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Drunkies Beware: iPads Are Coming To The Bar at the Casa Del Mar

Go To The Hotel's Web Site Where: 1910 Ocean Way [map], Santa Monica, CA, United States, 90405
February 10, 2011 at 9:31 AM | by | Comments (0)

Let's not call this an accident waiting to happen

Another day, another hotel finding another way to make use of its iPads. This time it’s the Hotel Casa del Mar in Santa Monica, which has been trumpeting its tech-savvy over the past week. First, it was its display of Google Image Searches as art. Now, it’s providing iPads in its restaurant, Catch, to act as sommelier.

The five iPads will be loaded with the SmartCellar app, which lets you search through a hi tech wine list of over 200 bottles. You can search by year, varietal, place of origin, dish that you’re pairing it with and personal taste. Each bottle comes with high def photos and tasting notes. It is, according to the developers (of course), like “a Super Bowl commercial for a wine cellar,” and has done well in East Coast restaurants up to now.

But, before you get any ideas, no, the iPads will be blocked from connecting to any other sites. So there’ll be no checking email at the table.

Seeing as Catch doesn’t already have a sommelier, it sounds like this can only be a welcome idea. Let’s just hope staff have the sense to commandeer the iPads and recommend the wine themselves after it gets past the second bottle. We don’t want any accidents now, do we?

[Photo: Hotel Casa del Mar]

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