The absurdity and delight of the mid-day meal could perhaps only be truly understood by Larry David, who structured so many scenes on the occasion- think every lunch at the "Restaurant" on Seinfeld, George buying The Big Salad for Elaine and not getting credit for it, plus pretty much every episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm (always order the anchovies).

Life is too short, though, not to lean into an absurdity as delightful as lunch. Yes, it might seem counterintuitive to step away from the desk for a bite these days but I think it’s really what we all need.

I was reminded of this last week at the new launch of lunch service at Bar Chimera. Since I've stepped back from the day-to-day, I got to go in with fresh eyes.

Before and after I sat down, I walked the room and asked guests about their idea of the Power Lunch today. We are in midtown, after all, on Madison Avenue, squeezed between 55th and 56th. There were people who had already booked two more reservations, for future client meetings. And there was the guy delighted by the pre-cut nature of the steak, since he is a big fan of fletcherizing* his meat, and smaller bites meant "less lunch work."

*Named after Horace Fletcher, an American health reformer in the early 1900s known as “The Great Masticator,” he claimed that chewing each bite dozens of times (often 32 or up to 100 times) cured various health issues, boosted energy, and improved digestion. “He once chewed a green onion 722 times before he let himself swallow it.”

Pretty much every one I spoke to though shared the same sentiment: the POWER LUNCH IS BACK.

Where did it go? Well, let’s stop and consider the very television shows I opened with. They were weaning us off of the 80’s Power Lunch into a modern day version which is begging for resuscitation.

These shows made a point of showing people who prioritized their network, their friends, their clients (midday! In person!) and that was COOL. Name me a show today that glamorizes that. I'll wait.

As the person who used to serve the lunch to the lunchers, it sort of left my own life for the past decade. When I was a cellar rat and bartender at Harry's at Hanover Square, my favorite shift was Beef Wellington Wednesdays (people even pre-ordered their Wellies, and by 12:30 we were 86'd. I used to field thick-wads-of-cash bribes to save a boeuf-en-croûte for regulars). From there I went to Aureole in the 42nd street Bank of America building- my first sommelier job, where we were essentially the cafeteria for Ernst & Young. Then, I was a sommelier at Marea, where I would argue the Power Lunch still rules. So much octopus.

Speaking of those days: I was recently at Oriana, the new restaurant from Cédric Nicaise, with a very good wine list - whom I overlapped with fifteen years ago when I took over for him as sommelier at Aureole while he was on his way out the door to Eleven Madison Park. (This, for the record, was a PARTY DINNER with a friend, not a BUSINESS MEETING. Church and state.) I was asking him about that era, and he told me that even pre-Aureole he did a brief stint at The Brasserie (downstairs in the very same Seagram Building where, upstairs, the Power Lunch was named*) and he remembers there was a guy from Santander who came in two, three times a week and always ordered the petit filet with a small green salad, waited for his client to finish talking, paid the check, and left. Then did that whole thing again, and again. Sure, that might sound monotonous. But you know what sounds worse? A Zoom meeting as lunch.

* coined by Esquire.

“Anybody in the mood for an exchange of perspectives and innovative concepts? Anybody in the mood for a meal that’s all grace, all business, nonfattening?” - Esquire

I suppose what’s changed is who holds the power, and how. La Côte Basque used to be full of Truman Capote’s Swans, which in today’s world is a chic gaggle of influencers with ring lights (I recognize that my influencer-tech-terminology might be outdated). And what once was a Wolf of Wall Street-ish, Prime Rib artery-clogging lunch at The Four Seasons is now a lot of massive, theatrical ice-towers of vegetable crudité at The Grill for GLP 1-ers.

While eating a Big Salad with Beans and talking business last week, I thought: save the long catch-up with friends for dinner. Take the client out mid-day. The Power Lunch was once a status symbol, but dinner has become all of that and more (how many reservation wait-lists can we possibly join!?). Business is best accomplished in the middle of the day, over a good bit of protein, outside the office. Maybe a martini (Bar Chimera also has a Zero ABV one). Probably not two. After all, we do have to grow up sometime.

Behind the paywall, my top power lunch places. Subscribers*, yes, you will find me here doing business. Join!

*A reminder that all subscriptions go directly to my 501c3 non-profit, Wine Empowered. So you are paying for good recs & good programming!

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About ten years ago, though, I hiked to the origin of the Rhône river - its headwaters in the Alps in Switzerland, just up from Vevey. At the top you could actually take a swim where the river begins: a big cold pond fed by the natural spring, the water that spins down and feeds the whole wine region as it runs into France.

And after a hike and a swim, I found you could also have, at the top of the mountain … a restaurant meal!?

This wasn’t a ski lodge but a humble sort of refugio, the kind of mom-and-pop place that offers simple fare to weary travelers. Beer. A pretzel. Soup, maybe.

A couple of years later, with a baby strapped to my chest, I hiked amongst the puffins of the Faroe Islands in fog so thick all morning I could barely see a foot in front of me. The air cleared as afternoon crept in, and like a magical mirage, a small shack appeared serving the local aquavit, beer, and fish soup. Delicious. Satiating!

A few weeks ago I was in the Basque Country when my friend Marianne mentioned a recent hike where, at the top, she’d had a great omelette. An omelette! The very idea that one could trek all day and be met at the summit by one of the most perfect dishes there is, complete with jamón, naturally, convinced me on the spot that I had to hike up that mountain.

Which is how I found myself trekking up the infamous La Rhune, the mountain that became a tourist destination after Empress Eugénie de Montijo’s holidays in Biarritz and her outings to the summit in the 1860s made international news. About a hundred years ago (1924 to be exact!) they built the Petit Train de la Rhune, which charmingly still runs(ish) [read: a very, very slow forty-five minute ride, still made of wood, creaky]. So you can cheat and take it up. But let me tell you: you can spot the hikers vs. the train-ers at the top. The really happy ones, the hungry ones at least, walk up. They’re the ones that leave satiated. To be fair though, I’m not a martyr. And absolutely exhausted, I did take the train down.

We started the hike in France and finished at the summit in Spain. Besides the omelette which actually turned out to be more of a Tortilla española, there were also the best gildas I’ve ever had. My partner, who’d summitted first to pre-order, texted us all with hope as I kept stopping and starting once we got to the part where we had to use our hands to climb: “Everything is already here. The drinks are cold, the omelettes are warm, and the gildas are perfect.”

About halfway up, though, I found myself wondering why anyone would build a restaurant in the middle of nowhere, on top of a mountain. As if running a restaurant weren’t hard enough in civilization - can you imagine the logistics, especially a hundred years ago, before you could pick up your phone and place an order, of getting supplies up and down this thing? How do you even know if anyone will come on a given day? A given week?

For those of us often too tired to walk down the street for our own nachos, ending up on the delivery apps instead, I empathize. Or, when a restaurant is all the way in the West Village from my North Brooklyn apartment, I sometimes think - is it really worth the trek?

But, what if that idea ~ is it worth the trek ~ dissipates the moment you actually trek? Maybe the trek is worth the trek, and the meal is just the glorious cherry on top of the mountain. I remember a couple of years ago hauling my daughter to the West Village for dinner with a friend, three subway transfers, her wiggling the whole way and terrorizing commuters across multiple boroughs, and thinking, not ironically at all, what a delight this is. That I got to spend an hour with her. Yes, an hour (the West Village is far!)… just us. What we now call a “Monie and mama” date, a joy entirely in itself, before we’d eaten a single bite.

We restaurant people get asked constantly: is it worth the hype? As if the meal were the destination. The real questions are the ones underneath it. Why did you go all that way to this particular place? And why did someone decide to open here, of all the impossible places (i.e. top of a mountain or New York fucking City), and now, of all the godforsaken times? Answer those and you understand that the omelette was never the point. The gilda was never the point. The point is how you got there and why - the swim, the fog, the baby, the borders crossed, the hour on the subway with a wiggling kid. The meal is just where the day finally sits down to rest.

Isn’t that the whole thing? The journey, the day, the evening, the people you crossed a mountain to reach, or climbed alongside. Isn’t that the point?

Subscribers, my favorite snack in the world. As in, the perfect Gilda pairing & recipe, right below here from San Sebastián direct…

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With a little education, a foot in the door of a world they'd never felt welcome in, people became empowered. Dishwashers became runners. Runners became bussers, then servers, then sommeliers, then managers. One person in that very first class told me that before then, the only way he'd ever experienced wine was in the dish pit: dirty glasses coming through, and him, curious, lifting them to his nose to catch what the guests had been drinking.

I grew up in the world of wine (perhaps the very definition of an Old Boys' Club if there ever was one) and watching that classroom, I understood something. This was the secret to making wine more dynamic, more alive, more fair: free education for the people the industry had always kept on the margins. In 2018, I co-founded WINE EMPOWERED with two other female sommeliers from COTE, Cynthia Cheng and Amy Zhou.

Eight years later, we’re still small but mighty, a 501(c)(3) offering tuition-free wine education to women and people of color in hospitality. Because the upper ranks of this industry should look like the rooms we actually serve.

So I’m kicking off a new summer spotlight series on our Wine Empowered alumni- where they started, and where they are now. First up: Camille Williams, class of 2024.

When Camille started the program she was working in a casino in Connecticut - and commuted hours weekly for the program. A little over a year later, she is running some of the most respected restaurants in New York (and therefore, the world!). We talked on a Monday afternoon at SAGA - Kent Hospitality Group’s two-Michelin-starred restaurant on the 63rd floor of a 1932 skyscraper in downtown Manhattan. Camille was in the middle of setting up for a private event that night. We sat in a cleared dining room, two glasses of water between us, under the restaurant’s famous Basquiat painting.

VJ: Tell me how you got into restaurants in the first place.

CAMILLE: Restaurants were always the second job in my family. My mom was a single mom - her daytime job was selling medical equipment, and then two nights a week she’d go work at our local pizza place. The Recovery Room, right across from the hospital. I’d say, “My mom’s at the Recovery Room,” and people would go, “Oh, she’s a nurse?” No - it’s a pizza place across the street.

It was a small husband-and-wife spot, the kind where the regulars knew her. She almost became more powerful than the owners, because she’d watched these people grow up, watched their kids grow up. My aunt bartended a few towns over. So it was always something I knew wasn’t your ‘real’ job - it was an outlet, a way to get more money and have people to talk to.

I’m the middle child of seven. I learned young that nothing was about me - it was about talking, working things out, taking care of people. So restaurants felt like exactly what I already did. I could float around a room, make you feel good for a second, and the whole time none of it was about me. It just felt too natural to count as work.

VJ: So you went and got the ‘real’ job first.

CAMILLE: I became an insurance agent. That was the first time my family told me they were proud of me. And I hated it. I hated the office. I knew I loved being social in restaurants, but it felt too easy to be a real job - because it was just… what I did all the time.

“It just feels too natural for it to feel like work. And I kept returning to restaurants because of that.”

Then COVID closed everything. I ended up at a place in Mystic, Connecticut - the Shipwright’s Daughter - right as the town started getting James Beard buzz. Suddenly my family was proud to say I worked there. They’d tell their friends, “You’ve got to go see Camille at work.” That was the first chef-driven place I’d ever worked - - the first time the chef’s vision dictated everything, not just the service. Then I got the chance to join Tao, where people walked in, saw the room, and were impressed I ran it.

VJ: When did wine become the thing?

