My City Guides Project just launched. You can find the Hamptons Guide here

You can find my most recent feature here.

This post is for paid subscribers. Friday features are always free, but if you want the weekly intel and ongoing education—plus to support independent wine writing that doesn’t do scores or sponsors—upgrade whenever it feels right.

If you’d like to work together or have consulting inquiries, pitches, or scoops, please email me at bodhilanda@gmail.com.

Good afternoon,

I hope you’ve had a chance to read ’s excellent Fall Restaurant Preview: Manhattan Edition. If you don’t already subscribe to the Strong Buzz, I highly encourage you to. She just dropped the Brooklyn, Queens and Beyond version today. The most exciting opening she’s tracking is, of course, George McNally’s French-ish bistro, Faux, which opens tomorrow at 277 Church Street in Tribeca. George is the 23-year-old son of Keith McNally, and he cut his teeth bartending at Balthazar before helping open Minetta Tavern in D.C. For the full pre-opening tour, check out Aliza Abarbanel’s piece for OTH / Cake Zine.

Downstairs, there’s going to be a subterranean cocktail bar called Prevz. It has a bouncer, a separate street entrance, and a completely made-up name. George apparently wanted something that sounded like an apostrophe-S drinking spot without actually being named after anyone, so he invented a word. As some have already observed, this is sure to be the hottest private event venue in NYC for at least the next couple years.

As the summer season of IRL restaurant work winds to a close, I’m looking forward to bringing Thirst Behavior into physical form. I’ll be doing some consulting work for restaurants as usual, but I’d also like to initiate a series of informal hangs at wine bars. In my mind it looks like this: I partner with a wine bar or restaurant, and invite readers to come hang out and pull some corks at a time when the place wouldn’t otherwise be busy. We can share bottles, chat about them, or about anything else and I’ll pick up the tab. Would you attend something like this? Would you like to host one? Get at me if so.

Here’s what I’m paying attention to this week.

Share Thirst Behavior

TASTING NOTES

• Frantz Saumon Vin de France, Romorantin, 2023 — I think I may have mentioned this wine here in the past, but I’m revisiting it now because I am, at this exact moment, preparing a staff training on it, in preparation for a short end-of-season BTG run. Romorantin is one of those grapes that probably shouldn’t still exist. It is native to exactly one tiny Loire sub-appellation (Cour-Cheverny) and even there, it is quite scarce. The grape is naturally high in acid, but Frantz’s has tons of weight, texture and breadth. It is farmed organically in Montlouis, where he’s better known for Chenin Blanc and some pet-nats from Gamay/Grolleau. This 2023 comes from young vines planted in 2017, fermented naturally and aged 18 months in large neutral oak. It drinks like green apple, citrus peel, bruised orchard fruit, white flowers, and crushed stone with a lengthy finish. It absolutely rocks. The only other place I’ve seen it poured BTG is Andrew Tarlow’s Manhattan Italian place, Borgo, which, to me, feels like a flex, although I know all of this will be lost on the pre-Labor Day Hamptons crowd. All I can really tell my colleagues is that this is not the wine for people who came out to drink Sancerre. They will not like it, and that is okay.

THE SPILL

Read more

This is a tiny wine region in eastern France, squeezed between Burgundy and Switzerland, with around 2,100 hectares under vine. It makes pale red wine from grapes most people have never heard of, Chardonnay that can look toward Burgundy and then veer somewhere else entirely, and Savagnin that can be made fresh and mineral or deliberately exposed to oxygen for years. Its most famous wine comes in a 620-milliliter bottle and tastes, among other things, like walnuts, currants and curry.

Twenty-five years ago, much of this was fairly niche regional wine. Today, serious Jura producers are allocated, collected and fought over by sommeliers.

Some of that enthusiasm has become its own cliché—the Jura bottle on the natural-wine list as a signifier of good taste—but the underlying fascination is legitimate. Few regions make so many genuinely different kinds of wine in so little space.

And the place to begin isn’t with oxidation.

It’s with the ground.

Subscribe now

Where Are We?

The Jura sits directly east of Burgundy, along the western edge of the Jura Mountains, before France rises toward Switzerland.

The vineyards don’t climb into the high mountains themselves. Instead, they occupy the lower slopes and foothills—the Revermont—where limestone cliffs and hills sit above softer slopes of marl. The regional geology was formed through an unusually complicated combination of ancient marine sedimentation, tectonic movement, erosion and glacial activity.

For our purposes, though, you can simplify this considerably.

The two words to remember are:

Read more

You can find my most recent feature here.

This piece is part of the Reviews section, where I visit restaurants, bars, and drinking establishments and look closely at the cooking, hospitality, and cultural theater of going out.

Reviews, like Friday features, are always free. But if you want the weekly intel and ongoing education—plus to support independent wine writing that doesn’t do scores or sponsors—upgrade whenever it feels right.

If you’d like to work together or have consulting inquiries, pitches, or scoops, please email me at bodhilanda@gmail.com.

Subscribe now

Walking into Smithereens feels like entering a submarine. You descend from street level into a low-ceilinged basement at 414 East Ninth, just west of First Avenue, and find yourself inside a dark capsule of brushed metal, blackened wood and various marine blues. The front of the bar is mottled to resemble the inside of an oyster shell, and the floor is reclaimed cork. It does not look much like a New England seafood restaurant, unless, of course, your idea of New England aesthetics begins with a shipwreck.

Down here, the normal rules of food and beverage do not apply, at least not directly. Smithereens is a bizarro underworld restaurant, a place indebted to the (sea)foodways of the Northeast but executed with the dark wizardry of a modern izakaya. The Negronis are salty and the wine tastes like someone made incense from dead flowers and lit it with a particularly sulfurous match. An abalone skewer, threaded with folds of shiitake and charred over the grill, arrives with a glowing, sweet-and-sticky jam of translucent cured egg yolk.

Everything is recognizable, but only after your eyes adjust.

Our server tells us that the buckwheat pancake is a must. On the menu it appears simply as “buckwheat pancake with smoked bluefish,” though the handwritten note offering it “Neptune style” acknowledges its debt to Neptune Oyster in Boston and denotes an optional caviar add-on. Neptune’s famous johnnycake layers cornmeal, smoked bluefish, honey butter, crème fraîche and caviar. This actually sounds kind of bad to me, but it’s probably delicious, and we order the pancake because we were told to. Chef Nick Tamburo’s version keeps the bluefish and sweetness but replaces the johnnycake with a galette-thin buckwheat crêpe, something he learned while cooking in Paris. The fish is hidden underneath; the surface is lacquered with maple and covered in a remarkably even snowfall of chives.

Share Thirst Behavior

Maple and smoked bluefish do not immediately sound like obvious bedfellows, but they share an affinity for fire. The maple’s caramelized, woody aromas reach toward the smoke, while its sweetness softens the salt, bitterness and oily intensity of the fish. My dining companion, a native of Charleston who attended conservatory in Boston, recognizes the anadama bread immediately. I do not, but we order it and turn to Google to jog my friend’s memory. Anadama is an old New England loaf made from wheat flour, cornmeal and molasses, associated particularly with the fishing communities around Gloucester and Rockport. Its precise origins are uncertain, though the standard piece of folklore involves a fisherman, exhausted by his wife Anna’s cornmeal-and-molasses porridge, adding flour and yeast while muttering, “Anna, damn her.”

At Smithereens, it is dense, dark and only gently sweet, served in thick slices with a quenelle of butter seasoned with nori and dulse. Molasses and seaweed seems a similarly daring proposition, but it works. The sweetness deepens the loaf’s maltiness while the butter and seaweed pull it toward coastal flavors. It achieves something close to the harmony of the pancake: the bread’s sweet nuttiness, maritime funk from fish or seaweed, and the richness of butter or cream.

This kind of inversion—an upside-down or sideways look at American seafood traditions—is how Tamburo cooks. He grew up in coastal Massachusetts, started cooking while attending Emerson, then passed through Momofuku Noodle Bar and Ko, Blanca, Momofuku Nishi, a wood-fired restaurant in Napa and, finally, Claud, where he was chef de cuisine. At Smithereens, the New England food of his childhood passes through the technical grammar of those kitchens: French sauces, Japanese seasonings, live-fire cooking, raw fish cut with precision.

The amberjack crudo arrived as six silken slices in a loose ring, their pale flesh edged with pink and glossed by a rust-colored citrus dressing. Each piece carried a small spoonful of green blueberry—a tart, vegetal interruption to the fish’s mild sweetness and soft, fatty texture. It looked almost austere, but the flavor was not: rich, slippery fish fillets, sharp fruit, citrus and salt, with the underripe berries bringing the texture and flavor of the amberjack into focus.

