Alpana Singh
When Wed 10/18, 7 PM
Singh, the director of everything enological for the Lettuce Entertain You restaurant chain, has just published her first book, the elaborately titled Alpana Pours: About Being a Woman, Loving Wine & Having Great Relationships. Published by Academy Chicago, it’s intended as a primer on everything the wine-phobic woman needs to know. Including this, from the chapter “Pairings: Wine, Hooking Up, and Dating”: “Looking super hot in a really expensive dress can be immediately undermined if you order a diet cola.”
Just six years after arriving from California cold and anonymous, Singh’s a local celebrity who’s stopped by strangers daily. While she was waiting on a bench on Devon last week for her visiting mother to finish shopping, a man crossing the street cocked his head, pointed, and then slowly and silently gave her a thumbs-up. “Once I was on the Gold Coast,” she says, “when this guy drove past us and then backed up and said, ‘Best-dressed television personality in Chicago!’ And then he drove off.”
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Nowhere is that more evident than in Alpana Pours–described on the jacket as “a unique lifestyle book with wine as the centerpiece.” There are sections titled “Having Him…to Dinner” and “What Wines Go With Bingeing?” (Champagne with potato chips, zinfandel with pizza.) In the pop culture firmament, the book may actually be a few years too late. It could have inspired an episode of Sex and the City, especially given passages like this: “Okay, foreplay’s over. No more looking at or sniffing the wine. It’s finally time to go all the way and put it in your mouth.”