CAMILLE: In Mystic, they were trying to do small-producer, biodynamic, natural wines - in a town where everyone just wanted Kendall-Jackson. So you had to teach it. And I’d suddenly become a boss. I realized I needed to learn about wine so I could actually be an asset to my staff. I was the person who’s supposed to have the answers.

That’s always what learning was for me. I never had a goal pinned to my wall. I just don’t like not having an answer, and I’m the person who’s supposed to have them. I was following my instincts and realized I was climbing a ladder I didn’t even know I was on.

VJ: And you found Wine Empowered through an Instagram ad?

CAMILLE: I was at Tao working late nights, so my days were free. I’d started following wine professionals, and the ads started popping up. Class was Monday mornings - my days off were Tuesday and Wednesday. So I’d close on Sunday night, get home around 1 a.m., wake up early, and take the train into the city. I slept a lot on that train.

Barnes & Noble in Union Square was always open, so I’d get a coffee and finish studying. Class at 10, take the quiz, then right back to Grand Central, grab an empanada, get on the train. Sometimes I’d have my work clothes in the car and drive straight from the station to the casino to close that night. I figured I’d rather make Monday one brutally long day than lose a real day off. It was a lot of fun. I have no idea how I did it.

VJ: And before this, you’d only taken wine courses online.

CAMILLE: All pre-recorded, no one to talk to. It’s like learning a language - you can study French alone, but if you’re not talking to anyone, it doesn’t lock in. The very first class, I’ll never forget how you taught us to taste: your first sip, you don’t actually taste the wine - you taste your mouth’s reaction, resetting to what you’re drinking. The second sip is the wine. I still tell people that. It blew my mind, and I’d never had anyone in the room to tell me before.

VJ: And let’s talk about the process of getting into Wine Empowered. The process is no joke. Hundreds apply then there is — a referral, multiple interviews.

CAMILLE: Every step felt like a Hail Mary. No one’s going to pick me, but let me just apply. I got the student interview, then the interview with Cynthia - I walked out thinking, that was weird, I have no idea. A friend told me, “They’re going to keep moving you through.” And I said, I don’t want to get confident - someone could have a better interview, you never know.

Then I got the email: Welcome to Wine Empowered! I was in New York for the weekend and I just sat there - oh my God, I did it. I get emotional even now. I’d gotten engaged two days before, and honestly I was more freaked out about getting into the program.

That first day of class, I heard where everyone worked - like Tatiana, all these places I’d been a fan of from Connecticut. The teachers were impressive, but so were my classmates. They picked me to be in the room with these people? They all worked at my dream restaurants. I just thought it was so cool to be there.

VJ: Getting in is one thing. The class itself doesn’t suddenly get easy.

CAMILLE: I compare it to a college course because of the self-study. You can’t just show up and learn what you need - you have to take on the responsibility. You walk into a quiz on something you should’ve studied all week. The lecture is two hours, and wine is bottomless. Every teacher has a different obsession - some are deep in history, some in geography, some are label-heavy on their favorite producers - so you have to be ready for anything.

My first couple of weeks, I was writing down literally everything - I thought I’d run out of notebook paper in a single region. By the second half I figured out what actually mattered: the AOC, the aging rules, the things that kept coming back. But it clicks.

VJ: Walk me through what happened after you graduated.

CAMILLE: I wanted mentorship - I’d come up through work, never went to school for management, and I’d had a lot of men as bosses telling me to handle situations a certain way without realizing my physical presentation changes how people receive the information.

So I joined the James Beard Legacy Network. You’d sent an email about a role, and I reached out to them even though I was already in management, because I wanted to stay connected to this group.

Meanwhile, I’d told my fiancé I had an interview in New York - and he found a job and an apartment before I’d even had the interview. So suddenly I needed to apply everywhere. That’s when the Gramercy Tavern opportunity came up, and it moved fast.

VJ: That’s wild - you move to New York and land at one of its most iconic restaurants, with a Michelin star.

CAMILLE: And the thing is - I have a hard time taking credit - but a lot of it was them being impressed that I’d done Wine Empowered from Connecticut. My job didn’t sign me up. They told me later that’s exactly why they pushed for me: I cared enough about the industry to do it on my own.

It was a service manager role - a step down in title and pay from AGM - but I knew working under Danny Meyer’s world would change my trajectory more than a bigger title somewhere else.

VJ: And then Saga.

CAMILLE: I came in to shadow Chef Charlie for a day - just to learn, for myself. People kept pulling me aside to chat, and I thought, wow, what a friendly group. They were interviewing me. Before I left, they pulled me outside and offered me a job. The line was: “We know Amy [Zhou] and Victoria’s work ethic. If you made it through their class, we know what that says about you.” I was frozen. That’s not why I came in that day. I keep accidentally paving a way I didn’t know I was paving, because I just wanted to learn.

Now I’m the AGM here. Saga and Overstory are two stars; Crown Shy has one; Overstory was 33rd on North America’s World’s Best. I started in November, got promoted in January, and it’s been a whirlwind. Chef Charlie and I went to cook dinner in Hong Kong; he’s in LA this week. I haven’t had a second to breathe - I can’t believe it’s already June.

VJ: People think Wine Empowered is just a wine program - but it empowers you to build a whole career. What did it give you that you use every day?

CAMILLE: The biggest thing: when you don’t know something, it becomes a boogeyman. From Connecticut, I looked at beverage directors and thought they had accolades I could never achieve. Then I got in the room - and they were just people. Normal people, gulping their water, hands shaking, PowerPoints not working, saying French words without a French accent. It pulled back the curtain and made it attainable. That’s what I loved most.

VJ: Had you been in rooms like that before - not all men, not all suits?

CAMILLE: No. Even at Tao, the wine guy was the boss, and the buyers were older rich men who wanted big, bold Italian wine. Wine felt like one of two things: a luxury you put on a shelf for special occasions, or the cheap stuff people made fun of. My cousin drank RELAX [wines] - she’d let me sip it, but in the wine world you’d call that garbage. It never felt like something people I knew actually drank.

Then I walked into Wine Empowered and my classmates were my age, dressed like me, doing the things I like to do. The teachers seemed like people I’d know. And it hit me - the wine world is made for people who look like me. They belong.

VJ: What about the community?

CAMILLE: In a small town, if there are two good restaurants, they’re competitors - there’s only so much to go around. New York showed me the opposite. Two beverage directors at the most successful places in the city can just be friends. I’d been around gatekeepers who wouldn’t teach you something because they found it threatening. To see people at the top training the people coming up under them - that was the most interesting thing to me about this whole industry.

VJ: What would you say to someone who wants to apply but doesn’t see themselves as ‘wine industry material’?

CAMILLE: You don’t see yourself there because you’re not there - you have to put yourself in those spaces. I didn’t see myself either. Being the first isn’t always a great feeling; it’s uncomfortable. But sometimes you have to sacrifice yourself a little so the next person can see it’s possible. There are younger girls here now who pull me aside, because I’m the first person they’ve met who looks like them that they can ask. If you’re interested, you belong. That’s literally it. You just have to find your way in.

You don’t have to check a set of boxes. Getting in or not isn’t a measure of your self-worth - and someone telling you no doesn’t mean you don’t deserve to be there. I pushed a friend to apply who kept saying, “They won’t pick me.” Nobody could care more than her. You’ll get in - and if you don’t, you reapply.

VJ: Why should people support Wine Empowered - money, time, wine?

CAMILLE: The connectivity can’t be overstated. We think of wine as something in a glass, but the community is so much bigger than that. The field trips changed me - going to Rosenthal’s office, to Skurnik, tasting things I’d never had, in rooms that showed me what was possible. I hadn’t set foot in a vineyard until we went to Macari on Long Island, and I realized great wine was being made in my own backyard - not just California or France.

Wine is an expensive hobby. There’s a real barrier to entry - the bottles, the regions, the trips. You can be just as interested as anyone and not be able to afford it. Wine Empowered gives you the community to talk it through and the access that can change a life. You never know what sparks it - maybe our next great winemaker is the person who finally got to visit a vineyard.

The biggest takeaway was the time. One of our instructors, Robin [Wright], had just done a huge DRC dinner and was there the next morning to teach us. When someone that busy gives you a day, it makes you feel important - it makes you puff your chest out. Even when you’re too nervous to speak up in a tasting because you don’t want to be wrong, it reminds you that you were worth this person’s time. The money and the trips matter. But people investing their time in you is life-changing. Empowering the next generation - what could be better than that?

Honestly, I can’t say it enough. Everyone told me they were so impressed I made it through Wine Empowered. People in this industry know the reputation - if you can hang with that class, they know what it says about you. I thought I was doing it all to help myself. Really, it was with your help. It was one of the most fun, hardest things I’ve ever done - and when you love it, it doesn’t feel like work. You look back and realize the hard times were really golden…

VJ: We can’t wait to see how you continue to change the industry as a Wine Empowered alumni and champion. You continue to take on hard things, and you turn them into gold, you alchemize them.

To find out more about Wine Empowered and ways you can support people like Camille, visit www.wine-empowered.com. Every donation goes directly towards our initiative of supporting a more dynamic hospitality world, and making dreams come true.

✨ Plus: Behind the paywall below for subscribers, the wines & cocktail to drink now at SAGA - direct from Camille! One that is ELECTRIC & one that is Burgundy-meets-Champagne! ✨

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That feeling crept into all of the corners of our conversation. In a few days we were going to announce to our whole team that I’d be stepping back as GHM’s Executive Director of Beverage to focus on new personal projects - staying on as a partner and advisor, but loosening my grip on the day-to-day. So we got nostalgic. We talked about the golden years, about everything we’d made, and about what’s still coming. And the whole time, that afternoon light kept shining.

I was twenty-four when I met Simon. He was thirty-three, and he hired me as wine director at Piora, his jewel-box of a restaurant on Hudson Street - one Michelin star, my first buying job. A sommelier sells wine; a wine director sources it, procures it, owns the beverage P&L, and still sells, too. From there he made me a founding partner - real equity, a real slice of the pie - in Gracious Hospitality Management, to help build the restaurant he’d been dreaming of: COTE. Korean barbecue married to a New York chophouse. He needed a beverage partner. He believed in me when I was just a kid.

A decade later, we have nearly eight restaurants by this year’s end, two Michelin stars, and a wall of awards: Michelin Sommelier of the Year, three James Beard nominations for our wine programs, Wine Enthusiast Wine Director of the Year, Esquire’s Beverage Director of the Year, Forbes 30 Under 30. In between, there were marriages, divorces, children, and an absurd number of very good meals - across America, and through Korea, France, Italy, and Japan.

We’d been wondering for weeks how to share this news. The answer, finally, was simple: no one will tell our story better than we will. So here it is, in our own words.

This interview has been condensed and edited.

————————————————————————————————————

VJ: I wonder - you know, we both came from this underdog mentality. You’re a Korean-American guy who had always worked with Italian and French chefs. I grew up as this young woman in the old boys’ club of wine. Do you think we became this way because we had to prove it? Or are we just wired this way? Or both?

SK: Combination of both. There’s definitely something before the professional - just upbringing, childhood. We share certain childhood things. It wasn’t the easiest: me coming from Korea to America, my family, my brother, your sister, you know, we know- there’s a lot. So we both have a very dynamic family background that made us extremely driven, but also fast-acting. We know how to read the room, how to move around the room. We’re very street smart. But we also have a kind of constitution - we can work. That intensity, paired with -

VJ: Paired with having a lot to prove. Women, minorities, professionally as well.