Later, a piece of tilefish arrived over spinach and spring onions in a dark reduction, with a pale, savory sabayon beside it. Its scales had been forced upright by heat, each one crisped into a tiny translucent shard, like a brittle stalagmite. They looked prickly enough to repel you, then shattered at the touch of a fork, giving the mild, yielding fish a surface somewhere between crackling and armor.

The wine program follows a notably editorial philosophy. Nikita Malhotra, Smithereens’ co-owner and beverage director, is less interested in building a cathedral of famous bottles than in publishing a new argument every few months. The cellar contains roughly 500 wines, from which she builds a much smaller daily list; every three or four months, she reorganizes the program around a grape, a region or some other governing idea. There have been editions devoted to Riesling, Grenache, skin-contact wine, Champagne, sake and Chardonnay. When we visited in June, the subject was Chenin Blanc.

The format could sound like the work of a person trying very hard to demonstrate that she has taste. Malhotra has the more liberating advantage of no longer needing to prove she knows what she’s doing. Her parents owned a bottle shop on the Upper East Side, so she grew up around wine before studying philosophy and spending six years working in independent bookstores. At Tribeca Grill, she deliberately immersed herself in the classics; she later rebuilt the program at Momofuku Ko around Champagne and Burgundy, winning Michelin’s New York Sommelier Award in 2022. She is now head sommelier at Pressoir, Daniel Johnnes’s wine-events company, which produces La Paulée, La Fête du Champagne and other occasions at which collectors gather to open some of the greatest and most expensive wines on earth.

Smithereens is where she gets to make her weirder moves.

This is not a curious wine list assembled in opposition to fine wine, or by someone who never acquired its vocabulary. Malhotra’s authority comes partly from declining to make that authority the subject. Instead of presenting the cellar as a monument to what she has accumulated, she treats the list as a temporary exhibition: these are the wines she wants to think about now, arranged deeply enough that a single grape becomes more expansive than the usual encyclopedic assortment.

I know Nikita somewhat, so rather than study the Chenin list, I gave her the sort of instruction that is either a gift or an annoyance to a sommelier: pick something from the cellar. No price range, no stylistic preference, no other parameters. She returned with a bottle of 2023 Matin, Midi et Soir, a Chenin made by Vincent Bergeron from vineyards around Montlouis. “I have this Bergeron Chenin for you because, well, I love reductive Chenin,” she said. That was about it.

The wine was indeed reductive, with a thrilling invocation of struck match, burned acacia flowers and cold stone, with Chenin’s lemony nectarine fruit hiding somewhere behind the smoke. Reduction is the accumulation of volatile sulfur compounds when wine is made or raised with limited exposure to oxygen. At its ugliest, it can smell like rotten eggs or garlic and is generally considered a fault. In smaller measures, though, it can produce the smoky, flinty aromas that many of us prize. The boundary between feature and bug here is partly a matter of concentration, but also a matter of taste. I suspect Nikita’s and my taste for reduction might be calibrated to slightly different thresholds. The wine didn’t seduce me exactly, but it was definitely something to return to often, with more an attitude of inquiry than a feeling of pure pleasure. Nikita did not apologize for its eccentricity or provide a technical explanation that would tell us how to appreciate it. Fortunately, the abalone skewer managed to do that work all on its own.

Share Thirst Behavior

That editorial impulse extends beyond the wine list. Smithereens publishes a genuinely good zine on Substack filled with staff recommendations, interviews, recipes, wine essays and cultural miscellany; it was, in fact, how I first learned about the restaurant. Each issue arrives with a playlist that generally bangs with stuff you wish you’d discovered yourself. There is also a staff book club in which guests are also encouraged to participate. These do not feel like the usual extensions of restaurant branding, bits of lifestyle content manufactured to keep the name circulating between occasional visits. The taste goes too deep. The zine is curious about books, movies, design and music because the people making it are curious about those things.

Tamburo studied visual and performing arts at Emerson, played in bands and initially imagined music as his life before kitchens took over. Malhotra’s years in bookstores preceded her life in wine. Their professional credentials explain the level of technique in the room, but they do not explain its personality. Neither owner seems particularly interested in resting on the impressive part of the résumé.

To call Malhotra and Tamburo “cool kids” of the restaurant industry would undersell what they do, though they are, I must say, extremely cool. Their taste in music is excellent. Their wine list reads like an elegant periodical. Their staff publishes essays and poetry. This is not coolness applied as a layer of styling to decent restaurant craft. It comes from an excess of intelligence and curiosity beyond their strict métiers—a sense that cooking and sommellerie are not the only two methods available for putting a worldview into circulation. I find their whole approach among the coolest I have encountered in a restaurant. I do not know what that says about me, except maybe that I would like dinner to feel a little like joining the editorial staff of an exceptionally well-dressed maritime journal, or that I might hijack the aux cord on an underwater mission and subject my fellow submariners to an hour of Black Marble or a Japanese City Pop compilation.

Anyway, dessert arrived in the form of a celery float, the metaphorical response to all this deep-sea sensibility. Toward the end of our visit to Smithereens, we found bubbles and buoyancy before ascending to street level. Tamburo makes it from celery-root ice cream drizzled with coffee oil, with cherries marinated in red-wine vinegar and shio koji and a house soda made from carbonated celery juice, citrus and sugar. The dish began with root-vegetable ice creams he experimented with at Momofuku Ko and eventually became a warped recollection of an ice-cream float and Dr. Brown’s Cel-Ray, that beloved and slightly medicinal soda of New York delicatessens. Tamburo has said that diners respond to it with reactions ranging from delight to disgust. I found it absolutely enthralling.

What you see is a soft-looking foam, but what you experience is the most lively carbonation. The celery soda snapped and fizzed around the creamy, earthy ice cream; the cherry landed with a pang of tartness, sweetness and salt. It was bewildering and completely insane, a dessert composed of ingredients seemingly intent on escaping their assigned categories, a dish with a clear raison d’être (celery-on-celery action), and some real freaky, out-of-the-box thinking behind it.

Over the course of my career, I have watched restaurants professionalize beyond what I could have imagined when I started working in New York. Even at expensive places, the staff used to feel comparatively ragtag: artists, poets, aspiring models, musicians, filmmakers, strippers, whatever else. Some were lifers, but many of us believed we were on our way to becoming something else. The work still got done, but all those outside lives gave restaurants a culture that did not come entirely from other restaurants.

Hospitality is now a coherent and increasingly viable career path. This is, in most ways, a good thing. Places are better run, standards are higher, and some forms of exploitation that once passed for the price of admission have become harder to excuse. But professionalization has brought its own kind of convergence. Menus and dining rooms look very much alike, as though they’ve been moodboarded by the same design agency. Service is very “good,” in a way that feels eager for a certain kind of recognition. Sometimes, it feels like everyone involved has studied the same restaurants, absorbed the same references and arrived at the same exquisitely tasteful conclusions. Smithereens offers another possibility: a restaurant run by people who chose this work completely, without allowing the work to become the only culture they possess.

There are people who grow up caring about restaurants, learn to operate them with total professional command and choose to still see the world like artists. Nick, Nikita, and their team have achieved enough technical mastery that technique no longer needs to be the point. Smithereens is a place where everything else they know and care about can enter the work.

My City Guides Project just launched. You can find the Hamptons Guide here

You can find my most recent feature here.

This post is for paid subscribers. Friday features are always free, but if you want the weekly intel and ongoing education—plus to support independent wine writing that doesn’t do scores or sponsors—upgrade whenever it feels right.

If you’d like to work together or have consulting inquiries, pitches, or scoops, please email me at bodhilanda@gmail.com.

Welcome to the new subscribers who found their way here after Substack finally broke Wine & Spirits out from under the larger Food & Beverage aegis. There is much rejoicing about this from within our small corner of the platform because, among other reasons, there’s a new leaderboard, which features many of us more prominently than before. I’m aware that there’s nothing more swagless than talking about gamified social media platform dynamics, but I guess I am also just as vain as the next aspiring wine media creator. If you’re new: this is Thirst Behavior. I write about wine and the performance of taste: how we all construct imagined identities from our consumer choices, and how wine offers us a particularly slippery stage for the work of public performance. On Wednesdays, I do a link roundup/digest-style post. You’re reading it now. Fridays are for longer form features, and Mondays have a dedicated educational column called Wine School.

