Thirst Behavior is a project about wine, taste, and the social performances that form around them, the rituals of enjoyment shaped by status, media, money, and desire. Wine is the entry point; the real subject is how taste gets made, circulated, and contested, especially in New York and the Hamptons, where leisure and tastemaking overlap most visibly.

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.

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.