SK: But I also think it’s not only that. It’s the synergistic effect that really boosts it. It’s not necessarily what kind of trauma or resistance bred us - it’s important to acknowledge that, but I also think we really empowered each other. You were young, and I said, “Do whatever you want to do, Victoria.” That autonomy, that mutual trust. You didn’t want to let me down; I wanted to let Victoria do what she wanted to do, not get in the way. Of course there are certain things I wanted to see a certain way, so I could steer you. That bonding took place when we were very young. I wasn’t jaded at all. That was my first sweetheart restaurant, Piora, where you came in - it was your first purchasing job too.

VJ: You were what, thirty-three?

SK: Yeah, I know. Holy shit. I feel like I’m still thirty-three. Those are the formative years. We learned it in a way that - it’s not “no,” we started with “yes.” Let’s do it that way. Yes. And more and more, even as a restaurateur with a lot of restaurants, it’s not always easy to say yes, because there are a lot of people involved. It’s reasonable for many people to start a career where the answer is no - you start at a big house, it’s no, no, no, under strict rules and guidance. But here, it was more: if you can think it, we can do it. And if we can do it, we can do it bigger and better. We emboldened each other’s imaginations. We linked our imaginations with reality. That propelled us to dream bigger, dream wilder, execute wilder things - which gave us more confidence, and then we started attracting people who were drawn to that. So we built a company and an organization that feels confident and dreams big.

VJ: I remember - do you remember that time at Piora? There was a time I came back from France, I had just gotten back from the vineyards, and I fell in love with this thing the winemakers would have called a casse-croûte, where during your break, your ‘family meal,’ you’d get a little glass of wine. And with the food and wine, you’d get the pairing. Like the Alsatian muenster cheese nibble with the gewürztraminer. I thought, “That’s so cool, we should do that at Piora - with each dish the chef makes I can do a little family-meal wine pairing so people truly understand - truly get how wine can make food taste even better, but also be unfussy.” And you said, “Okay, go for it.” And for one full week everyone was drunk going into service. It was a terrible mistake. But you let me do it. Then a week later you said, “Okay, everyone’s face is red, it looks like we’re a bunch of drunks.” But it was cool that you let people do things, let them fail or mess up, and then say, “Okay, what did you learn? We move forward.”

SK: Because that’s how I learned. I don’t learn by people telling me to do it. I can follow directions, but I learn so much better when I do it myself. You form a hypothesis: if I do X, then Y will happen. But if you do X and Z happens, then you actually understand what went wrong. And speaking of that shift wine - the family-meal wine - I actually in retrospect think that if you’d stuck with it, people would have gotten better. The first week, everybody gets drunk, yes. But it takes people time to get used to it. Even good ideas may not work in the first couple of weeks.

VJ: We could bring it back! You know you also have all these clever ideas all the time.

SK: Any crazy idea I have, you add your expertise, your knowledge, and you have this brilliance where you can logically connect the dots and materialize it.

So many people have great ideas. But rarely do they have the capacity to materialize, execute, and realize them. I think the difference between someone who is immensely successful - basic good to great - is that great entrepreneurs, when they think, they can act. Whether it’s right or wrong is completely secondary, because once you act, you see the result right away. So you can pivot, pivot, pivot. It takes you and me less time to execute-pivot-execute-pivot than it takes other people to take one single action. I think that really is the highlight of our professional relationship.

That intensity is something we share. We’re intense. We have a force that’s really unstoppable. It’s hyper-focused, we execute, it’s challenging, but honestly, challenges stimulate our intensity. They don’t diminish it. And to be fair, if it was easy, everybody would do it. It takes a kind of maniacal focus.

VJ: You know, whenever someone comes into GHM, I tell them that working with Simon sometimes is like - there’s a fence, and the sign says “live voltage, be careful.” Sometimes we both operate on this wavelength that’s so intense it can be like an electrical shock. You have to be on that live-voltage wavelength.

SK: Yeah I mean, let’s talk about some of the things we’ve done in our beverage departments. Magnums. The audacity. That’s basically what we’ve done - audacity. If you can think of it, Victoria can make it happen. I’m very fortunate as an entrepreneur to surround myself with people who aren’t yes-men. Now that I have a pretty big company, you have to be careful with yes-men. There’s a distinct difference between a yes-man and a person who can execute and realize your vision because they believe in it. At Piora, we thought, “What if we did all wines served out of magnums by the glass at COTE?” - I was just thinking of something unrealistic, just wouldn’t it be cool? And you said, “Yes, and I can make it happen.” Before you know it, one hundred percent of our wines by the glass were poured out of magnum. I had no idea it would be possible. And you weren’t one-dimensional about it. A lot of people, when I say “get magnums,” they get magnums - but they get terrible magnums.

VJ: But Simon, you told me to get magnums. So I got magnums.

SK: Right, but that’s one-dimensional, and you’re never one-dimensional. A lot of wines didn’t come in magnum, so you flew out to France, to the source, and got them bottled in magnum. When I have a mere idea, you make it greater than the original vision itself. That’s what I appreciate most about the greatest collaborators - so they don’t just realize my vision, they make it more nuanced, more appealing to the customer, and it tells an authentic story. It’s not “someone told me to get magnums, so I got magnums.” It’s a story. Your thoughts on uplifting BIPOC and minority winemakers, biodynamic practices, quality - you put that into your own high standard. You created something that, done the wrong way, would have been terrible. There’s zero value in it done wrong. But done the right way, it creates something. And that’s where we started, many years ago.

I say things like the magnum idea to so many collaborators in passing, because everything is fleeting. When you have an idea, it happens - and what you do is capture the brilliance. That’s your great talent. Of course you have great ideas of your own, but you also have an amazing skill to trap a lightning bolt in a jar. Who can do that?

VJ: And then COTE - in the Flatiron now - we have a twelve-hundred-label wine list. We have a million dollar cellar there now. That’s crazy. At a Korean barbecue restaurant.

SK: It’s a Korean steakhouse - but such a thing didn’t exist. What distinguishes Korean barbecue from a Korean steakhouse? We thought we needed a really good, robust, respectable wine list. That was the mission, but we had a very limited budget. And with that limited budget, you were able to procure this really respectable, robust, well-curated list.

VJ: So, COQODAQ. There are tons of fried chicken restaurants in America, tons of excellent ones - but you have the only one with the largest champagne list in the country.

SK: Thanks to you, Victoria. Just like when we decided to upgrade Korean barbecue into a Korean steakhouse, we set the precedent. When we decided to do Korean fried chicken — in Korea, chimaek 치맥; chicken and beer, is a big thing — we thought if we were going to upgrade it, we’d start with champagne. That was the mere idea. And of course, Victoria, larger than life, puts the largest champagne list in America with a very limited budget. That sums up our professional relationship - the audacity, larger than life, where one plus one equals more than two. Who would have thought the largest champagne list in America belongs to a Korean fried chicken restaurant? If somebody wrote that into a TV series, even something like The Bear, it would be comical — “okay, now that’s pushing it too far.” But in real life, it’s happening.

Same thing with the martini bar at 550 Madison. When we were designing the bar at Chimera, we talked about the ice - could we do reverse osmosis? Those ideas come and go, but you catch them.

And then we continuously get the Wine Spectator Grand Award for all of our wine lists- literally all our restaurants have them. It’s pretty wild. Then the James Beard Foundation three nominations, Star Wine List Best Champagne list in the world - the amount of accolades we won, that you brought to the table… I call it the head of Medusa brought to the table. It was truly remarkable. It’s special, and it’ll continue to be.

VJ: It’s interesting seeing GHM evolve over this last decade. It’s like the trajectory of a healthy company. It used to be just you and me, David, Wesley - this ragtag crew of me and my Korean big brothers. Now it’s bigger than any one individual. Bigger than Simon. Definitely bigger than me. Every hospitality company - and definitely GHM - you spend a lot of time together, we used to spend more time with each other than with our actual families. At least for the first five to eight years. Do you really think you can build something at this level without it becoming deeply personal?

SK: Honestly, I don’t know, because I just did it this way and it worked. We were a Korean restaurateur without money, and you, one of the youngest females in the field. The cards we were dealt weren’t the best. We didn’t have big funding or a family office or that kind of privilege. What we did have was being in the trenches together, really building it, and the camaraderie - genuinely looking out for each other’s backs. I could trust you with everything, and you could trust me. That level of trust, collaboration, intimacy, and mutually aligned interests - if we hadn’t done that, things would be very different.

VJ: Our relationship has been complicated, but we choose each other because it’s genuine. And at the end of the day, when it no longer makes sense, there are still ways we can be involved in each other’s lives.

SK: It’s a decision to part ways in a way - to graduate - and obviously we have nothing but great intentions. A lot of blessings, a lot of exciting things. There’s also a lot of gratitude, loyalty, friendship - GHM will always be your home. You’re going out into the world to have a family of your own, and I bless it all the way.

VJ: Me stepping back from the day-to-day at GHM - I’ll definitely still be involved, as an advisor. This is the family we built. And still retaining equity and being part of the company - I want it to be incredibly successful and continue to be.

SK: You’ve got a few horses in the race.

VJ: I do. It’s also just so special. When I think about telling people - honestly, it makes me cry. It’s so sad telling people I’m leaving.

SK: We’ve always thrived in unconventional circumstances, and this is just another one. There’s a pathway. Doing extraordinary things requires extraordinary effort.

VJ: So for the next chapter of GHM - we’re recruiting, bringing in amazing new people to take over and continue these really ambitious beverage programs - what are some of the things you’re looking for in these people?

SK: I’m looking for someone who is a good storyteller. That’s very important. That’s what you do really, really well. Same thing with food, with wine, with hospitality - you need to tell your authentic story. People respond best when stories are told, and when that story is authentic. Otherwise you’re just selling a product and it’s transactional. And a good storyteller is often a good listener. They listen to what the customer wants, what I want to do, what the ownership wants, what the servers see, what sells, what’s working. And they add their own stories, so it creates a dialogue.

In terms of logistics - sourcing, relationships - someone who makes great relationships, because whether it’s a customer, vendor, collector, or server, we’re looking for someone who thrives on creating meaningful relationships.

VJ: So what do you feel the next phase is for GHM?

SK: We’re entering our second quarter. We had a very successful first quarter. If the first quarter was passionate young people learning, establishing things, getting to know different people - the next chapter is where I want to play more of a team sport. It’s not Victoria James, Simon Kim, and David Shim. It’s more Gracious Hospitality Management. But we never want to lose the magic of our individuals. We also want to embrace the whole. Is it the whole, or is it the individuals? That question is always there. We’re maturing to better balance our magical individualism, but making sure all of it is in tandem with the greater good of the company.

Honestly, the company is getting stronger. We’re growing and maturing, but make no mistake - we’re slightly smarter, slightly more experienced, but just as ambitious and passionate about what we do. It’s a really exciting phase. We’re bigger, we have more resources, more brand recognition, more talented people on our team.

For people who love growth, expansion, new ideas, doing more, and bringing more delight to our customers - this company is so much more exciting than where we started. The door at Gracious Hospitality Management is always wide open to people who want to come into the industry and be the next Victoria James - full of bright eyes and .. what is it?

VJ: bushy tails..