I’m writing to you from my favorite government third space, the Montauk Public Library, in the midst of the collective late summer psychosis that punctuates the end of every season on the East End. Restaurant guests are more insane than ever, and those of us who have been working out here all summer are also losing our minds, but for different reasons. Too much work, too much sun, compounding hangovers, or anxiety about the fast-approaching end to summer flings and situational friendships. Every pre-shift meeting is a pep talk where we ask our colleagues to ‘dig deep’ and just get through it. Every time I have to do that, I believe my own hype less.

One fun thing about this season has been working with all the Irish twenty-somethings that populate the service industry out here. They sleep five to a room, three to a bed, work sixteen-hour days across multiple jobs, and still manage to stay out partying until sunrise like it’s nothing. I’m composing a love letter to this bizarre community in the form of an experimental ethnography. If you know any of these lads (or lassies) who has some good craic about summer work culture, please point them in my direction.

If you’re interested in Montauk or Hamptons coverage I made a single-day travel guide to Montauk for ’s Hospitality Everywhere and my own guide to The Hamptons. For more critical takes on East End culture, you can check out The Imperative of Self-Parody, my dispatch from a rained out Memorial Day weekend, or the July Third battle royale piece which also has some fun stuff about our local 7-Eleven.

Here’s what I’m paying attention to this week.

Share Thirst Behavior

TASTING NOTES

• The Ultimate Guide to Yogurt and Late Summer Fruit — I enjoy giving aesthetic and moral accounts of the things I consume. You might even say that’s the whole point of this platform. I’ve tasted some good wines lately, but I’m not going to tell you about them this week. Instead, I’m deferring this section to someone called William Mullan, who published this exhaustive piece about yogurt and fruit on ’s Feed Me a couple days ago. This is the best piece of writing I’ve read in a long time, an impassioned guide to the subject on a level I never knew possible. Mullan is equal parts fervent fermentation evangelist, incisive organic chemist, botany freak, and a man with a dizzyingly deep reverence for the science and mystery of the natural world. If wine writers could manage to write like this guy, we would not be worrying about why younger people aren’t interested in wine. I’m not going to quote it here, but I simply insist that you read this.

Read more

The vineyards are tiny. The grapes are obscure. Many of the best wines come from steep Alpine slopes planted to varieties that barely exist anywhere else. The whites are often light, bright and saline; the reds can be peppery and almost weightless. There are old vines, limestone, glacial deposits, tiny growers and enough local names to keep a sommelier happily annoying you for an entire dinner.

And yet Savoie didn’t reinvent itself to become fashionable. If anything, the rest of wine culture moved toward it.

For much of the 20th century, these were largely local wines—things you drank in the Alps with cheese, lake fish and whatever you had earned after spending the afternoon skiing. Today, bottles from serious producers turn up on ambitious wine lists around the world.

Subscribe now

First Problem: Where Exactly Is Savoie?

We’re in the French Alps, against the borders of Switzerland and Italy.

But don’t picture one continuous vineyard.

Read more

You can find my most recent feature here.

Friday features are always free, but if you want the weekly intel and ongoing education—plus to support independent wine writing that doesn’t do scores or sponsors—upgrade whenever it feels right.

If you’d like to work together or have consulting inquiries, pitches, or scoops, please email me at bodhilanda@gmail.com.

Subscribe now

Last week, The New York Times published Ligaya Mishan’s two-star review of Bistrot Ha, generating some delightful controversy among the food-media commentariat. Though the review was generally positive, one of the visits Mishan describes was a total catastrophe.

This is the stuff of service-world nightmares: a carafe of water spilled into a diner’s lap, a dessert dropped hard enough to send its ice cream onto the table, fries accidentally seasoned with sugar instead of salt because someone accidentally switched the pinch bowls.

Mishan gave the restaurant a pretty good review anyway. Bistrot Ha remains, in her account, one of the most exciting restaurants in New York. “Sometimes messiness is a price you’re willing to pay for some of the most thrilling food in town.” The disastrous meal is neither suppressed nor converted into a verdict.

That ambivalence strikes me as central to restaurant criticism now, a form caught somewhere between the aesthetics of consumption and the aesthetics of labor. The critic makes meaning from what it feels like to receive hospitality; restaurant workers understand what it takes to produce. Neither position contains the restaurant in full, although both are prone to behaving as if it does.

jumped into the ring. His sworn enemy, The NYT, had criticized his friend’s restaurant and he was not about to let it go. One of the enduring pleasures of food media is watching people, especially Huang, go to war with the Times: the paper is too large, too much of a cultural behemoth, to experience the fight in the same register, leaving its enemies to maintain a unilateral blood feud across decades, editorial regimes and changes to the website font. At some point, I’m sure I’ll take up a similar fight and I look forward to it.

In “The New York Times Goes to Bistrot Ha’s and Delivers a Very Bush v. Gore Result”, Huang argued, in the general tone of you guys just don’t get it, that Mishan had mistaken the codes of another world for disorder. What she called “messiness” might instead be vulnerability, authenticity or simply humanity. “There’s nothing messy about Ha’s Snack Bar or Bistrot Ha,” he wrote. “It’s just another world.”

Huang reached back to Pete Wells’s 2015 review of Mission Chinese Food, in which Wells contrasted the old Mission Chinese’s beer-keg hospitality with the host lectern at its new address. For Huang, the sentence carried the institutional condescension of someone who had never been to a good party. His enemies are durable, his campaigns long. Please continue to go TF off, Eddie.

There is something to Huang’s complaint. A critic can mistake informality for incompetence, or enter a restaurant whose hospitality depends upon familiarity with a social world and experience only exclusion. Still, I did not read “messy” as especially harsh, considering Mishan’s meal was full of actual failures. Huang’s fixation felt disproportionate, especially when his alternative threatened to turn every dropped plate into some grotesque Gaggan-style wabi-sabi charade. You can be in “another world” and still sometimes drop the ball, no?

Share Thirst Behavior

I have a fun piece of information to share now: I also dined at Bistrot Ha on the night of Ligaya’s disastrous meal. In fact, it was the meal that became my own very favorable review of Bistrot Ha. In my review, I described a table of New York Times writers as part of the scenery: fashion people, wine people, hospitality people, downtown couples sharing cigarettes, the Times table. Their presence seemed like evidence of the restaurant’s almost instantaneous cultural importance.

moved through the dining room all night, running food, clearing tables and generating a palpable amount of warmth, even if her exhaustion showed a little. On her way out, she stopped at the bar to touch our table and told me what had happened. There was no ambiguity about whether the service had gone badly. The restaurant had fucked up the New York Times table. She left that night a beleaguered but seemingly still happy soldier, sure to return to fight another day.

In my review, I described the room as “perfectly managed overflow.” From the bar, speed, compression and incipient crisis became the pleasurable sensation of a restaurant running hot. My drinks arrived on time, the pork chop with clams was something near God-level and Sadie was present to make sure we were happy. Velocity registered as confidence. I was not wrong about my experience, nor Mishan hers. This is what criticism does: restaurant workers make the thing being consumed, and critics translate the result back into qualities. Labor becomes atmosphere; done well enough, it disappears completely and reads as ease.

But workers, myself included, do not always enjoy that erasure.

Last summer, , then bar manager at Le Veau d’Or, published “A Love Letter to Priya Krishna”, an extremely angry response to Krishna’s two-star Times review of the restaurant. The piece was, formally speaking, a mess. It was full of zingers, the kind of things an exasperated restaurant professional would love to say to the pretentious critic that lives in their imagination. Some were very funny. Some—beginning with the suggestion that Krishna was too busy “eating ethnic foods and taking down the patriarchy” to understand the work of a “small bartender woman”—sounded kind of…racist? Proceed to the comments section with caution.

The piece is difficult to defend but also difficult to dismiss, because beneath the resentment, score-settling and fury at receiving two stars—which still means “very good”—Morrissey is trying to describe something criticism has trouble seeing. She wants Krishna to understand the accumulated knowledge, training, repetition and restraint required to resurrect an old French restaurant without turning it into a museum or theme park; the people who spent fourteen hours on their feet producing an experience the critic could summarize as merely very good. Pete Wells, in Morrissey’s telling, understood what restaurant people did. Krishna consumed the result and missed the labor inside it.

, writing about the controversy, notices the diminutive posture Morrissey adopts: the tiny bartender riding the hot subway, savings dwindling, addressing the powerful critic. The worker sweats underground and then appears in the paper, if at all, as a cocktail, a mood, a design choice, a fucking plate of french fries. A person’s entire professional life becomes a sentence about whether dinner was fun.

On the other hand, this is, as some say, the show. The critic is a consumer, not the beverage director’s performance reviewer. A restaurant can be punishingly difficult to operate and still be unpleasant to visit. The guest buys dinner, not an equity stake in the staff’s suffering. Labor does not become excellent because it is exhausting, and no amount of mise en place can undo a significant mistake, after the plate has arrived at the table.

