ratings have gone up 30 percent this season.

Years ago for that Crain's Chicago business story, Singh made the comment that she had no conception what a normal 24-year-old was. Is that still true, I ask? "I still have no conception what a 27-year-old is supposed to be like. I was in a car with some girls the other day, they were listening to some Eminem tape, talking about where they were going to go later on to find some guys or something. It was like, okay. I was at a James Beard dinner last week," she laughs, referring to the prestigious food and beverage award which she's been nominated for in the past.

"Umm..it used to bother me quite a bit. I thought, maybe, am I missing out on a certain part of my life? Am I going to regret making this decision? You only get one twenties, am I working my way through it?" She pauses, trying to reword her answer. "Am I going to get to the point where it's going to be enough and I can say, now I can go vacation and do the tequila shots in Tijuana or whatever. I thought about that, a lot." Now, however, Singh says she's finally reached the point where many of her friends are her age, and many of them professionals as well. "I guess you eventually find yourself," she takes a deep breath. "I'm probably most comfortable around other master sommeliers." Ten of the sixty "MS's" in the country met last week at a wine competition in Philadelphia. "It's kind of a common bond that I've never experienced with any other person, not even my parents, not even people I've dated. There's this synergy you've experienced with somebody else who's gone through the process."

Last year she was at a certificate exam and four MS's were sitting around table. "I look at them and go, 'So, guys! What do you do besides wine?' And they all gave me this blank stare, like, well, what else is there? I'm like, 'Okay, good, I thought I was the only one,'" she laughs, then delves into a mock complaining tone. "I mean, I don't have any hobbies, I try to read, I'm trying to get into knitting, I'm trying to diversify myself."

That's kind of what the TV show is for her. It's that next thing Singh's always going to be looking for. "I look at 'Check, Please!' as kind of like a hobby. Because it's something drastically different from what I've been doing the past seven to eight years of my life, and it's really refreshing."

(2004-03-18)

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