SK: - and with so much desire to bring delight and reach for the stars! GHM is always open for that, and we’re here to support. And for you, VJ, the important thing is: follow your heart, be you. That’s the most important thing. And you deal with whatever comes with you being you. You live your life, you own it. I’m excited for you. I’m excited for all of us.

VJ: I’m excited. It’s going to be really great.

[End of conversation.]

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Two weeks ago, I went to a dinner party in that same building.

Different floor [actually, it was in the wine cellar way below ground], different decade, different crowd. I had worn a three-piece linen suit and cravat for the occasion, and only later learned of the Radical Chic connection [I swear! Also, as I mentioned my aim in life is often to dress like a male writer from the 70s in three piece suits with a neck tie]. With the heat of summer barreling toward us in New York (this was during that duo of days where it was close to 100!), I thoroughly encourage all of us to sit back in good linen and pour ourselves a drink. Because here is what I’ve noticed in my very culturally-packed schedule these last few weeks: everyone is drinking again. Smart people, musical people, fashion people, people in the arts, people in Midtown making money - all of them, all at once, are drinking. A lot.

What Wolfe was actually doing in Radical Chic, beneath the satire, was anthropology. It wasn’t so much about politics as it was about how the cultured class performs. The blue cheese canapés were the essay. The white waiters were the essay. (The Bernsteins, famously, had asked their Black staff to take the night off and brought in white servers to avoid the optical awkwardness given that it was to benefit the Black Panthers. Wolfe took note and made it the spine of the story.)

To me, every elite party and gathering is a cultural document, and I'm usually the writer in the corner taking notes or the sommelier pouring wine. Often both. And in the last few weeks it has been a lot of gatherings. Note-takings. And wine-pourings.

Take last Thursday — the Jazz Foundation gala. Every person in that room was knocking back white wine and martinis, all of us waiting for Norah Jones to grace us with her famous line about a wine-drenched heart. Jazz people, intellectual people, arts people, Midtown-money people. I saw no soda waters ordered. No splashes of cranberry juice in ginger-ale. And somebody, at some point, did spill Pinot Grigio all over the floor of the theater.

And this week, at the LONGCHAMP x JEREMY SCOTT collab party, there was a crêpes Suzette station, where the woman next to me, faced with the unbearable hardship of waiting four minutes for more rosé, asked the flambé guy to pour the Grand Marnier directly into her mouth. Six ounces of room-temperature Grand Marnier. Straight in.

It was lit!

Or take a few weeks back - at a Met Gala after-party at the Boom Boom Room - Questlove was on the decks, everyone who was anyone still half in costume from the steps [I am not anyone so I was just in full garb], the dance floor packed with feathers and bare backs and capes and see-through-dresses [me]. The drink of the evening was YOLA Mezcal, and the mezcal kept coming.

Okay, so parties are loud examples, sure people often drink at these things, right? Well, it was also the quieter events of the past few weeks that were telling.

I went to a reading where Sigrid Nunez read an excerpt from a ‘new work,’ at Attersee Studio. Before we sat to listen to Nunez talk of her novels about grief and 'going full dog' (when she decided to put a very large dog in one of her books), a small group of just over a dozen of us puttered around and sipped San Pellegrino and unnamed white wine that one woman accidentally was served instead of the water she had asked for, but then went, oh well, to hell with it, and drank it - down the hatch like one would, well, water.

The next evening, I sat at Balthazar for a National Poetry Series Foundation dinner, hosted by Daniel Halpern (who was my editor for Wine Girl, and who is the only person I know who could get a room of this caliber of writers together), surrounded by some of the most clever poets in America — which at first I didn't know I was in the presence of because I don't study book jackets! And then I'd go on to figure, oh, well this is Jeffrey Eugenides, and there is Ocean Vuong, and on and on for pretty much every literary name you've seen on a shelf. There were cigarettes smoked outside on Spring Street with Pete Wells. Melissa Clark we had a quick chat with. And there were bottles of wine moving, I mean MOVING, across that dining room the way bottles used to move across rooms. It reminded me of when I first started working downtown at Harry's (yes, also of of Tom Wolfe fame from his 1987 novel, The Bonfire of the Vanities, Harry’s is and was the real-life subterranean Wall Street watering hole where the city's financial elite gather, the ultimate "Master of the Universe" hangout)…. well, sometimes here by the time I'd served a table one bottle of wine and had gone to put it on ice, I'd look back and their glasses would be empty! Within moments!

Mid-poetry-reading I looked around the room at Balthazar and saw that all but two people were drinking. One was visibly pregnant, and the other was seated next to me and imbibing on Diet Cokes. The whole room became warm and loose as the poetry continued to flow. And wine. Conversation kept getting better and the noise levels raised. And then, the same gusto was felt just the following week, beneath Park Avenue itself.

In this Park Avenue, almost-century-old wine cellar with decades of bottles laid down - truly one of the wildest places I have ever been in New York, the bathroom wallpapered with old wine labels - we drank '01 Yquem! '90 Jaboulet La Chapelle! '00 Mouton! Even though the bottles were fancy, there was no pretension, no aim to Radical Chic-ness, though it was in the same building. The patriarch of the family came down - almost 100 now - and joined us for 2008 Bollinger Champagne and caviar on blinis. Just chic. As a side note too I have to say - what were the Bernsteins thinking serving Blue Cheese at a cocktail party! What Wolfe didn’t write about was, can you imagine, everyone’s breathe!?

Floors underground in the Park Avenue cellar, I was served one of the best cassoulets of my life, and I’ve had an ungodly amount of cassoulet in the south of France. As someone who loves a bowl of beans and meat, it is a dish that is hard to make well, you need the right trimmings and a lot of soul. Seemingly unlikely to make well on / under Park Avenue, and yet here we were - the beans were creamy and still warm from being cooked upstairs, with chunks of generous and earthy meat inside, and somehow crispy bits too - it was a wonder. This was all served on vintage plates from Bordelaise chateaux, like one might find in a ritzy grandmother’s house. I had a Château Margaux plate. My neighbor, Petrus. Here, so much soul. A night with so much meat on the bones.

Wolfe coined "radical chic" to name a particular 1970s elite anxiety: that wealth and culture required atonement, that the party only really worked if the politics were trayed-out like canapés. Conscience as social accessory.

What I think I am seeing now, at least over the last few weeks in these rooms, is the opposite phenomenon. The elite class has stopped performing virtue. The whole 2010s wellness regime of the dry Januarys, the California sober, the green juice, the cult N/A beers, was, read uncharitably, is a kind of secular radical chic: abstinence as moral signal, self-denial as the new conspicuous consumption, the green juice as the new black tie. What I am noticing at the Boom Boom Room, at Balthazar, in the private cellars, at the galas, at readings - is the end of that. Martinis, mezcal, cigarettes. The same class that needed to atone is, in 2026, openly enjoying itself again.

There is a parallel story to all of this, which is that I have been slinging wine with our team at the new restaurants and bars at 550 Madison (we are now over a month old!). Here in the Philip Johnson postmodern monolith with the Chippendale crown, the old Sony building, Midtown's most iconic skyline cameo - I’ve watched Midtown rise out of whatever grave the discourse keeps insisting on burying it in. People will tell you that no one drinks anymore, that drinking is slowing, that the kids are all sober and on mushrooms. But have these people spent ten minutes in Midtown recently!?

(just a few bottles from service at 550 Madison the other night, video c/o of our Head Somm’s IG)

I am not a reporter. This is all anecdotal. But these last few weeks were the first time I caught myself thinking that New York is returning to New York - that the pendulum has finally, audibly swung. Diet Coke is back. Cigarettes are back. 90s low-slung pants are back. And drinking, it turns out, has fully made the comeback.

Take the Radical Chic building. It’s still there. Wolfe is gone; Bernstein is gone; the Panthers are gone; the Roquefort balls are (thank god) gone. The party is just on a different floor now. Someone is still in white linen. Someone is still taking notes. The drinks are just different (better). And people do really deserve a good drink these days, don’t they?

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I think about that car ride every single time I make an aioli - which is often, and especially right now, because we are smack in the middle of High Spring, my absolute favorite crescendo-ing bit of the 12-week stretch of the seasonal calendar. High Spring is hope. It is green things exploding out of ground that was frozen solid six weeks ago. It is asparagus! Ramps! Spring onions! It is the season when all I want to do is forage upstate + blanch bright vegetables and dunk them in a garlicky, lemony, herb-flecked aioli aside cold rosé, until the sun goes down.

On my Provence trips, a visit to Domaine Gros' Noré and the Domaine Tempier wineries always culminated in a Grand Aioli lunch. After a big tasting of Bandol rouge, blanc, and rosé, we’d be ushered into a big room overlooking the Plane trees and Mediterranean-blue skies, and serve ourselves mountains of boiled vegetables with enormous bowls of aioli.

This past weekend, after a haul at the Union Square Farmers Market I came home with wild ramps, spring onions, almost purpley asparagus, and lots of sweet little Spring greens. I threw together Melissa Clark’s spring pasta for lunch [my partner was hesitant on the addition of yoghurt - but I am telling you - do it!] and for dinner: blanched asparagus, a glass of cold rosé, and my aioli. Our rooftop garden is also finally in full swing - baby Margot ate approximately a quarter cup of compost during repotting - and I threw our first little crop of summer herbs straight into the bowl of aioli. Most notably, tarragon. Loads of it. It makes everything better, especially aioli. I firmly believe it to be the most underrated herb on planet Earth.

You need rosé with aioli. And I know it’s been a minute since my 2017 book on rosé, but I stand by this forever: rosé should be year-round. AND YET- and yet! - there is something so genuinely joyful about cracking one open on the first warm weekend of the year.

Here is the one you want right now:

Château Revelette’s Coteaux d'Aix en Provence Rosé is ‘Provence’s Wild Edge’ on full display - yes it is biodynamic and organic, but in the kind of way where it would be just as acceptable on a midtown Manhattan wine list as it would be in the deep reaches of Brooklyn (both places I love to frequent). It is vibrant with energy, and freshness. I’ve squirreled away a few cases for friends - which you can snag for summer here.

Please also enjoy this photo of the Fischer fam making said rosé in their winery (his shorts!!)…

THE AIOLI recette!!!
(for paid subscribers, full recipe below)
+ a VERY amazingly allocated rosé that I have saved a few bottles of for you …
+ a dirty joke from Lulu Peyraud, the O.G. proprietress / rosé Queen of Domaine Tempier…

A NOTE ON LULU PEYRAUD

Lulu Peyraud was the matriarch of Domaine Tempier. She passed at almost 103 years old. When I first visited her, she was almost a centurian, drinking red wine at lunch like it was milk, and right before her daily exercise - which was, I swear this to you, swinging on a swing set. She swam in the Mediterranean every morning until she was 94. When I asked how far Domaine Tempier was from the sea, she told me that it now took about 20 minutes to drive, but “back in the day, it depended on how far Lucien’s hand was up my skirt.” Lucien was her husband of many years, they had seven children together [many ‘drives to the sea’, I see].

Lulu also told me the below joke, which I will share with paid subscribers because it is filthy and perfect and she told it while 99, drinking said red wine like milk at 2pm, and I will never forget it as long as I live.

(The joke, and the full aioli recipe, and the VERY amazing allocated rosé, below the paywall.)