Morrissey’s implicit question is: Do you have any idea how hard we worked to give you the experience you found merely very good? The critic might reasonably answer: Would knowing have changed the meal? Probably not. Some of criticism’s value depends upon maintaining this indifference. But consumption is not a neutral observation point either. It has its own preferences about which kinds of labor should remain invisible and which are allowed to be part of the show.

Fine dining once made concealment into grandeur: every crumb removed, every need anticipated, a small army disappearing into effortlessness. The contemporary downtown restaurant lets the work show. Cooks plate food in front of you. The sommelier admits he’s not especially well-versed in the wine he’s pouring but loves it anyway. The owner runs dishes, clears glasses, sits down for a minute, gets back up. We read this visibility as intimacy, personality, authenticity. We enjoy being close enough to the machine to feel its heat. At least I know I do.

Huang’s defense of Bistrot Ha sounds labor-conscious because he knows the people and recognizes the restaurant’s cultural language. But “another world” is also an aesthetic judgment made from the dining room. It turns operational looseness into authenticity. Mishan calls it messiness; Huang calls it humanity. I called it something else. We each converted someone else’s service into a meaning available to the consumer.

Share Thirst Behavior

A criticism more attentive to labor would not count hours or award stars for sacrifice. It would still say when service was bad; labor is not an alibi. But it might abandon the fantasy that the diner is a neutral instrument, recording the restaurant as it really is. Every review is an account of what a restaurant managed to produce around one person, on one series of nights. The critic’s authority comes from making meaning out of that experience, not pretending to have escaped it.

None of this makes criticism useless. It makes criticism contingent, which it has always been. Mishan’s review works because she records a nightmare without turning it into the whole truth of the restaurant. Bistrot Ha was good enough to survive disastrous service at the critic’s table because the food, the feeling and the people producing both remained visible through the wreckage.

Riesling. Gewurztraminer. Pinot Gris. Muscat.

This is commonplace almost everywhere else in the wine world and distinctly unusual in France, where we’ve spent most of Wine School learning that Chablis means Chardonnay and Cornas means Syrah. In Alsace, grape variety has historically been one of the principal ways wine communicates its identity. INAO identifies seven principal varieties commonly appearing on Alsace labels: Riesling, Gewurztraminer, Pinot Gris, Pinot Noir, Pinot Blanc, Muscat and Sylvaner.

The explanation is partly geographic and partly historical. Alsace sits along France’s northeastern frontier, separated from the rest of the country by the Vosges Mountains and facing Germany across the Rhine. Control of the territory has shifted between France and Germany repeatedly. In 1918 alone, Alsace went from being Germany’s largest wine-growing region to France’s smallest.

So yes, this is France. But the grapes, food, architecture, language and wine culture all bear the marks of a borderland.

And the wines are very much their own thing.

Subscribe now

The Geography: The Vosges Make the Wine

The Alsace vineyard forms a long, narrow band along the eastern foothills of the Vosges, running roughly north to south for about 170 kilometers.

The mountains are crucial because they create a rain shadow. Weather moving eastward loses much of its moisture as it crosses the Vosges, leaving the vineyards on the other side unusually dry and sunny for such a northerly region.

That combination is extremely useful:

Read more

My City Guides Project just launched. You can find the Hamptons Guide here

You can find my most recent feature here.

This post is for paid subscribers. Friday features are always free, but if you want the weekly intel and ongoing education—plus to support independent wine writing that doesn’t do scores or sponsors—upgrade whenever it feels right.

If you’d like to work together or have consulting inquiries, pitches, or scoops, please email me at bodhilanda@gmail.com.

So I fell for a phishing scam. Then I sent the same scam to pretty much everyone in my gmail contacts. The email was an invitation to a party. It arrived from a sender I rarely talk to, from an address that, in retrospect, looked like someone had typed it while falling down stairs. And still I clicked. Still I opened the attachment like a person who has never been warned about anything, who has never sat through a workplace cybersecurity training, who has never once thought hmm, this seems off.

The vanity of receiving a party invite comes for us all. It turns out I am not above it. I am, in fact, exactly at eye level with it. Whoever these scammers are, they understand something the cybersecurity awareness posters will never admit: the promise of being wanted somewhere is more effective than any threat or alarm. Nobody clicks the link that says your account has been compromised. Everyone clicks the link that says someone thought to include you. We are not greedy, we are just lonely. Or not even lonely. We are curious about who might be thinking of us. The party invite is a mirror. You click to see yourself reflected in someone else’s guest list.

I did my best to contain the damage (see: my instagram stories). I’m still in the midst of my digital walk of shame, explaining to people that no, I was not actually throwing a party, and yes, I was exactly the kind of kid who falls for the email equivalent of a van with FREE CANDY spray-painted on the side. If that was you, and we haven’t already spoken about it, I’m sorry. The scammers won this time. And because the thing has a kind of viral character to it, this letter is starting to feel like sheepish STD disclosure, like, uhh I guess you should get tested...

But here’s the fun part. In spreading the word about a fake party, I ended up hearing from people I rarely talk to. The woodwork runneth over with unlikely contacts. Some of those exchanges were brief and businesslike and some have been genuinely fun, but all of them have been basically to the effect of please don’t click the link I sent you, I am a fucking idiot. The scam created, briefly and accidentally, the very thing it pretended to offer: a reason to reach out. The whole debacle is functioning as a kind of accidental party, a gathering of everyone I’ve ever known, convened around the shared experience of watching me humiliate myself. So, uhh, great to hear from y’all!

It’s also a reminder that I need to throw an actual party. Stay tuned.

Share Thirst Behavior

Read more

Stretching west from the Rhône toward the Spanish border, it contains seaside vineyards, limestone plateaus, mountain foothills, old-vine Grenache and Carignan, sparkling wine, crisp coastal whites, fortified sweet wines and plenty of things that don’t fit comfortably into any of those categories. Today the Languedoc wine organization alone represents 20 AOPs and 19 IGPs. Roussillon, tucked against the Pyrenees and Catalonia, operates as a distinct wine region with its own appellations and traditions.

But for much of modern history, none of that specificity was the story. Languedoc-Roussillon was where France made a tremendous amount of wine.

Understanding how it went from the engine room of everyday French drinking to one of the country's great laboratories for ambitious, idiosyncratic wine is the useful way into the region.

Subscribe now

First: Where Are We?

Think of Languedoc-Roussillon as the great Mediterranean sweep of southern France west of the Rhône.

Broadly:

Read more

My City Guides Project just launched. You can find the Hamptons Guide here

You can find my most recent feature here.

This post is for paid subscribers. Friday features are always free, but if you want the weekly intel and ongoing education—plus to support independent wine writing that doesn’t do scores or sponsors—upgrade whenever it feels right.

If you’d like to work together or have consulting inquiries, pitches, or scoops, please email me at bodhilanda@gmail.com.

Good afternoon,

Last night was Thirst Trap, a one-of-a-kind entertainment event with an amazing name at City Winery from the mind of I wanted to go, but couldn’t. A couple months ago, I met up with Mack under the auspices of covering the event. I thought I was getting a quick pitch and that would be it. In fact, he bought me lunch at Via Carota and spent two and a half hours dropping gem after gem of personal wisdom on me over a bottle of Barolo.

If you don’t know, Mack is a sommelier-at-large (goals) with a diverse portfolio of wine-related projects. He won Best Young Sommelier in America, worked at The French Laundry, then ran the 1,500-bottle list at Per Se. He founded Maison Noir Wines in 2007, has a whiskey label, wrote 99 Bottles: A Black Sheep’s Guide to Life-Changing Wines, and routinely pulls millions of views on Bon Appétit’s YouTube channel, and he had his own celebrity guest wine talk show thingy, which he described to me as “kinda like Hot Ones.”

Thirst Trap was a kind of live storytelling event that featured four wines, one rye whiskey, an appearance from James Beard Award-winning chef and Emmy-nominated host , and music from MICK.

Toward the end of our lunch, I asked why he had agreed to meet with me in the first place. It was obvious he had brought much more value to my project than I could ever dream of adding to his. He said something to the effect of, “I don’t know. I’d heard you were interesting, so I figured we could have a chat.”

Simple as that. What a fucking pro.

Later that night, I had dinner at Smithereens—review coming soon—where somm-owner set my friend and me up with a bottle of incredible, super-reductive Loire Valley Chenin Blanc. I asked her about the weird dimple in our glasses. Each had a small, deliberate crease folded into the bowl. She said, “Oh, these are the ones André Mack designed with the son from the Zalto family.” Of course they were. I’d never used one before, but they really were fun. You get the smoothest most perfect swirl.

