Menus highlight provenance and traits like acidity, minerality and sweetness; no ice or lemon allowed

Illustration of an ornate chalice overflowing with a bright blue waterfall.

Alexandra Citrin-Safadi/WSJ

By

Natasha Dangoor

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Oct. 20, 2025 5:30 am ET

Magdalena Kalley was browsing the drinks menu at a Michelin-starred restaurant, wondering what might pair well with the $175 steak she planned to share with three friends. The server recommended something smooth and full-bodied.

It was an $11 bottle of still water from the East Coast.

Unlike most people, who are drawn to high-end restaurants for the food, Kalley went to Gwen over the summer specifically to check out the Los Angeles hot spot’s water menu—part of a small but growing contingent interested in the rarefied world of “fine water.”

She started with Saratoga, the East Coast water, before moving on to her French favorite: Evian. “I am absolutely obsessed with the taste and texture,” the 38-year-old said.

Kalley also tried a $12 Georgian sparkling water, Borjomi, described on the menu as salty and complex. The salinity, she said, helped highlight the differences between the various waters she tried. “It was fascinating to see that the water with the lighter mineral content paired nicely with our appetizers.”

Gwen’s water menu—a detailed book with lengthy descriptions of each water’s origin and flavor profile—includes bottles from as far away as Australia and Armenia. Most cost between $11 and $13. It also offers tap water, priced at $0. Served by the glass, “the Los Angeles Tap water has more minerals and electrolytes dissolved than most purified bottled waters,” the menu notes.

Gwen's water menu, which includes a flavor profile for each bottle or glass, has become so popular that people are stealing them.

Jessica Hammerman

Martin Riese, the water sommelier behind Gwen’s menu, said the restaurant makes as much as $100,000 a year in water sales.

H2O is the stuff of life, but for several decades, water producers and sommeliers have been working to make it something more: the stuff of taste.

Riese and fellow water sommelier Michael Mascha, founder of FineWaters, a water connoisseur platform, began training people in their field in 2006. By 2018 they were educating hundreds worldwide.

“No one would think it’s strange if you served different types of vodka at a bar,” said Riese, “so why should it be any different for water?”

Plenty of people don’t seem to be buying it.

The idea has been slow to catch on more broadly. Some early adopters of the water menu were unsuccessful.

Martin Riese posing next to three bottles of water and a glass, with a city skyline in the background.

‘It’s all about options in the restaurant scene,’ says water sommelier Martin Riese, who oversaw the water menu at Gwen and a handful of other spots. Sven Doornkaat

“It was hard not to laugh at it,” Jessica Hammerman, 48, said of Gwen’s water menu. The history professor and editor from Bend, Ore., stuck to tap water during a visit there to celebrate her anniversary with her husband. She splurged instead on wine.

The world’s largest water menu can be found at O Lar do Leitón, a restaurant in Galicia, Spain, which offers more than 150 waters from 33 countries. Eateries in Italy, Denmark and the U.K. offer their own aqua explorations. Around 10 restaurants in the U.S. now offer a water menu. Industry experts say more could be on the way.

Christopher Alexander would be happy to see more offerings. “I’d argue it’s the most important drink on the planet!” he said.

Servers at Gwen restaurant working in the kitchen, viewed from a marble counter with drinks in the foreground.

Staff at Gwen work in the kitchen. As people consume less alcohol, high-end water has become a palatable alternative not only to cocktails and wine but also to sodas, juices and overly sweet mocktails. Jessica Hammerman

Gwen is currently his favorite restaurant in Hollywood. While the 26-year-old housing specialist from Long Beach, Calif., sometimes takes the server’s recommendations, he usually ends up drinking Antipodes—one of the restaurant’s most popular waters. Sourced from a deep pressured aquifer in New Zealand, it’s “smooth and easy to swallow,” Alexander said.

Not all waters are created equal. The difference, Riese says, usually comes down to the Total Dissolved Solids, the mineral composition that determines a water’s flavor profile based on its sodium, magnesium and calcium content. It can alter the taste of food and wine, too.

Water with a high TDS is often bitter and acidic, making it a natural pairing for heavy, fatty foods. Three Bays, an Australian water with a TDS of 1,300 milligrams per liter, says it takes 2,000 years to filter through soil layers. Its age, Riese suggests, makes it a perfect accompaniment to steak.

The Inn at Little Washington’s water menu entry for Berg water, showing an iceberg partially submerged in water, product details and a bottle of the water.

Berg water, on the menu at the Inn at Little Washington for $95 a bottle, is sourced from Newfoundland.

Water with a lower TDS, considered dry in the mouth, pairs better with lighter fare, like salad or fish. And like many a postmeal digestif, Fiji is a popular dessert choice for its smooth, slightly sweet aftertaste.

Riese instructs servers to treat the waters like a fine wine: No ice or lemon allowed. Nothing that could dull the delicate flavor profile.

The dining room at the Inn at Little Washington in Virginia is one of the latest in the U.S. to offer fine water. Its menu, launched this spring, includes Berg water from Newfoundland, Canada. Sourced from a 15,000-year-old iceberg, the light-bodied, low-mineral water costs $95 a bottle. The menu says it tastes of “ancient packed snow and air.”

Water sommelier Cameron Smith said many guests have never had a choice in the water they drink beyond the standard still, sparkling or tap. “It would be like a sommelier offering only red, white or sparkling wine—far too limited.”

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5789342&forum_id=2:#49370950)

Considered as a public statement, the $12 water is obnoxious, a flagrantly expensive lowbrow-highbrow stunt out of the Jeff Koons catalog.

If you can forget all this and just drink it, though, the $12 water is glorious. It gets to you both on a mindless, lizard-brain level and through a sophisticated appeal to your mind. It’s “Barbie” and it’s “Oppenheimer.”

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5430631&forum_id=2#46954778)

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5789342&forum_id=2:#49370956)