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There are a few new readers here, so welcome. I write about the things I find interesting as a restaurateur and sommelier, with now, it sounds wild to say - almost eight restaurants under our belt.

And before we go into the newsletter today, I’ll answer what many of you will inevitably ask - I can assist with a reservation at our new (and O.G. classic!) restaurants and bars. Subscribers please send me a direct message for assistance, I really love welcoming cool wine & restaurant people in our spaces.

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There are a lot of things we’ve been cooking up in the 5.5 years leading up to 550 Madison…

With our new 550 Madison beverage programs there is a wealth of things I’m dying to chat with you about over the coming weeks, such as why our 50-vintage vertical of Mouton-Rothschild is more than just baller, how you can order 100 vintages of Madeira wine dating back to 1835 (and why people should care more about this peculiar superpower drink), plus the sessionable highball culture of Japan you don’t even realize you already love.

But today what I want to talk about is: water.

When I am building beverage programs I follow this basic structure:

• Research & Comparative Sets

• Visioning

• Development

• Analysis

• Training

So when we were developing the Martini bar at BAR CHIMERA for 550 Madison, I knew that if we wanted to make the best martinis in the world we had to really understand what that meant.

I dug into years of research on the history of the martini, literary references, the evolution over time, the best examples around the world, and a deep comparative set analysis of martini bar offerings, recipes, glassware, and pricing. What I didn’t expect as a result from this research was that I would become obsessed with not gin, or vodka, or even vermouth but, well, water.

Thirty percent of what’s in your martini glass is water. Not gin. Not vermouth. Water, from the ice, introduced the moment you start shaking or stirring. A third of the drink. And for most of its history, nobody has thought much about where that water came from.

I didn’t either, until I was on a research trip to Japan last summer. I watched a bartender in Kyoto freeze a martini with liquid nitrogen and mix in almost equal parts gin, vermouth, and aromatized water. He was treating the water like an ingredient, because it was one.

I flew home and immediately started obsessing over something I’d been unconsciously ignoring for years. A martini is a bare-faced beauty. There’s nowhere to hide. Which means the thing I wasn’t paying attention to all these years was, this whole time, wrecking it.

From there - spearheaded by Nate our Head Bartender, Sondre our Director of Bars, and Chris who runs high ABV at 550 - we tested dozens of types of water and ran analysis on each and found that the big three things to focus on are magnesium, calcium, and potassium. As an example, most of the natural mineral waters you love have about twenty times the amount of magnesium as NYC tap water. We eventually found an aggregate we liked and then tried variations when mixed with vodka and gin and vermouth to find our perfect proprietary water recipe.

Oh, yes, you heard me. Water recipe. We found a guy that will purify our water for us in mass quantities and re-mineralize to the exact specs we want, and freeze it, so all our ice is consistently what we want. For our freezer-door martinis, we use the liquid re-mineralized water as an ingredient, mixing it directly into the batch of gin / vodka + vermouth.

We are about a week into previews now - and it seems people are digging the martinis we poured so much time into. Hooray! Emily Sundberg reported that, “The secret ingredient to Midtown’s best new martini is water,” as did New York Magazine, and RESY wrote:

My water journey perfectly climaxed a few weeks ago with a trip to Évian-les-bains. Yes, Evian is a water but, also… a place!

Evian has a most excellent natural magnesium content of 26mg per liter, and a whopping 80mg of calcium! Yes, NYC tap water is totally safe and I am a long-time-customer, but that is because it is rigorously tested and treated with chemicals to meet these strict safety standards. Evian, like all natural mineral waters, is naturally filtered. For them it is through Alpine rocks over the course of fifteen years. NYC tap water is ‘soft,’ so while totally safe and quenching, it only has trace amounts of magnesium, calcium, or potassium. [Though I will say, NYC tap water does make excellent bagels, pizza, and coffee due to this silky softness!]

It was funny, for for all of our research, I’d never actually visited a water source like I would a winery or distillery. So when our partnership with Evian came together alongside their 200th anniversary, I knew we had to see where the water comes from

Évian-les-bains sits on Lake Geneva, but the real story is underground. The water starts as snow in the Alps, then spends fifteen years filtering down through glacial rock before it ever reaches a bottle. Fifteen years underground, moving slowly through layers of mineral-rich stone. In France, something can only be labeled “natural mineral water” if it hasn’t been altered. No filtering allowed. Which means the entire operation, hundreds of people and decades of infrastructure, exists purely to protect something so that nothing happens to it. The first time that Evian water is ever exposed to oxygen is when you open the bottle yourself. As I toured the factory and climbed up to the top of the mountains, listening to the care poured into something so many take for granted, I was deeply moved by the dedication and patience of the people in Évian-les-bains.

On the flight home, to keep my water obsession hydrated, I rewatched 233 minutes of movies I hadn’t seen since French class in high school: Jean de Florette and Manon of the Spring. It was this duo of movies based on old Pagnol books that was the “cinematic event of 1986.” (I know I just talked about Gérard Depardieu in a recent newsletter but here he is again as the tragic hunchback trying to find a water source!).

While the first movie is about a good man looking for water, and the whole town deceiving him with tragic outcomes, the second is about his daughter seeking revenge on the town and cutting off their water source. The water is primarily a metaphor for the lifeblood of existence, representing wealth, power, and moral integrity. Its presence equates to life and prosperity, while its denial symbolizes malicious cruelty, greed, and death. Water is the fundamental necessity for life here in rural Provence, serving as the core of human connection with nature. I recommend watching both films in whole, back to back, and be prepared for them to leave an indelible mark on your soul.

At 35,000 feet, breathing terrible recycled airplane air, I thought: in a world so disconnected from nature, water might be the one element that actually grounds us. Évian in old French roughly translates to “living water” — eau vive.

Which brings me back to our 550 Madison opening. I’d like to think that the best restaurants, like the best martinis, aren’t the most complicated ones. They’re the ones where everything is in balance. What if success lives in the things nobody thinks to think about? There’s a version of opening a restaurant where you obsess over every visible thing and completely forget the invisible ones. The things that don’t make the Instagram post (vibes!). The things nobody names on a review (bathroom cleanliness!). And those things are almost always what separates great from merely good.

The water in the ice. The air in the room. The thing the guest never consciously notices, but would absolutely feel if it were wrong. The life, vive, of it all.

A third of your martini. It should matter.

Subscribers, send me a direct email for 550 Madison bookings:

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Cheers,

Victoria James

Bookings / IG

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There are a few new readers here, so welcome. I write about the things I find interesting as a restaurateur and sommelier, with now, it sounds…

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And every year around the end of March when Spring kicks off little green buds of herby greens, you’ll see this wine popping off as pairings everywhere on menus and on shelves. And tomorrow, well, rejoice! Spring is here. And that means, Sancerre!

Over a decade ago, I too was a snobby sommelier that preferred the non-aromatic whites to this ubiquitous sauvignon blanc that is so fun to say. But something changed. More on that below. But first, if you are going to drink Sancerre, make it special. Here is a favorite for friends of my newsletter:

Only a few hundred bottles remain. Forever.

Dominique, the vigneron at Domaine du Carrou, is retiring with no heirs. When these bottles are gone, the estate is gone with him. It happens in restaurants too- places you think will always be there, suddenly not. (I am still crying over Barbetta!) It never stops being a gut punch. For wineries, I watched Domaine Gioielli in Corsica disappear and scrambled to find buyers. No luck. I’m watching Domaine Trotereau now with the same dread.

Isn’t that crazy? That a winery can just disappear. That these things can die. They end. I feel like most people don’t think of wine that way, they think of wine as brands or products that will go on forever -

And here we are, holding what’s left of Domaine du Carrou, about as classic and lovely as Sancerre gets.

For the sommeliers who claim they hate Sancerre, I always wonder: have you ever had it where it comes from, with the cheese it was meant to be eaten with? Goat cheese in Chavignol, with a glass of Sancerre, and suddenly the whole thing clicks. Respectfully, until then, I’m not sure your opinion counts!

I believe every wine has its moment. If you don’t like a style, you probably just haven’t met it in the right setting. (Ask me about the time I finally understood orange wine- in a brothel on the Slovenian border.)

“Grows together, goes together” is a cliché until it isn’t. In 2016, I had Chavignol cheese with Sancerre and it rewired something for me. If you want to do yourself one better this Spring, make the Chez Panisse Baked Goat Cheese Salad and open a bottle of Domaine Carrou. It’s the kind of pairing that the French call a petite mort.

Get the cheese here. Get the wine here. Get a case, actually — Spring is 12 weeks long and this winery is going extinct (😭).

It was during a 2017 dinner at Régis Minet’s house in Pouilly-Fumé (that other Savvy Blanc spot in the Loire) where I first had that goat cheese and Sancerre pairing.

Régis had invited a group of growers, many of them Kermit Lynch producers, people whose names I knew from my buying orders for the restaurants but had never seen all together. We gathered over a big pot of potimarron soup in the dead of winter. Hippolyte-Reverdy was there, Trotereau, and Domaine de Reuilly.

Sancerre is a region that used to be planted largely to Chasselas (the white grape of Swiss fame), before Sauvignon Blanc took over because it was easier, more reliable, and eventually, more popular. Then Paris got involved. Café culture, fashion people, proximity to the city. Sancerre became the thing you drank, and then the thing everyone drank.

And honestly, I get it. It’s a wine that gives you something right away. Even if you don’t know much about wine, you know what you’re tasting. There’s no barrier to entry. It doesn’t make you feel stupid. Which is always a lovely thing with wine.

I would take that: a well-farmed, well-made, unapologetically expressive Sancerre- over a lot of wines that hide behind the idea of being “natural” but forget that they still have to be good. There’s nothing noble about a wine that smells like a problem.

Sancerre isn’t basic. It’s a wine of generosity. It’s the people’s wine.

And I’m very much on its side.

Behind the paywall, subscribers get access to a wild rarity - the Sancerre that any sommelier worth their salt would actually go mad for.

Only a few magnums remain…

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You see, San Sabino is fully committed to their inner Italian(ish). When Chef Angie (the DON)’s Crab Louie inspired salad hit the table, William said something that really struck me, “you know this is great, in Italy, we have salad and like it is a piece of lettuce and oil, but here in America there are so many things on the salad.”

It’s true! We love a packed salad! We are a nation of people who look at a piece of lettuce and say: and, what else?!

It's one of the things I love most about New York restaurants - the way they've always leaned into the (ish). This week I was also chatting with Isabella, the next generation of The Russian Tea Room, and she mentioned how often people tell her the restaurant isn't very Russian. And, well, yeah, people. It's a New York institution! That's the whole point!

Like COTE. When we first opened in 2017, people used to complain to Simon that it wasn’t really Korean. But he is Korean-American, and the restaurant is Korean BBQ energy through the lens of a classic New York Chophouse.

The (ish) is the intersection of identities. It is the hyphen in Korean-American or the way an accent or words can transform over generations and immigration. Like how Parmigiano Reggiano became parmesan and then just parm, or the Neapolitan Capicola became the {extremely more fun-to-say} Gabagool.

Our theme continued throughout the weekend, as my little Margot was turning one, and so to celebrate the family gathered at Gino’s in Bay Ridge for Sunday sauce to celebrate her first birthday.

We arrived to Gino’s at noon and the room was empty, which was surprising until we realized that church hadn’t let out yet. By around one o’clock the place was packed, which is when Gino’s becomes what it really is: one of the greatest rooms in New York for people watching.