Anyway, I missed Thirst Trap because of work obligations and a nasty summer cold, which, I have learned, may actually have been COVID…awesome! It turns out that no number of colostrum cold-foam iced coffees, or twenty-dollar engineered smoothies, or cold pressed super-juices can exempt you from the basic humiliations of having a body.

Today, Thirst Behavior gained its 1,000th subscriber. Thank you so so much for being here.

Tomorrow, deejaying again at Bar Lalo. Come say hi!

Share Thirst Behavior

TASTING NOTES

• Pazo da Sinsela Albariño 2022, Rías Baixas — Tasted this recently and was kinda blown away. So much width and warmth without feeling heavy. It was just broad and kind of rich, with a soft texture I really enjoyed. This is a joint project between Raul Perez and Rodrigo Mendez, two of Spain’s greatest winemakers, who found a three-hectare parcel in Salnes in 2021 and signed a twenty-year lease. The vineyard is ten kilometers from the sea, with silty soils near the river Umia lending salinity without a trace of sharpness. The wine is fermented naturally in used oak (225 to 500 liters), aged twelve months on the lees, no malo (but silkiness abound). Albariño is often used as a go-to zippy summer sipper, without much talk of the other ways it can present. I think wines like this one are an indication that we are going to see more and more ageworthy and interesting Albariños here in the States.

Read more

And importantly, Provence doesn’t just make rosé. It defines how the modern world understands it.

Subscribe now

The Climate: Hot and Windy

Provence sits fully in a Mediterranean climate:

• hot, dry summers

• mild winters

• abundant sunlight

• strong winds (including the Mistral mees-TRAL)

What separates it from the Southern Rhône is proximity to the sea.

What that adds:

• cooling influence

• preservation of acidity

• slightly more freshness in the wines

This is still a warm region — but one where balance comes from timing and restraint, not just blending.

The Geography: Spread Out and Coastal

Provence is large and varied, stretching from inland hills to the Mediterranean coast.

Key appellations include:

Read more

You can find my most recent feature here.

Friday features are always free, but if you want the weekly intel and ongoing education—plus to support independent wine writing that doesn’t do scores or sponsors—upgrade whenever it feels right.

If you’d like to work together or have consulting inquiries, pitches, or scoops, please email me at bodhilanda@gmail.com.

Subscribe now

It is, improbably, a great time to drink wine in New York City. Lists are getting weirder and more personal, finding increasingly inventive ways to offer value at nearly every price point. Last week, I found a bottle of 2014 Coffinet-Duvernay Chassagne-Montrachet Blanchots Dessus for $255 at Oriana. This is obviously not the average person’s idea of an affordable experience, but for mature white Burgundy from a respected grower, in a room full of marble-topped tables and unmistakably expensive contemporary art, it was a proposition I was more than happy to entertain.

Oriana opened a couple months ago in a newly renovated Nolita building, the latest effort from Andy Quinn and Cedric Nicaise, the team behind the Noortwyck. The place speaks the fluent, largely placeless language of contempo-luxury. It is a kind of dining room increasingly prevalent in New York, although it could exist just as comfortably in Denver, Seattle, Austin, or anywhere else VC and tech money finds its way into the hospitality trade. The wine list is different: specific, eccentric, unmistakably the work of a person with his own ideas about what belongs on a world-class list and what those things should cost.

This is one of the more sophisticated sensations a restaurant can produce. The bottle was expensive; I knew roughly what it would cost elsewhere; there was nothing remotely democratic about the room in which I drank it. Still, the price felt not merely defensible but generous, as though the restaurant and I had arrived independently at the same peculiar conclusion about what the wine was worth. That feeling of alignment is increasingly available on the best wine lists in New York, where the old arithmetic of restaurant wine is being replaced by something more personal, elastic, and difficult to reproduce. I enjoyed my first glass with some embered oysters from the restaurant’s custom hearth oven, laden with bubbling ’nduja and neatly arranged in a bowl of hot rocks. How, I wondered, did this wine get here?

The first bottle Cedric Nicaise bought for Oriana was in March of 2024. The restaurant opened in May of 2026. If you have spent any time around restaurant openings, you know how strange this is. I recently submitted the opening order for a small bar in the West Village; its entire wine inventory, admittedly only around forty cases, arrived one week before the soft opening. This is the normal sequence. You look at the distributor books, place the orders, open the restaurant, and begin discovering all the things you should have done differently.

You do not generally spend two years accumulating wine for a restaurant that does not yet exist. Cedric could because Oriana’s investor, the tech entrepreneur Kevin Ryan, understood the cellar as an asset rather than a pile of inventory waiting to spoil the cash flow. Ryan had also purchased a Nolita building that had been empty since the late nineties and was willing to wait through a lengthy revitalization effort. The cellar and the restaurant were both allowed to develop at the speed of real estate rather than hospitality, which is to say with considerably more patience and considerably more capital.

While interviewing Cedric, I referred to him almost accidentally as a “somm-operator.” The phrase slipped out on my way to asking a question about gaining an investor’s trust, but he stopped to consider it.

“There aren’t that many sommelier-operators,” he said. “It’s kind of a new category, and I think we’re writing it as we go.”

Share Thirst Behavior

The term is useful because it describes something more consequential than a sommelier who has managed to open a restaurant. A wine director usually operates within a hierarchy of competing intelligences: the somm knows the wine, the chef knows the food, the general manager knows the room, and somewhere above or adjacent to all three is a person who knows that the beverage cost has moved two points in the wrong direction. Taste may be respected within this arrangement, even lavishly accommodated, but it remains a department.

The somm-operator turns taste into executive power. “When I was at EMP, I answered to an accountant,” Cedric told me. “My accountant is now paid by me.”

This does not mean the accountant has been banished, or that the numbers have stopped mattering. It means the person who understands why one bottle should cost $88 and another can withstand a much more aggressive markup is now in a position to impose that judgment on the mathematics. At Oriana, Cedric prices every bottle individually, looking for the lowest number a guest will feel good about paying that still makes the restaurant money (although what constitutes “making the restaurant money” when the principal owner is also the landlord, and the restaurant functions partly as an amenity for the VC office tenants upstairs, is somewhat unclear). Sometimes the markup is two times cost; sometimes it is five. “Percentages don’t go to the bank,” he said.

A fixed markup treats consistency as a kind of fairness: every bottle bears the same multiplication, nobody receives special treatment, and the spreadsheet remains innocent. But guests do not experience wine prices as percentages. They experience them as a field of numbers carrying information about what kind of place they have entered, how much fluency is expected of them, and whether the restaurant has decided to be on their side. Pricing is part of the hospitality before anyone has tasted anything.

Chase Sinzer has constructed the lists at Claud, Penny, and Stars around this kind of emotional, numerical reading. At Stars, eighty-eight bottles priced at $88 or less appear at the front of the list, establishing affordability as one of the restaurant’s organizing principles. Once you believe a restaurant has made a serious effort to offer value, the trophy bottles somehow look more attractive.

The somm-operator can extend that authorship further down the supply chain. A conventional wine director buys mostly from distributors, supplemented by allocations, consignments, and perhaps the occasional auction purchase, because restaurants generally prefer their inventory to arrive by the case, with an invoice, from somebody already entered into the accounting software. Cedric’s purchasing philosophy is more expansive: “Anyone who’s willing to sell a bottle of wine, I’m willing to entertain it as a purchase.”

Share Thirst Behavior

The Oriana cellar draws from distributors, auction houses, online retailers, private collectors, and winemakers Cedric visits in Burgundy. Because he travels there to see friends, he does not feel obliged to amortize the cost of the flight across the bottles he brings back. The cellar is not a survey of what happened to be available during opening month. It is a record of two years spent watching, traveling, bidding, asking around, and buying wine from places that do not send tidy weekly offer sheets.

Chase’s three restaurants create a different kind of freedom. A bottle that makes no sense at Claud may be perfectly at home at Stars; wine purchased as part of an allocation can move through the portfolio until it finds the list, price, and audience that suit it. A single restaurant might have to decline an interesting bottle attached to six less interesting ones. With three rooms and three distinct concepts, he has substantially more power to secure allocations of in-demand bottles and buy at a volume that enable his friendly markups.

“There’s nothing I hate more than an Excel spreadsheet wine list,” Chase once told me. There is, certainly, no shortage of spreadsheets behind his restaurants. What he hates is the point at which accounting becomes visible as an aesthetic: each category dutifully populated, every markup flattened into consistency, the particular replaced by the operationally convenient. Three distinct restaurants give him enough places to put the wine that no individual list has to resemble one.

