Ivory Grille Restaurant and Oak Room Lounge

Walking into the Hotel Bothwell — a historic landmark in downtown Sedalia — and finding a Wine Spectator Award of Excellence on the wall is genuinely surprising. The Oak Room Lounge has real atmosphere: old-school glamour, dark wood, the kind of room that makes you want to order a bottle instead of a glass. The wine list leans hard into California, which turns out to be less of a limitation than you'd expect.

This is a California-centric list, full stop — and the producers they've chosen are the respectable mainstream rather than the lazy supermarket shelf. Caymus, Jordan, Stag's Leap Wine Cellars, Cakebread Cellars, and Sonoma-Cutrer anchor the program with recognizable names that actually drink well. There's no adventurous detour into Rhône varieties, skin-contact whites, or anything that would raise an eyebrow at a natural wine bar, but that's not the game here. What they're doing is offering solid, crowd-pleasing California in a setting that makes those bottles feel at home.

Ten to sixteen pours by the glass running $8–$14 is a reasonable spread for a mid-Missouri steakhouse environment. Sonoma-Cutrer Chardonnay and Kendall-Jackson Vintner's Reserve are likely workhorses on the glass list — familiar and inoffensive, if not exactly thrilling. We'd push the staff on what's actually open and drinking well that night before defaulting to the obvious.