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New Yorkers of a sure age will keep in mind the town’s wine bars of yore. The dimly lit spots that smelled of bloomy rinds and charcuterie and served their purple wines only a hair too heat beneath lights that had been a hair too vibrant.
This template was at the very least partially upended when The Ten Bells opened on the Decrease East Facet in 2008. Barely vibrant sufficient to make out the colour of the wine in your glass and effortlessly cool, Ten Bells launched the town to the pure wine bar, a spot the place you didn’t want to take a seat down and examine an inventory, that wine might simply be there to accompany time. And if the wine was good, all the higher.
That very same 12 months, Paul Grieco opened Terroir within the East Village, utilizing children’ alphabet magnets and playful wine descriptions to decorate down the entire notion of “wine bar”; he set the entire thing to a punk playlist. From there, the brand new wine bar unfurled at a breakneck tempo, introducing umpteen variations on the concept, blurring the road between wine bar and restaurant and giving us a few of the most fun cooking of the final decade at locations like Wildair and The 4 Horsemen. At this time, there are such a lot of locations that outline themselves as wine bars, so many iterations, that it’s exhausting to truly outline what qualifies as one.
“To me, if I can’t go in, throw again a glass of wine, not ordering meals, after which go about my day, that’s not a wine bar,” says Grant Reynolds, proprietor of Parcelle on the Decrease East Facet. In different phrases, a spot the place you possibly can go only for the wine, with out ruffling feathers, that’s a wine bar—and that’s true of all the locations we’ve referred to as out under. These are the bars we deem important, every with their very own singular identification.
P.S. There are a handful of recent and not-yet-opened wine bars that couldn’t be included on this record, equivalent to Whoopsie Daisy in Crown Heights in addition to the forthcoming Unusual Delight in Fort Greene and Plus de Vin in Williamsburg. To them we are saying: See you quickly.
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