Subscribe now

All of this sounds, and to some degree is, like a triumph of expertise. For years, restaurant sommeliers were expected to possess exhaustive knowledge while remaining institutionally subordinate, held responsible for the financial performance of programs whose most important conditions they did not control. The somm-operator can choose the acquisition channel, move margin around the list, buy across several restaurants, and cultivate a cellar over years rather than ordering whatever Burgundy remains available in the final months before opening. The person with taste now signs the checks.

The difficulty is that the checks still have to clear.

The conditions that make these lists possible are highly particular and not remotely portable. Nobody can hand an ambitious wine director the template for acquiring a patient tech investor, a vacant Nolita building, and permission to begin buying Burgundy two years before opening. The purchasing power of three successful restaurants becomes available only after somebody has opened three successful restaurants. Even the supposedly asset-light solution of consignment depends on years of relationships with collectors who own the right bottles and trust you enough to place them in your cellar.

The best lists in New York currently feel more personal because the financial arrangements behind them have become more elaborate. More kinds of money have been assembled so that one person’s judgment can become unusually legible: the investor’s money, the collector’s cellar, the allocation earned across several restaurants, the bottle discovered at auction, the real estate allowed to remain vacant until the room is ready. Capital, time, property, inventory, and fifteen years of cultivated relationships do not appear on the list, but they determine what can appear there and at what price.

This may not be a model for the future of restaurant wine so much as a luxury available to a very particular class of restaurant. It is nevertheless producing remarkable lists. Cedric spent two years deciding what belonged in Oriana’s cellar, where he was willing to make his margin, and what a mature bottle of Chassagne-Montrachet ought to cost when it finally reached the table. The spreadsheet has not disappeared. It has been subordinated to a sommelier’s peculiar theory of value.

My City Guides Project just launched. You can find the Hamptons Guide here

You can find my most recent feature here.

This post is for paid subscribers. Friday features are always free, but if you want the weekly intel and ongoing education—plus to support independent wine writing that doesn’t do scores or sponsors—upgrade whenever it feels right.

If you’d like to work together or have consulting inquiries, pitches, or scoops, please email me at bodhilanda@gmail.com.

Hello everyone,

My friends created what I believe will be the coolest bar in NYC, and it soft opens tomorrow night, Thursday, July 30th. It’s called Bar Etienne, and it’s located at 44 Bedford Street in the West Village in the old Daddy-O’s space. This project comes from the team behind the popular LES hangout and cig-smoking capital of Dimes Square, Bar Valentina. Etienne promises to be every bit as cool as Val’s, but maybe a little more enticing for those of us over the age of 26. I’ve installed a tiny wine program of French wines in many of the classic categories at markups that I believe are very friendly. Go pay them a visit on Thursday night.

Also on Thursday night, I’ll be deejaying at Bar Lalo. If you’re in Montauk, please come by anytime after 11. You can have a margarita, listen to some not-so-recent Uproot Andy techno cumbia remixes, and decompress after work. If we’re lucky, we might get a guest appearance from DJ SoftSkillz aka my wife, Chelsea Heller, who does not in any way identify as a DJ, but does nonetheless FW a clever transition. There also might be some bonus wine tasting opportunities behind the DJ decks. This is a new hybrid form I’m trying to launch: approach the booth, not to request a song (no, never), but to get a tiny sip of something special I brought out with me. Am I a good enough DJ to be adding this extra layer of mental and physical work? Nope. Will I do my best? Always.

Finally, another piece of news: I’ve joined the team at Hospitality Everywhere, a new newsletter on Substack from . They’re a hospitality-focused creative agency that works globally and they’re currently concepting a new restaurant in Grand Central Terminal. I’ll be contributing travel recs, hot takes, and beverage-related strategy notes regularly here.

Share Thirst Behavior

TASTING NOTES

• Château Léoville Poyferré 1982 — A real heavy hitter, allegedly. A guest shared a glass of this with me at work. The 1982 Left Bank vintage was generationally good — these wines are still among the most prized and expensive in the world — and this bottle arrived carrying all of that reputational baggage. It smelled and tasted exactly as you might expect: cassis, cedar, graphite, worn leather; a tasting note I could have written before the cork came out.

  
  The wine was remarkably sound. The cork smelled kind of moldy, but the acidity was impressively intact, some primary blackcurrant hanging on, a little bricking at the rim, and an almost suspiciously smooth finish. It was good! I just couldn’t tell you whether I liked it. The problem isn’t that context is bad — context deepens pleasure, for sure. The problem is that an outsized reputation fills the gap between what you expect and what you get, and that gap is where surprise lives. Without it, it’s harder to have a direct experience of the wine. You’re encountering what you’re supposed to feel about it. If I’d tasted this blind, I would have probably said something boring like, “wow, what a remarkably even palate. Feels well-aged and uhh, pretty good, I guess.” Not exactly the language of generational greatness.

Read more

This is where most Southern Rhône wine is produced — across a wide, sunlit landscape of mixed soils, small growers, and flexible blending rules. It’s less about prestige and more about function: wines that are meant to be opened, poured, and finished without ceremony.

And importantly, it follows the same logic you’ve already learned — just at a different scale.

Subscribe now

The Appellation Structure:

Southern Rhône wines are organized into a loose hierarchy:

Read more

This is the region’s flagship — historically, culturally, and commercially. It’s also one of the first places in France to formalize what we now think of as appellation rules.

But before it was a system, it was a workaround.

Subscribe now

The History: From Papal Court to Appellation Law

Châteauneuf-du-Pape literally means “the Pope’s new castle.”

In the 14th century, when the papacy moved to Avignon, the surrounding land became a source of wine for the court. The area was already producing wine, but the association with the papacy elevated its status.

Over time, the wines developed a reputation for:

Read more

You can find my most recent feature here.

Friday features are always free, but if you want the weekly intel and ongoing education—plus to support independent wine writing that doesn’t do scores or sponsors—upgrade whenever it feels right.

If you’d like to work together or have consulting inquiries, pitches, or scoops, please email me at bodhilanda@gmail.com.

Subscribe now

In 2016, shortly after Ace Hotel, New Orleans opened, I walked into an interview wildly overdressed for a June day. I was in my beloved double-breasted Theory suit with these cool pleated trousers. Feeling perhaps over-confident, and also quite sweaty, I did my best to dazzle the F&B director with my big city bona fides. They needed a wine guy and I was that guy. I proposed a structure I’d seen work in New York: hourly wage for wine admin and staff training, tip pool cut for selling wine on the floor. I followed up our meeting with a detailed proposal about the value I’d bring to their new operation. To my amazement, they went for it.

A year later, they eliminated my job.

The comptroller cited concerns about a “non-revenue-producing position.” The servers had complaints about sharing tips with someone whose work, moment to moment, didn’t look exactly like theirs. The alternative Ace offered was the job of outlet manager: run the rooftop bar full-time, with maybe some input on wine, provided that it went through the property’s dedicated beverage manager. They still wanted my wine brain. They just didn’t want a line item for it.

This was not an isolated incident. Before Ace, when I was in New York, I’d written a lengthy cover letter for an AGM job at Reynard in the Wythe Hotel — a dull-sounding and poor-paying management gig I pursued for the privilege of getting to help Lee Campbell with wine buying for Andrew Tarlow’s restaurant group. I was not called upon for this opportunity. Before that, I sat through an excruciating interview with Thomas Carter at Estela for a position billed as “server with wine knowledge.” He asked me to evaluate my own wine knowledge on a scale of 1-10, and had me name my six ‘favorite varietals.’ I gave what I thought was the most defensible answer: Chardonnay, Chenin, Riesling, Pinot Noir, Gamay and Cab Franc. He said, “Interesting…” and never moved onto the next question.

Stories like these will sound familiar to anyone who has invested heavily in their own wine education, but wanted to avoid the fate of stagnating in middle management. I cannot tell you how many times a manager has said to me, “your wine knowledge will be really useful here,” and propose exactly zero compensation for it.

Now, I know what you’re thinking: is it possible that I am just not actually that good at wine? Yes, that’s totally possible. But my own frustrations aside, I think real sommelier jobs are rarer than they should be. And it’s not because of a talent shortage. It’s because restaurants don’t know how to value this kind of expertise, and therefore, they think they can get it for free. They fold wine into someone’s management job or dangle it as the perk that makes a boring AGM role worth taking. Or maybe they give a server an extra side of responsibility and call it professional development. You get an admin day to handle cellar work if you’re lucky and a title if you’re luckier, and the restaurant gets to trade on an acumen they don’t understand.