There was a man with what looked like five Rolexes stacked on one wrist like chunky bangles. Not a woman in the room without heels or a thick, matted layer of red lipstick. In the front it sort of feels like a slice shop, but in the back it’s all Sunday sauce and clams. Like Carbone, but with absolutely no design choices except a wall of signed photos from people who were deemed famous at some point.

Of course I had to order the ‘Sunday Gravy,’ or Gino’s Sunday Sauce which is as classic (ish) as it comes: a tomato-based sauce simmered for days with all the meat leftovers from Friday and Saturday suppers: meatballs, Italian sausage, pork ribs, and, (crucially), pork neck.

Places like Gino’s feel like real New York terroir to me, places built by immigrant communities who brought pieces of another country here and slowly turned them into something slightly ish. Italian(ish), Russian(ish), Korean(ish)… but really, truly, and unmistakably, New York.

When I find that same feeling in wine- something rooted in nostalgia, but full of a new perspective- that’s when I know it’s special. Like William’s Sangiovese, Clivo Altura, which centers on what he’s learned as the winemaker for his family’s Chianti winery - Corzano e Paterno - but it is his own perspective from cool, high elevation vineyards. When you come from a big Italian family (oh, and he is a twin!!) with a lot of viewpoints, {I personally know} it can be nice when you finally get to share your own perspective. His bottle is here.

For paying subscribers: more below! Why Chianti got a bad rap (yes, it involves Hannibal Lecter), plus the holy trinity of Sangiovese bottles & rare wines that tend to disappear quickly, and you can snag with my connects…

↓ ⇩ ⬇ ⤋ All of that here ↓ ⇩ ⬇ ⤋

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First off:

2011 Troplong-Mondot from Bordeaux

You can grab HERE for $110/bottle
or a 3 pack for $99/bottle (you should share)

Perched at the top of Saint-Émilion on limestone, Troplong has always had a quiet swagger chock full of dark fruit, espresso, truffle, and a mineral spine. 2011 was a very human year (we’ll get into this more below through Neal’s lens): a devastating tsunami in Japan, Adele cracking the world open with “Someone Like You,” and the feminist comedy, Bridesmaids, reminded everyone that women too can poop in their pants. For me, in Bordeaux, it is a year for classic claret albeit not as hyped or priced as the more famous 2009s and 2010s. And when from a serious estate like Troplong, and fifteen years in, the tannins have softened, the fruit has settled into earth and tobacco, and it’s in a solid drinking window, especially with a proper ribeye or côte de boeuf. I found this at a slightly crazy price, and there are only a few bottles left: this is the moment to be smart, skip the flashy vintage, and buy the 2011 that’s actually ready.

& the second wine is wild rare, there are only THREE magnums available - this is for paid subscribers only, down below the paywall. First come, first serve!

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Last Thursday I was lucky to be seated next to Neal Martin. Neal’s vintage reports are clever and fun to read, and he is even more charming in person. He arrived in an orange-red WAX London coat which turned out to perfectly match the cover of his new book he’d brought along: The Complete Bordeaux Vintage Guide, from 1870 to 2024, now in its second edition.

No one in their right mind would pick up a book about 154 years of wine vintages, but that’s the thing about Neal, he’s clever about this sort of thing. For each year he doesn’t just give you the wine. He gives you what else was happening. The film of the year. The song. The one event everyone alive at the time would remember. He makes the wine the thing that anchors a year, not the whole year itself.

I flipped to 1990, my birth year. The historic event he cited was Tim Berners-Lee inventing the internet, which right now feels pretty meta as I write this using said invention. The film that year was Cyrano de Bergerac with the G himself - Gérard Depardieu. I looked up from the page and told whoever was near me that Cyrano was one of the first plays I read that really stuck with me in high school, I was thoroughly convinced no one would ever love me properly, and that unrequited love, the tragedy of a man who can only say true things through someone else’s mouth, it landed somewhere that took years to identify. The song for 1990 was Sinead O’Connor’s Nothing Compares 2 U, which inevitably lead to quite a few of us breaking into, nu-THING compares, nu-THING compares, to YOUUU!!! Naturally! This play, this song, these things deeply resonate with people. They make you feel, which is also what the best sort of wines do.

I kept turning that over in my head through the weekend. On Friday night I put on Criterion and fell into something I had no idea existed as a genre: pre-code Hollywood. These were films made after the silents and before the Hays Code took effect in 1934, which essentially meant that movies were censored for decades by a set of rules drafted by a Catholic priest paid an exorbitant amount of money. Movies back then showed interracial relationships, same-sex affairs, women chain smoking and doing drugs, people challenging the government and religion, nudity, and well - things that were actually happening in America, in real life.

The film was Three on a Match, 1932. It tells the story of a woman running from a good marriage, a wealthy husband, a young son — straight into addiction, a lover, and eventually her own child’s kidnapping. On screen. In 1932. But that part isn’t even what got me. What got me was that the whole film is built around three women who are drawn as actual people. Friends from girlhood into their thirties, each of them flawed in specific and unrepeatable ways, none of them positioned as a lesson or a warning or a symbol of anything. They drank too much, made terrible decisions, went to prison, were imperfect mothers. They were just women. I have watched a lot of cinema from the decades that followed and have rarely seen women as multi-dimensional.

A lot of these films are forgotten, but not by Neal - who references Public Enemy in his debriefing of 1931. One thinks that gangster films were invented around The Godfather or Goodfella’s - but that was over forty years later! Pre-code Hollywood set the standard for the whole genre, which would go on to become censored for decades as the Hays Code warned against sympathy for criminals, theft, robbery, firearms, etc. etc.

Films and wines can make you feel things, the way an ear worm of a song can make you feel seventeen again (while at a dinner table in your thirties), surrounded by people you’d just met, all of you singing. It’s all just attempts to say: this is what it felt like. This particular year. I was here.

Nu-THING compares.

FOR SUBSCRIBERS

A rare allocation, offered to this list only, just a few bottles remain.
See below…

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The New York restaurant world is full of sad stories, and this one feels especially so.

I started my drink career in 2009, almost twenty years ago now, bartending on Restaurant Row. For anyone who doesn’t know that stretch of 46th Street between 8th and 9th, I could write a whole book. The street today holds mostly chain eateries, a little anonymous, but it used to hold some of the most iconic dining rooms in the city.

Restaurant Row was built for the rhythm of the theater. Before curtain, after curtain, actors and regulars and industry lifers all folding into the same rooms night after night. There is still Becco, opened by Lidia Bastianich in 1993. My favorite is the Roman-Jewish, Lattanzi, since this is where a 19 year old Victoria bartended for Lorne Micheals’s crew every week. Joe Allen, beloved since 1965.

And then there are the recently shuttered: Swing 46, one of the last swing-dancing supper clubs, which closed just last month. Firebird, heaps of caviar and Tsarist nostalgia before its unraveled when the owner went to prison. And now to join the shutter club, the restaurant that was the oldest on the block and the anchor, Barbetta.

Over a hundred and twenty years ago, Laura Maigilio’s father, Sebastiano, bought four (FOUR) brownstones on 46th street and opened Barbetta. At the time it was a revolutionary concept- not just an Italian restaurant (red and white checkered tablecloth spots were sprouting up in immigrant communities), but a Piedmontese restaurant. Instead of the ubiquitous spaghetti - they focused on hyper-specific foods from the northwest Piedmontese region of Italy, which borders France and is cradled by the Alps and Apennine mountains. This is where my own Nonna was from. Claiming to be the oldest Italian restaurant in New York, Barbetta was the first to bring risotto, white truffles, and Barolo to New Yorkers.

I hosted a Friendsgiving there two years ago, and in that moment wanted to buy the place. Sadly, it seems I’ve missed my chance as Laura has passed and rumor has it that they are tearing down these gorgeous brownstones, filled with absolute treasures, and building a condo. You better believe I will spend every day this week calling them to find out who can help save this place!

New York needs to hold onto places like Barbetta, where a pianist still plays for you during your meal, the waiters wear white tuxedo dinner jackets and move with a proficiency that only 30+ years on the job can arm one with, and no need to have your cellphone on the table, you can hop into the phone booth by coatcheck if you need to reach someone.

When places like this disappear, something in the city goes with them. We don’t need another condo building. We need more places, preserved.

I dined there on Saturday with a group of friends, poring over their gorgeous Piedmontese wine list all in an Old World palatial setting with marble floors, chintz chairs, and over a dozen chandeliers.

Is a restaurant meant to live forever? A hundred years is already a miracle. After all, this week, we celebrated half a decade of COTE Miami, and that feels enormous. And yet. And yet.

What did we drink and what was that last night at Barbetta like?

Subscribers, more below + my wine of the week.

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“Oeuf mayonnaise.”

It isn’t every evening when a simple egg + mayo take center stage. After all, we were on the Left Bank. Linen tablecloths. Serious wine. The chef was wearing a toque. And the headliner was… a hard-boiled egg with mayo?

As someone deeply committed to eggs and mayonnaise in all forms, I was intrigued. Max leaned in. It was a point of pride. There is, he explained, an actual association in Paris devoted to protecting the tradition of oeuf mayo.

The next night I asked my Parisian friend, Alexi, about it. “Oh yes,” he said quite seriously. “They judge the yellow of the yolks.”

Of course they do.

“And the mayonnaise?” I asked. Isn’t it just… spooned on top?

“Yes,” he said. “But you must respect the texture.”

This is how I learned about the Association de Sauvegarde de l’Oeuf Mayonnaise (a.k.a. A.S.O.M.), founded by the critic Claude Lebey and journalist Jacques Pessis. Each year they award bistros that properly uphold the sacred standards of the dish. They take it seriously. The yolk must not be overcooked or circled with that horrid grey circumference. The mayo must have integrity.

Their motto,“Le temps passe mais les oeufs durent.” (“Time passes but eggs remain),” is yes, iconic, and also a clever play on oeuf dur, or hard-boiled egg.

In 1960, France had 200,000 bistros. By 2019, fewer than 34,000 remained. In the 1980s, when eggs were demonized as cholesterol bombs, oeuf mayo was often the first thing cut from menus.

Lebey obviously disagreed, he saw the oeuf mayonnaise “as indispensable to cuisine as the paperclip is to the office.” So in the 1990s, he formalized the movement. The Egg Mayonnaise Protection Association was born.

I suppose it isn’t that secret of a society, Dorie Greenspan has written about it for the NYT, Hannah Goldfield for the New Yorker, and David Lebovitz for his substack, and oh, well the A.S.O.M. itself is working tirelessly to push the egg into infinity. Which after all, isn’t that the symbol of the egg?

At the chic Le Voltaire (from Dua Lipa + Callum Turner notoriety this past weekend), the dish still costs €0.90, the same price it did in 1956. Nearly seventy years later, inflation has come for everything except the egg.

And maybe that’s the point.

In a city that reinvents itself constantly, that chases stars and trends and tasting menus, the most radical thing on the table might be a perfectly boiled egg, cut cleanly in half, with mayonnaise made properly and spooned on with dignity.

Time passes. Restaurants close. Fads rise and fall.

The eggs remain.

Behind the paywall, my favorite Oeuf Mayo pairing + my list of Paris bistros you need to save for your next trip.

