Quick Announcement
Next week, I’m introducing something new: Wine School — a weekly email for readers who want to deepen their fluency with wine. Every day next week, I’ll send out a short lesson to all subscribers to give you a taste of what this will look like. After that, Wine School posts will be available to Founding Members only (who also get all digital products for free as they roll out).
Why Wine School? Because wine is about context. It’s notoriously hard to learn because people are almost never on the same page knowledge-wise. This is my attempt to change that. Think of it as a framework for building shared language — the kind that makes conversations between professionals and curious drinkers actually interesting.
If you work in restaurants, consider it like a pre-shift wine presentation… if those were actually good and complete. If you’re not a restaurant person but have always wondered how wine people know the things they do, this is for you too. Professionals and hobbyists welcome.
I’m back in New York City and, as as always, I’m nearly paralyzed with excitement: there is simply too much. Too much incredible food. Too much otherwise-hard to find wine. Too many places that deserve a night, a whole bottle, and a few unhurried hours. Walking these streets is a torturous exercise in appetite triage. I find myself mercilessly editing my dinner schedule for the next few days, crossing out one world-class option only to immediately trip over another. I finalize a reservation, then I see a new taco truck in the distance, then I get word that the team from Thai Diner has opened a fast-casual chicken finger window. How in the hell am I expected to keep up with all this?
We made our semi-annual pilgrimage to SriPraPhai in Woodside, and it was as good as ever. The lunch spread included crispy catfish with spicy mango salad, pork and green beans with nam prik noom, green curry with baby eggplant, a classic beef pad see ew, and sautéed Chinese broccoli with oyster sauce. My terminally well-organized life partner had our go-to order saved in her Notes app, complete with the letter-number codes from the menu. Could we have branched out? Of course. And to be fair, we did make one improvised substitution at the moment of ordering. But if your intention is to enjoy lunch and catch up with loved ones, it’s best to arrive with at least the bones of your order ready to go. The menu is detailed and long, and largely incomprehensible to the non-aficionado. Again: overwhelm.
Dinner was at Chez Ma Tante in Greenpoint, which is, in my estimation, the perfect neighborhood restaurant. The menu is just refined enough to be world-class while still feeling completely approachable. It combines the best aspects of a North Brooklyn cool-kid wine bar with tight, technique-driven European fare, staples that your parents would be overjoyed to share with you when they visit. The room is almost comically underdesigned, which to me reads as, we’re not going to hide behind decor. It’s just honest food and friendly service executed with grace.
Bread and butter seems to be having a moment. Two nights in a row, I had absolutely banging instances of bread service. At Chez Ma Tante, they greeted us with a hunk of brown wheaty sourdough with a firm crust and pillow-soft interior, accompanied by butter containing who knows what kind of sorcery. It was whipped glossy but had a layered texture—likely cultured—soft and highly spreadable, finished with a dusting of flaky salt.
It reminded me of the night before, upstate at Chleo in Kingston, where the bread service was similarly excellent. Their sourdough is warmed on an open-flame hearth until the crust picks up the faintest char, while the center turns plush and steamy. It retained its heat for the first half the meal. We enjoyed that with a totally acceptable but in no way memorable bottle of Crémant de Bourgogne. we drank with it showed lovely brioche and yellow apple flavors, but the bubbles themselves felt indifferent—larger, spaced out, more carbonation than mousse. Not bad, just uninspired. But those bready notes resurfaced in dessert: a sourdough sundae. Sourdough-infused cream churned into ice cream, topped with gently salty miso caramel and sourdough cocoa crispy bits. It was the kind of thing that, when the server describes it, you wonder if all that is really necessary. In practice, it worked nicely to add just enough complexity to some otherwise obvious flavors.
Back at Chez Ma Tante, they’re using Piave cheese generously, which caught my attention. Piave is a firm, cow’s milk cheese from the Veneto, somewhere between Asiago and Parmigiano in texture—sweet, nutty, and salty, with a crystalline snap when aged. It lent a pronounced saltiness to certain dishes, including a plate of grilled artichokes marinated and topped with culatello (a salty cured pork like prosciutto, but without the metallic aftertaste) and fresh oregano. This whole flavor profile seemed directly aimed at my personal love language (pizza), and the crusty bread lingered long enough to soak up the fragrant olive oil pooling on the plate.
It’s autumn in New York, so Jimmy Nardellos are everywhere right now, and they made an appearance atop a perfectly cooked chicken Milanese. If you’re not familiar, the Jimmy Nardello is a long, thin, bright red sweet pepper named after the son of Italian immigrants who brought the seeds to Connecticut in the late 19th century. When roasted whole, the interior collapses into something sauce-like—juicy, absurdly fruity. Not heat at all, but Platonic levels of nightshade character. At Chez Ma Tante they were draped over the crisp, juicy cutlet alongside a cute fennel and dill salad, and it was perfect.
The wine list, curated by my longtime friend Mike Patricola, is a minor miracle. It’s everything a natural(ish) list should be: priced for actual humans, stocked with low-intervention wines that are classy, clean, and genuinely distinctive. No orange-wine circus tricks, no skin-contact-for-the-sake-of-it posturing. This is a natural wine list for grown-ups. Kind of like how Greenpoint is the millennial lifestyle themepark (aka williamsburg) for grown-ups. The thoughtful curation of this list is evident, and Mike is a generous steward of the program. I overheard him going deep on the social history of natural wine appreciation in the U.S. at the table next to ours. I know that sounds annoying, but he really pulled it off, and the guests were grateful.
I was, of course, overwhelmed by the act of choosing a single bottle for our 5:30 dinner, but we chose well: Anne et Jean-François Ganevat’s Victor De La Combe dit “Le Vieux Bougre”, a Chardonnay from the Loire vinified with Ganevat’s usual tenderness. The palate was soft and smooth with stone fruit flavors and a nutty savory note, like a sage roasted almond. There was a density to it, a kind of supple concentration that held everything together without ever tipping into heaviness. The finish unfurled slowly, with an undulating length that moved in and out of savory and fruity registers, never quite settling on one idea, as if the wine itself were still making up its mind.
We closed with a flourless chocolate cake that had the usual pudding-like density, but with some air whipped into it. It held its familiar “slice of cake” shape, but texturally it didn’t feel baked at all—more like a mousse that decided to stand up straight. Another fun little miracle. We enjoyed that with a digestif of mezcal on the rocks, but had to jet to a show at Elsewhere, which for some inexplicable reason started at 7 p.m. Who goes to Elsewhere at 7? The Brooklyn music scene really has changed—if there’s even such a thing anymore.
I’m overjoyed to be back from the Hamptons. New York has real restaurants—places whose quality is forged in the furnace of endless competition, not tailored to tourists with nowhere else to go. And as much as I love it, I’m also relieved I don’t live here full-time. How would I ever get anything done? This is New York’s great cruelty: everything is this good. The baseline is excellence, and the abundance is relentless. You can’t possibly keep up. But of course, you try anyway.
Want more? Founding Members get access to Wine School, free digital resources, and the satisfaction of fueling this little corner of wine and culture.
If you’ve got thoughts, tips, or favorite NYC spots I shouldn’t miss, hit reply. I read and respond to everything.
Reading this makes me wanna grab Jack and fly to NYC like right now! ❤️🔥