Share Thirst Behavior

This arrangement functions, in the narrow sense. The list looks fine because it’s probably been vibe-coded by a manager with a tiktok account, an expensive graphic designer, and a few savvy wine reps; the by-the-glass selections take care of the bottom line; and the rest of the list doesn’t really matter. At no point is it someone’s main job to stand in the dining room and translate the list to the people reading it. That labor — the real-time interpretation of the list for the benefit of the guest — simply disappears. Servers default to what’s easiest. Guests default to what’s safest. The middle of the list, the part someone put thought into, goes cold. Nobody notices because nobody was tracking it in the first place, and they’re just glad they don’t have to reprint too often.

What’s strange is that this is happening at the exact moment wine has never been more central to how restaurants signal who they are, and who they are for. The right producers, the right regions, the right price-to-cool ratio circulate on Instagram. They get photographed. They perform the cultural literacy of the place. Restaurants want the cellar as a cultural document. They want the signaling. They just do not want to fund the person who writes it, maintains it, activates it, and has an actual point of view. The industry has gotten very good at separating the performance of taste from the labor that produces it.

Some operators have been burned by lazy or pretentious somms — the guy who treats service as the gap between big tables, who stands around in a tie clip waiting for a whale to enter the room, who disappears when the dining room gets weeded, who terrorizes servers rather than helping them. He is real, he is a problem, and he has done more damage to the economic case for the position than any comptroller’s COGS spreadsheet. But he’s also a useful villain. He allows the industry to treat a structural problem as a personnel issue. The tie-clip guy is not why the position is precarious. The position is precarious because the industry’s theory of value does not know what to do with labor that generates revenue indirectly — through return visits, through reputation, through cultural positioning through the continual enfranchisement of the right kind of guests.

There’s also the tip-pool problem, which I totally understand. I have stood in front of servers who do not want to share their tips with someone who, at times, resembles their manager. This is totally fair, and it means the somm has to be useful in ways that have nothing to do with wine. Here are some suggestions: Run drinks. Reset tables. Seat guests. Polish glassware. Run food when the kitchen is drowning. Be fucking helpful. Do not behave as though you are above the job of a busser. If you can be the person the servers are genuinely relieved to see on the schedule, the tip-pool conversation gets less awkward.

And this is the thing: that versatility is not a concession. It’s the whole point.

There is no other role in a restaurant where you can go from the dish pit to a ten-minute conversation about Burgundy’s newest wave of micro-negociants. I have done it. That range — cellar to floor to dish pit to a table ordering Roulot — is not a compromise you make to justify your existence. It is, for me, what makes the job worth doing.

A good somm, the kind who did the jobs that lead up to being a somm, can do anything. The hard skills are unglamorous and specific: bussing, clearing, folding napkins, polishing glassware, resetting tables quickly, expediting. The soft skills are harder to teach: salesmanship, emotional intelligence, de-escalation, the ability to read a room and know what it needs before anyone asks. And then, layered on top of all of that, the somm holds the most esoteric information in the building. They know what a wine list is supposed to communicate, and they know how to communicate it to someone who may have zero frame of reference. They understand the overarching theory of hospitality the restaurant is aiming for — why a room feels the way it feels, why a guest decides to come back — and they can execute it at every station in the building.

Share Thirst Behavior

That person is worth the hourly, and their spot in the tip pool. They are worth the title and the dedicated time, even if they get to self-manage a bit more than your average line employee. But the argument only works if both sides hold up their end of the social contract. The somm has to actually work — and I mean work, not just sell wine and look cool. The operator has to fund the role like they mean it, not like it’s a line item to be engineered around. A cellar does not maintain itself. A list does not develop a point of view by accident. Staff training is not a distributor with thirty accounts reading aloud from a tech sheet at pre-shift. Good wine programs don’t happen when it’s someone’s second job.

Wine is everywhere and it’s more visible than ever. The person who makes it mean something is not. That gap is fixable. It just requires that everyone stop pretending the work is free.

My City Guides Project just launched. You can find the Hamptons Guide here

You can find my most recent feature here.

This post is for paid subscribers. Friday features are always free, but if you want the weekly intel and ongoing education—plus to support independent wine writing that doesn’t do scores or sponsors—upgrade whenever it feels right.

If you’d like to work together or have consulting inquiries, pitches, or scoops, please email me at bodhilanda@gmail.com.

Hello there!

Life out east is entering a phase known as deep summer: the humidity thickens, the crowds thicken, the restaurant guests get more demanding. Usually this begins the first week of August, but for some reason, it appears to have arrived early. This has me wishing I were back upstate, where this Sunday, July 19, the first-ever Atlantis Wine Fair is happening at Rose Hill Farm in Red Hook.

The event is the brainchild of Katy Morton, who is the wine director at Eliza Bistro and head buyer at Kingston Wine Co., and also someone I’m lucky enough to know personally. When I was still considering whether to make the move to Kingston, Katy was one of the people who made it clear that the Hudson Valley wasn’t just a scenic backdrop for city people playing farmer. It was, and is, a legitimate wine market, and I’d argue, one of the best in the country.

What do I mean by this? The Hudson Valley wine scene operates in this strange sweet spot: you get New York City prestige, New York state allocations on the list and Pennsylvania prices on the check. A bottle that would run you $90 at a wine bar in the East Village is $55 up here, poured by someone who probably knows the winemaker personally, and maybe used to run a special portfolio a reputable distributor in NYC. The talent density post-pandemic is absurd. The quality of farm produce is also absurd. The wine culture there is friendly, communitarian, unfussy and full of true weirdos (complimentary).

I’m not saying you should move to the Hudson Valley. I’m just saying it’s a great place to drink wine, and a lot of that is thanks to people like Katy, who decided to build something here instead of waiting for someone else to do it. Atlantis will feature 50+ wines, ciders, and vermouths from producers who are part of what the event describes as “the rising tide of the New York beverage world.” Food from Sira Ulō and Oyster Party. An afternoon outside at the farm. If you’re within driving distance, you should absolutely go.

In other news: I’m contributing a modest wine program to a new West Village restaurant opening slated for the end of this month. More on that soon!

Share Thirst Behavior

TASTING NOTES

• 1998 Dom Perignon — Dom Perignon is the Champagne that people who don’t know anything about Champagne know about. It’s the name that gets dropped in rap lyrics, the bottle that lands on a nightclub table with a sparkler in it, the default shorthand for “I have money and I want you to know it.” It’s also, despite all of that, one of the few “prestige cuvées” that genuinely rewards aging. Under the right conditions, a well-cellared Dom can go twenty-five, thirty years and come out the other side as something stranger and more interesting than the luxury product it was designed to be. This bottle was not on my list. It’s not something I would pay for. But it arrived for corkage at a table, and the guests were kind enough to pour me a glass once I’d opened it. The cork broke when I pulled on it. The cage around it practically disintegrated in my hand, as did the foil. I was able to get the rest of the cork out with a corkscrew, in a series of surgical maneuvers. The wine poured a deep golden color with very little visible bead. It smelled indelibly of grapefruit, caramel and smoke, and incense. On the palate it had just enough bubble to keep things interesting. The acidity was totally intact, carrying through flavors of burnt cherries, cashew/almond nuttiness, ginger snap cookies, and dead flowers. Good times!

Read more

And the wines reflect that shift immediately.

Subscribe now

The Climate: Mediterranean Rules

The Southern Rhône sits fully under a Mediterranean climate, which means:

Read more

You can find my most recent feature here.

Friday features are always free, but if you want the weekly intel and ongoing education—plus to support independent wine writing that doesn’t do scores or sponsors—upgrade whenever it feels right.

If you’d like to work together or have consulting inquiries, pitches, or scoops, please email me at bodhilanda@gmail.com.

Subscribe now

In 1986, NBC aired Kate’s Secret, a made-for-TV movie in which Meredith Baxter Birney plays a suburban housewife hiding her bulimia from her family. I have not seen this, and I probably won’t, but by the description, it sounds like a tidy little morality tale about a woman coming apart, and embracing her imperfections, and beginning recovery. Forty years later, John Early has made a film called Maddie’s Secret about a millennial food content creator whose professional life provokes a flare-up of long-latent eating disorder.

I was only cursorily familiar with John Early’s work before I saw this film last week. I found a lot of it superficially chuckle-worthy, but largely evasive — an endless, vexing stack of meta-jokes that seem to redound, above all, to meaninglessness. That he’d chosen food media as the subject of his directorial debut obviously piqued my interest. Seeing promo content where he talks to Alison Roman about how food videos on Instagram have assumed the visual rhetoric of pornography, I wondered what Early might add to the conversation. I, like many in my métier, arrived to the film ready to be flattered by way of roasting. That didn’t happen.