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After fifteen years as a sommelier, let me say, there is something telling in how one handles wine. It’s both an everyday grocery item and something ephemeral, meant to be handled, enjoyed, and then gone. Ideally, someone handles it with care, generosity, and curiosity. And oh, god, please save me from the impassioned speeches.

That line about eating appears on page 155 of Betty Fussell’s new book, How to Cook a Coyote, and reading it felt like someone older and sharper putting words to something I’ve noticed for years. Food (and drink) reveals who we are, emotionally and erotically as much as socially.

I’ll embarrassingly admit, I had no idea who Betty was until I caught the New York Times book review recently, but turns out this woman is a G. Betty is 98 today and has written about food, sex, marriage, betrayal, and reinvention.

Betty also wrote, My Kitchen Wars, which was published in 1999, and really got press for Betty delightfully skewering her ex-husband, Paul, as he was caught in the middle of an affair. A feeling, I know, many women understand intimately. And I was comforted that she thrived in reinventing herself, with no money but all of the freedom. As Daniel Halpern (my brilliant editor and publisher of Wine Girl, and Betty’s former neighbor, is quoted saying), “spending time with Paul was work. Spending time with Betty was pure pleasure.” And I really did enjoy the few hours I spent with Betty throughout her book.

How to Cook a Coyote was an unusual read for me. It doesn’t follow the standard flow of modern memoirs, nor does it try to “sell” the reader on a specific argument. Its only point is to chronicle a long life lived. How often do you get to read a book by a 98-year-old? I wanted to see what was on the “other side” for me, too.

At 98, she still puts on makeup every day, even with failing eyesight. “Do it,” she says, “and you don’t have to spend your time in front of a mirror depressed by the half-face staring back at you.” The ritual was touching, the same impulse that shows up in the way she gathers friends around a table for eggs, or hot water with a single slice of lemon. With only one good molar left, she misses popcorn and steak most.

The other day, eating a ribeye at the new Golden Steer, I found myself slowing down. How many more steaks will I have in my life? And how many more dinners with the people I love?

French gastronome Brillat-Savarin also famously said, “Dis-moi ce que tu manges, je te dirai ce que tu es” [Tell me what you eat and I will tell you who you are.] This is why bringing a date to a restaurant, or a client for that matter, is a great way to learn who someone is. It’s why we’ve been dining and drinking with people for centuries, to really get to know them.

And after a long life lived, what Betty chose to write about wasn’t money or acclaim but people and food.

“Now long gone,” Betty would say, again and again, when writing about former friends, lovers, family. “Now long gone” might not be so far away.

Well I suppose we should make each bite count.

Behind the paywall: what to drink now. Plus, a sneak peek of an upcoming collab 👀

My wine of the week…
is a story of why immigrants make American wine special.

👇

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This came after a few things. Annie Shi’s piece on what no one told her about opening restaurants, Kerry Diamond’s new So You Want to Open a Restaurant series- - starting with her story of quicksanding into this beautiful and complicated world. Chef Ryan Bartlow’s two-part series on being compelled to open Bartolo in the West Village.

But mostly, it’s because the last few months I’ve ruminated over spending ten years with my current partners, at our restaurant group, GHM (COTE + COQODAQ).

It’s funny how ten years suddenly feels very present right now. Everywhere on social media, people are posting photos from 2016: old phones, old haircuts, old versions of themselves. A collective time capsule cracking open. And it made me realize that 2016 wasn’t just another year for me. It was the beginning of something I’m still very much inside of.

It’s been ten years since Simon Kim first hired me to be his wine director for the, now closed, PIORA, in the West Village. I had just left Marea, where I was a sommelier for billionaire’s row, and he gave me my first opportunity to buy wine. Not just sell, as a sommelier does, but buy. Curate a wine program and be responsible for at least thirty, if not forty percent, of a restaurant’s revenue and budget.

At the time, I knew how to sell. I could sell anything to anyone. But buying wine—really buying—was different. It required conviction before consensus.

Since then we’ve gone on to become partners and open many restaurants, together.

COTE Flatiron in NYC in 2017- we were babies! COTE Miami in the Design District in 2021, when I was pregnant with my own actual baby. COTE Singapore in 2024, legit a couple weeks apart from COQODAQ in NYC - don’t recommend doing that. The mighty COTE Vegas just a few months ago in 2025.

And now, this week, we posted that we are hiring for our new spot: 550 Madison. Which is, actually, quite a few spots.

By the end of this year, we’ll have eightish restaurants around the world.

So, what does it mean to open a restaurant? What does it mean to open many restaurants? Many times, over many years?

Well, I suppose it means many things. But mostly, it means only as much as the people you do it with. You see, restaurant openings are anything but glamorous. They’re sort of like a dirty high. Sure, you might all be wearing freshly cut suits and you spent $800 on a swirly decanter- - but at the same time you’re trying to seduce the Con Edison woman on the phone into giving you an earlier appointment so they’ll turn on the gas.

It’s devastating that you can sit in an empty, two-million-dollar restaurant, just waiting for the bureaucratic red-tape people to come in and perform a five-minute inspection, while everyone is already on payroll, and you’re anxiously twiddling your thumbs. And unless you know people—and can pull strings, and even then—you still end up dealing with someone from a government-adjacent agency, absolutely high on the power they have over you, calmly explaining that yes, the absolute earliest they can come by is seven weeks from now, a Thursday, at 4:15 p.m.

You have to build a Dewey-Decimal-System-like inventory for the wine cellar with tiny bin stickers that inevitably end up stuck in your hair. You have to search for the right words to tell a server they can’t work in a crumpled shirt pulled from the bottom of a backpack; and spending, all at once, so much money you don’t yet have.

But we love that dirty high. Us restaurant people. And we love doing it together.

Maybe that’s why Annie’s line stuck with me, that it takes ten years for a restaurant to really open. Not soft open. Not press open. But to actually hit its stride.

For our ten-year anniversary a few months ago, I gave Simon a bottle of vintage Champagne. His favorite producer. Definitely one of mine, too. I chose this particular bottle not only because it was a favorite and delicious but because the wine was only released after ten years. The house waited ten years before declaring it ready.

Which is to say: maybe that’s the point of all of this. Ten years in, after all the opening and reopening and building and rebuilding—we are just now ready to drink.

Behind the paywall:
The 2016s that are ready to drink now, and my favorites. Including that Champagne I gave Simon.

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A mentor and friend of mine, Dana Cowin, hosted a potluck with a bunch of wine, restaurant, and food people this week. Dana runs Progressive Hedonist, where she gathers people around food that “nourishes ourselves and the planet, creates meaningful connections, deepens understanding, restores purpose, and inspires action.”

Usually, Potluck is a word that arrives pre-loaded with obligation, logistics, and the faint fear of being silently judged for bringing the wrong thing in the wrong vessel ( x10 if there are going to be famous chefs present).

Potlucks, have historically had terrible PR. After I went, someone sent me Robby Hoffman’s Subway Takes video, in which she declares: “Either invite me for dinner or don’t but f*** your potluck.”

She’s very funny. The bit works. Her take - - that potlucks are what people do when they can’t really afford to host, and also that her move is about buying tabbouleh, transferring it to Tupperware, and pretending she made it, well, it is deeply relatable.

Twelve years ago, I once bought a chocolate cake for a dinner party I had promised to bake for. I then spent the afternoon “messing it up” just enough to look homemade. When someone asked what the filling was, I said I forgot. Which is not a thing anyone who has ever made a cake could plausibly say.

So yes. Robby’s take lands. But my take is actually the opposite: Today, more than ever before, I think we need more potlucks.

Social media has turned the dinner party into a kind of competitive hosting fetish: Look, she cooked twelve courses for forty people and still looks effortlessly TradWife hot. The potluck feels radical precisely because it refuses this. It says: we’ll do this together!

Which, historically, is exactly the point.

Unlike the dinner party or the cocktail party, the potluck is almost always tethered to the idea of community. That’s because it’s structurally egalitarian. It isn’t trying to be chic or cool. My earliest memories of potlucks are from weekly Bible study, when Suzy would arrive with her famous French onion dip. There is nothing sexy about transporting sour cream and onion powder in Tupperware across rural Virginia, well into the temperature danger zone after four hours out of the fridge- - but her dip slapped. It made me genuinely excited to see Suzy, who was otherwise pretty lame, mostly because she insisted on pinching my six-year-old cheeks.

In parts of the UK, a fuddle (my personal favorite) or Jacob’s join describes a gathering where everyone brings what they plan to eat, contributing it to a common stock. The root suggests a happy muddle—slightly chaotic, convivial, alive. Even the French pot-au-feu—a perpetual pot, always ready to receive whatever good fortune might bring—carries the same spirit.

The modern potluck isn’t a budget workaround. It’s a rejection of the old model, where one person performs hospitality for forty others while everyone else consumes.

That model is actually insane.

Truly.

A potluck takes the pressure off the host and redistributes it gently across the room. A community isn’t an audience. It’s a group of people pitching in, exchanging recipes, ideas. Even if you buy, and don’t bake, the cake.

FUDDLE THINGS UP, I say. For every dinner party you go to, throw in a couple of potlucks. Even us wine and restaurant people love them.

The potluck won’t kill the dinner party.
It might just save it.

If this essay resonated, consider subscribing. All new subscriptions will go directly to the Food Education Fund.

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VJ’s Top Potluck Wines:

for paid subscribers…

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We have turned the pinnacle of the evening into a curfew, treating the arrival of dessert as an edible “Exit” sign. But shouldn’t this be the signal that the party is just getting started?

I found myself thinking about this over the weekend while baking a cake for my partner’s birthday. My daughter, Simone, and I had set out to try our hand at the King Olive Oil Cake from their latest cookbook. Simone became transfixed with peeling off the blanched almond skins (look at this bowl below - - we felt so accomplished!) and pulverizing them into what she dubbed “pixie dust.”

Earlier that morning we caught the last day of the Edward Gorey exhibition at the Society of Illustrators. Simone declared that the below image (from The Very Fine Clock, which we then of course had to buy in the gift shop) was the ‘bestest of them all.’

Who could disagree with her!? I mean, look at this looming, multi-tiered Gothic structure!

Gorey’s characters lived in a world where people were simply more civilized, largely because they understood that sugar requires a spirited partner to keep the conversation from curdling.

The historical record bears this out. The “coffee and cake” pairing is a remarkably boring, mid-century invention that would have baffled our ancestors.

In the 1770s, the legendary masquerades of the Georgian era featured “Great Cakes”—heavy, boozy, fruit-laden affairs—that were washed down with rivers of Madeira and Claret.

By the 1800s, a formal “Wine and Cake” course was a staple of high society; in the world of Jane Austen, offering a guest a slice of seed cake without an accompanying glass of Sherry or Frontignac was considered a targeted social snub.

Even during the Gilded Age, the dessert course was paired with demi-sec Champagne or Sauternes, specifically to provide the glucose spike and alcoholic courage necessary to dance until three in the morning.

As we enter 2026, let’s stop being boring. When the cake is served, the wine must stay. Better yet, bring out the good stuff—the late-harvest Rieslings that come in tiny golden-capsuled bottles, and smoky drams of mezcal and whiskey. If we want to become as layered as a Gorey drawing and as charged as the Gilded Age, we have to refuse to let the fun be dictated by a clock (yes, even a Very Fine Clock!). We must bring back the wine and cake starter course. Keep the party going.

For my Paid Subscribers: I’ve curated below a list of my absolute favorite cake + wine situations - - of course including the specific bottle that makes that “pixie dust” on the King Olive Oil cake otherworldly.