Maddie’s Secret is not a good satire of food media. It is not a good film about eating disorders. It is not a convincing psychological portrait of a woman in crisis. It gestures toward all three but declines to deliver on any of them. It is a messy pastiche of 2010s food media tropes, with nonsensical references to buzzy ingredients of the era: Meyer lemon, yuzu kosho, turmeric. The references are so obvious — Bon Appétit’s Test Kitchen, The Bear, the chauvinist media exec who would have met his demise in the #MeToo era — that anyone hoping for an incisive critique of that world is more likely to feel insulted than seen. Likewise, anyone hoping for a fresh take on disordered eating from the vantage point of the Ozempic era would likely have left just as unsatisfied.

But the film is not about food media, influencer culture, or eating disorders. What it actually is, beyond its plot machinery, is a performance built entirely out of other performances, and a total subversion of genre.

Early’s performance as the titular Maddie unfolds as a succession of instantly recognizable emotional poses presented as clichés: the coy deflection of praise; the carefully measured confidence that evaporates the moment she’s alone; the gasping orgasm; the grief-stricken collapse to her knees in the inpatient ward. These scenes propel the narrative forward, but they also function as citations of a genre we’ve all become painfully fluent in.

The strange thing is how the film’s emotional registers keep inverting. I found some of its most ostensibly serious scenes — the dramatic exposé of Maddie’s mother’s abuse, for instance — to be the funniest. Some of its campiest, stupidest moments, like Maddie discovering embodiment in a radically inclusive queer dance class, were genuinely moving. The film never settles into a stable relationship with its own material. You keep laughing at things you’re supposed to feel, and feeling things you’re supposed to laugh at.

Share Thirst Behavior

Maddie is less a character than an archive of modern feminine imagery. More than any of the film’s alleged subject matter, it made me think about Cindy Sherman.

Sherman’s photographs never simply depict women. They depict the accumulated images through which women have already been represented in popular culture. As Laura Mulvey writes, Sherman transforms herself into “a glossary of pose, gesture and facial expression,” assembling figures from cinema, fashion photography, melodrama, and advertising — from the visual debris of twentieth-century femininity — rather than from any stable interior identity. John Early is attempting something remarkably similar. The film doesn’t ask whether Maddie’s performances are authentic. It asks how they became recognizable in the first place.

The performance never attempts to erase Early’s own body. The film could have pursued a convincing illusion of femininity if it wanted to — or, you know, cast a woman in a film supposedly about women’s issues. It doesn’t. Every emotional crescendo is quietly interrupted by the same undeniable fact: Maddie is visibly John Early in a wig. The interruption is never played as a punchline, and the film never asks us to overlook it. Instead it becomes the mechanism through which the whole project operates. We never stop seeing Early. We never entirely stop believing Maddie. Mulvey describes something similar in Sherman’s photographs, where the viewer continually oscillates between seeing Sherman herself and seeing the feminine archetype she has assembled. The illusion never stabilizes, because the construction stays visible.

That oscillation is what makes the film’s emotional life so unpredictable. Sometimes you see Maddie — the earnest dishwasher, the wounded daughter, the perfectly imperfect millennial food personality — and the feeling lands. Sometimes you see John Early, fully committed to a performance of someone who is so obviously fake, and that commitment is itself the thing that moves you.

I’m still not sure why the dance class scenes affected me the way they did. On paper it’s flagrantly silly: John Early in drag finding catharsis in choreography, surrounded by a cast of characters so pointedly diverse they could have been focus-grouped in 2013. It should collapse under its own ridiculousness. And yet I felt something real watching it.

I saw John Early, not as a performer inhabiting someone else’s script, but as a writer building himself a room to stand in. There’s a version of this that Clint Eastwood has been doing for fifty years: constructing the scenarios, the redemptions, the moments of moral clarity that let him enact his own fantasies of masculinity, then stepping in to perform them himself. Early’s dance class felt like a version of that same move, run through a different set of fantasies — embodiment, acceptance, a room full of people cheering you into your own body. Call it his own phantasmatic identification, his very personal exercise of diva worship. What moved me wasn’t Maddie’s catharsis being performed by Early. It was Early borrowing Maddie’s narrative long enough to stage something he wanted, or needed, to experience himself.

Oscillation reshapes what the film seems to be about. Maddie’s bulimia initially appears to function as the psychological explanation for her relentless pursuit of perfection. But the more the film leans on familiar eating-disorder iconography — the furtive bingeing, the purging — the less interested it seems in the condition itself. The body becomes another representational problem, another image under pressure — the coherent, photogenic Maddie giving way to something that won’t hold its shape. Mulvey describes Sherman’s later work as dismantling the cosmetic surface of femininity, replacing polished appearances with bodily fluids, grotesque transformation — a “phantasmagoria of the female body.” Maddie’s Secret stages its own small version of that disintegration. Bulimia doubles here as narrative engine and the film’s most literal image of it’s own incoherence.

This is why I don’t see the film’s “failures” as incidental — they’re structural, and they’re necessary. A convincing satire of food media, or a genuinely affecting eating-disorder drama, would have resolved Maddie into a coherent psychological arc. Coherence is exactly what the oscillation can’t survive. The film has to stay a mess, because a tidy Maddie is a Maddie that Early risks disappearing into.

This is what Jack Halberstam calls “the queer art of failure.” Halberstam argues that failure can be its own kind of politics — a refusal to succeed on terms set by dominant culture, and in that refusal, a way of exposing how coercive those terms actually were all along. Early’s Sherman-esque drag that never fully convinces, and never resolves, feels aligned with this project. Maddie’s Secret isn’t incompetent. It’s refusing a certain kind of legibility. It fails at food media, at trauma narrative, at psychological realism, for the same reason: competence would be way too easy.

Maddie herself is barely a character — a caricature assembled out of other women’s crises, other women’s recoveries. What’s amazing is Early’s devotion to her anyway: total commitment to someone who was never meant to convince anyone. Genre, here, is a ruse — a shape borrowed long enough to get him a room where the real representational work happens. But even that reading doesn’t hold for long. In the end, Maddie takes off. I don’t know if that’s Maddie evading her own diagnosis, or Early evading mine. Either way, the film seems intent on outrunning us.

My City Guides Project just launched. You can find the Hamptons Guide here

You can find my most recent feature here.

This post is for paid subscribers. Friday features are always free, but if you want the weekly intel and ongoing education—plus to support independent wine writing that doesn’t do scores or sponsors—upgrade whenever it feels right.

If you’d like to work together or have consulting inquiries, pitches, or scoops, please email me at bodhilanda@gmail.com.

The creator economy runs on a single endlessly renewable resource: yourself. Delia Cai names this well in her latest piece for Deez Links — oversharing isn’t just content strategy, it’s practically good manners, a way of signaling you understand that your relationships are mediated by platforms. The more you disclose, the more you’re rewarded. The messier, the better. But Cai also names the trap: once you’ve trained an audience to expect access, withdrawal looks like betrayal. Disclosure starts to feel less like a gift and more like a contract.

The question underneath all of this is simple and mostly unasked: if authenticity is always a performance, what’s the honest move? John Early’s Maddie’s Secret, which I saw at IFC last week, has a better answer than most essays on the subject. The film is ostensibly about food media and eating disorders. It fails at both. The film refuses to succeed on any of the terms its genres establish for themselves. The refusal is the argument.

These are dynamics I find constantly vexing as I continue to explore the supposed ‘creator economy.’ Taste and the performance of taste are not separable. The wig is there, we just don’t always mention it. I know this because I’m doing it. This newsletter mines my life, my taste, my hours on the floor, and converts them into content that, hopefully, gives readers a sense of what its like to be a **person in wine. Some weeks that feels cathartic. Some weeks it feels like a trick I’ve gotten good at. Early’s film makes the case that honesty and technique aren’t opposites. The wig is the honest part. I have more thoughts on this film coming at you this Friday.

Here’s what I’m paying attention to this week:

Share Thirst Behavior

TASTING NOTES

• The ‘Golden Glow’ Smoothie at DRUGSTORE (which is a wellness café popping up inside of Montauk Beach House) with Organic Pineapple, Orange Juice, Carrot Juice, Banana, Vanilla Collagen, Turmeric, Ginger, Lion’s Mane, Maple Syrup, Coconut Cream, and Coconut Milk, Whose Ingredients Can Only Be Learned Via a QR-Code, That Costs 20 Dollars And That Looks Like a Helen Frankenthaler Painting — Pretty good.

Read more