A self-aggrandizing interlude…

did you catch me saying ‘Nun’s fart’ and building a Champagne Tower on live TV!? Oh, you can watch me doing so on the Today Show here.

CAKE & WINE STUFF continued below:

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In my twenties, I was introduced to the world as “the youngest sommelier in the country.” In her book, Cork Dork, Bianca Bosker called me a “wine wunderkind.” My value was tied to a data point: my youth.

But fifteen years have passed. The novelty has worn off. I found my first gray hair this month, and booked my first laser facial.

And yet, don’t things grow more magnetic with time? Like certain restaurants. Think of places like Keens, where the mutton chop hasn’t changed in over a century. Or The Odeon, still downtown-cool - - all neon, muscle memory, and cultural residue. And Harry’s, still humming with the low-frequency glamour of a two-martini lunch and Beef Wellington Wednesdays. Or Viand, which makes the city’s most steadfast turkey club.

These places have earned their patina - - the layering of time, care, habit, and human presence. Like a well-used copper pan or a beloved leather chair, they’ve been shaped by use, not trend.

Wine, when it’s allowed to age well, behaves the same way. In wine, youth is a performance of power - oftentimes coarse tannins, punchy fruit, aggressive oak. It’s a wine trying to convey its worth. But as wine ages, it stops trying to please everyone. The fruit recedes; the structure loosens. Aromas migrate from the obvious to the intimate. A vintage Rioja or an aged Barolo doesn’t care if you “get” it. It has become a singular, complex thing that requires you to meet it on its own terms.

We are taught that to age is to lose. But I’m finding that aging is actually a series of subtractions that leave you with something much more potent: one’s self. And wouldn’t it be a shame to hide all of our well-earned patina?

The most common Q’s I get on aged wine

& my A’s:

1. Does wine actually get better with age?

Sometimes. Aging doesn’t improve wine, it transforms it. Some bottles deepen; others simply fade. If you’re not down to do deep research on each bottle, producer, etc. ask your local wine shop and sommelier their thoughts.

2. How do I know if a wine is meant to age?

General rule of thumb is wines with good structure (acid, tannin, sweetness, and / or a combo of these) helps the bones of the wine age well.

3. Is older always better?

No. Youth can be beautiful. Age is just a different type of pleasure.

4. Why does old wine taste less fruity?

Because fruit gives way to tertiary notes like leather, forest floor, tea. The first thing to go is fruit, so if you like juicy and fruity wines best to stick with youthful bottles.

5. What’s the difference between “aged” and “dead”?

Wines that have aged well still have energy. Dead ones feel hollow, flat, mute. You don’t have to be a sommelier to get this vibe. Make sure it is the right temperature (55 degrees!) and have a taste. I always find that “dead” older wines smell like a not-great, musty, vintage clothing shop.

6. Can white wines really age?

Yes, sometimes more gracefully than reds! Think Riesling, Chenin, Champagne, white Burgundy, off-dry whites. My full list that I love right now is below.

7. Should I decant old wine?

Gently, if at all. Treat it like you would your 90-year old Grandmother. Don’t shake her!

8. Why do some old wines smell strange at first?

Reduction (lack of oxygen) or bottle age. Air often brings them back to themselves but don’t make a snap judgement here, give it a little time. If they don’t smell at least a bit better after 30 minutes decanted, it might be time to bury the wine.

9. Is expensive wine more age-worthy?

NO! I write this in all caps because it is a mistake people often make, conflating the two. Longevity comes from structure, not price.

10. What’s the biggest mistake people make with aged wine?

Waiting too long out of fear. Many great bottles die unopened. Don’t wait for your daughter’s wedding to share an older bottle together with family.

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Aged Wines + Restaurants

Below are a few of my favorite vintage places and bottles that have moved past performative youth and come into their own.

& whether that bottle of 1867 Lessona was any good still…

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All corporate team members- - now more than two dozen of us, which still feels surreal to see in writing. And that doesn’t even include the extraordinary people on our dining room floors and in our kitchens at COTE and COQODAQ (whose annual parties are the stuff of legend, traditionally held on Super Bowl Sunday, the slowest day in restaurants without TVs). In the corporate office alone, GHM is now a double baker’s dozen of people tasked with keeping a growing restaurant group both solvent and soulful.

We ate live giant Dungeness Crabs… whole pigs… there were noodles and soups. Wu’s is one of those New York restaurants that doesn’t belong to any single group, which is precisely why it belongs to everyone. It is, however, unmistakably, an industry restaurant. The kind of place where chefs and sommeliers roll in with a case of wine.

So of course we weren’t surprised when we looked over and realized that across the room was a table of industry friends. But we WERE surprised to see that at their table was Pete Wells, formerly the New York Times restaurant critic.

It’s a funny feeling to see someone you often spend months scouring your just-open restaurant looking for like a game of Where’s Waldo? and now here, just sitting out in broad neon lighting in Chinatown like Bizarro Restaurant World.

We’ve come a long way from the first restaurant critic, a.k.a. Grimod de La Reynière of the 18th century who I choose to remember as that weird dude who hosted his own [fake] funeral just to see who would show up.

Grimod believed taste was a discipline, not just pleasure and essentially invented the restaurant guide, the concept of expert taste, and idea that dining could be evaluated publicly, not just socially. Critics back then weren’t just asking “Is it good?” but rather: Is it proper? Is it excessive? Is it corrupting society? All excellent questions!

Later, as newspapers flourished, criticism became institutionalized. There was Curnonsky, “Prince of Gastronomes,” who promoted simplicity, and regional cooking. Michelin Guide. And then Craig Clairborne, the O.G. New York Times restaurant critic and a pretty cool guy from Mississippi, who changed everything. He took criticism seriously and systematically, he reviewed immigrant and non-luxury restaurants, he made dining both democratic and aspirational.

But listen, it sucks to be criticized.

It just does. A restaurant is so public, something you build with your hands, your taste, your ego, and your exhaustion for all to see. You want people to feel what you felt making it. You want the message to land cleanly.

And sometimes, a critic comes in and doesn’t quite pick up on the vibe. Or the energy. Or the thing you were trying to say. Sometimes they walk in on a bad night. Sometimes you made a mistake. Sometimes the restaurant isn’t as good as it should be yet, which is an especially brutal realization when you already know that deep down - - and which I felt over a decade ago when Pete wrote one of the most scathing reviews about a restaurant where I was a sommelier uptown.

And yet, another hot take, criticism is important.

It keeps us humble. It keeps us honest. It forces a kind of realism that is otherwise very easy to avoid in an industry fueled by adrenaline, affirmation, and applause. You don’t have to agree with a critic to learn from them. You don’t even have to like the review. But, hey, someone was paying attention.

I’ve also always believed this: the New York Times restaurant critics are some of the best writers out there. Priya, Melissa, Ligaya, Tejal, Pete, Sam, Frank, Ruth, Gael, Mimi - - and more - - a lineage of people whose opinions I don’t always agree with, whose critiques I certainly don’t always enjoy, but whose writing I grew up reading, studying, and respecting. Especially the women, my homegirls, who radically shifted criticism toward lived experience, not just authority.

Oh, and a personal favorite, Adam Platt from NY Mag, who was both clever and funny, a rarity in the world of criticism!

I’ve been thinking a lot about criticism lately, partly because of that night, and partly because I recently watched the new Noah Baumbach film, Jay Kelly, starring George Clooney, which is all about the lonely glories of being critically acclaimed and beloved.

There’s a scene on a train chugging through the Italian countryside, somewhere between Paris and Tuscany, and one rider asks the other:

… Italy. What is its fatal charm?

To which the other responds:

I believe it is a certain permission to be human.

I think criticism does that too. It pulls us down from the idea that we are gods-- creators, auteurs, visionaries- - and reminds us that we are actually just people. People doing human things in public. Trying. Failing. Improving. Repeating ourselves. Getting it wrong. Occasionally getting it very right.

And people are going to have opinions about that. They’re going to write down those opinions. And people are going to want to read those opinions.

Criticism, at its best, helps us understand ourselves a little more clearly. It holds up a mirror. Sometimes it’s flattering. Sometimes it’s brutal. But it’s human.

And in restaurants, of all places, shouldn’t we hold that certain permission to be human?

Which brings me back to Wu’s. To seeing a former critic out in the wild, no longer the institutional voice of judgment but simply another diner at another table. Well, I had to go over and talk to him.

So what did I say to Pete Wells?

What did I ask him about critics?

🔒 Paid subscribers, see below.

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It wasn’t Champagne.

It was a German Riesling from the village of Nierstein. (!!!)

Today, if that ship cellar were stocked again, you best believe that Riesling would most certainly not be the priciest bottle on the list.

I started thinking about trends, fads, and how they come and flow in such big waves after a post I saw this week by my friend Vanessa Lenore Price. They shared a 1968 magazine cover featuring a bottle of Château Lafite Rothschild with the promise:

“In 1964 this cost $8 a bottle. In four years it may be $48.”

Adjusted for inflation, that $4 bottle equals roughly $38–$40 today. The projected $48 in 1968 equals about $420–$450 in today’s monies. However, a current release of Lafite now retails anywhere from $800 to well over $1,500, depending on vintage and provenance. That is, if you can even get an allocation [noting my bias here of course].

Yes, Lafite and Bordeaux came into fashion, but others came before. Your grandparents might talk about Sherry or Port. And their grandparents, perhaps Riesling. While Riesling now is often considered {mostly} sweet and therefore not chic, there was a time when sugar was once the height of sophistication. In the sixteenth century people blackened their teeth with charcoal to show that perhaps they could afford sugar and it’s seductive side effects of dental rot.

Rotten and blackened teeth even became a beauty trend. Elizabeth I, one of the most famous sugar addicts of the period, was described by the German visitor Paul Hentzner as having “a face that is oblong, fair but wrinkled; her eyes small, yet black and pleasant; her nose a little hooked; her teeth black (a fault the English seem to suffer from because of their great use of sugar); she wore false teeth.” The queen’s blackened teeth became an ideal, and some people even rotted their own teeth to emulate this look.- Historic UK

And today? Well, we brag about what we don’t consume. Dry wine. Dry martinis. Sugar Free. Clean lines. Clean living. Clean labels.

Every generation thinks it invented restraint. Enter, for example, the “Sexy Pineapple Diet,” one of many short-lived food crazes that swept through American culture in the mid-20th century. “The diet is pretty straightforward – you simply choose two days a week to eat nothing but fresh pineapple. On the remaining five days you eat whatever you like, as long as you maintain your new, lowered weight. The diet promises a slimmer body, more energy and an increased ‘sexual capacity’.”

This all from the noble pineapple, the international symbol of hospitality, and once so rare it was rented as a table decoration in the 1700s.

By the 1770s, “a pineapple of the finest flavour” became a phrase used for anything that was the best of the best. It’s played upon in Sheridan’s 1775 play The Rivals, when Mrs Malaprop confuses the word with “pinnacle” and exclaims: “He is the very pineapple of politeness!”.

SO who decides what flavor is fashionable? What wine? What fruit? What diet? Behind the paywall, subscribers we dive into many more Diets as Moral Theater & Wine Once Worshipped.

And to all: bring a pineapple to the next dinner party. Maybe a bottle of Riesling too. After all, they happen to just be excellent, together.

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