About five years ago, I started noticing a new kind of wine service cropping up in restaurants—one that did away with the list altogether. Instead of a printed menu, or a chalkboard, a mirror or an iPad, there was simply a server, a few open bottles, and a quasi-magical feeling that everything had already been taken care of.
At Ops in Bushwick, this worked nicely. Their by-the-glass program has always been small and intentional and curated with care. You ask what’s good tonight, and someone tells you, easily and without pretense. It feels like a conversation rather than a transaction. For a neighborhood pizza joint, that kind of theater makes sense. It adds a charming touch of mystery to something otherwise humble—a small dose of interactive performance to keep us entertained.
A few years later, my friend DJ Piazza pulled off a version of the same idea at Margot’s in New Orleans. The bottles were lined up on the back bar, prices scribbled in wax crayon—the kind that wine shops use to look French. The setup invited curiosity rather than anxiety. You could see the entire scope of the program because the bottles were on display, and if you wanted to know more, DJ would grab one and walk you through it. The exchange was verbal, but the information was visible. It was personal and casual, but also fair. You weren’t guessing what anything cost. You could see the whole ecology of the place from your seat. Like Ops, this was a neighborhood pizza restaurant, and a touch of orchestrated interaction like that elevated the simple rhythm of ordering pizza, salad, and wine.
Recently I went to Lei in Chinatown and had a similar experience. By all accounts, Lei is excellent. It serves refined Chinese American small plates in a tiny, beautiful room with eight tables and a few bar seats. Their wine director, Annie Shi (of King fame), has curated what feels like a perfect wine bar wine list: cult producers like Raveneau, Laherte Frères, Thierry Allemand, and Marnes Blanches; a deep bench of grower Champagnes; a traditional Super Tuscan and a vertical of Cappellano Barolo for the finance bros coming over from Tribeca; and plenty of great Burgundies. There are bottles in the several thousands of dollars, but you can also get a delicious Langhe Nebbiolo from Stefano Occhetti for eighty-five bucks.
The list itself is printed, but the by-the-glass program is verbal. We didn’t have time for a whole bottle—nor the time to thoroughly peruse their thirty-something-page wine list—so we asked about a sparkling wine by the glass. There were only two: one, from what I could tell, was a Cava; the other, a traditional-method German Riesling. The server—clearly good at his job—seemed to really like the German one, and it sounded interesting, so we went with it. It was bright, detailed, and taut with a tart, pointed acidity enveloped in fine, mousse-like bubbles.
The wine was great, the sale frictionless, and we ordered a second glass to share as we finished our chilled celtuce with red vinegar and sesame shao bing. This wine—and I still don’t know the producer or appellation—was thirty dollars a glass. Now, this didn’t bother, or even surprise me; I just realized how much the entire exchange depended on tone. Without a list, the cues shift from facts to vibes. You’re not comparing vintages or prices; you’re reading confidence, cadence, and intent. When that fluency exists—when both sides share a language of taste and trust—the no-list model can be wonderful. When it doesn’t, it’s a lot of guesswork for everyone involved.
For guests, the appeal of this setup is obvious. It removes a moment of friction. Most people don’t want to read a wine list—they want a good glass of wine and to return to their conversation. Even I, a list obsessive, sometimes skip it if the pace of the evening doesn’t allow for focus. If a server is hovering, if I’m catching up with friends, if the restaurant feels quick and social, I’ll order a martini and treat the wine list as post-meal entertainment instead.
For small restaurants with competent staff, there are practical upsides too. It allows for flexibility and improvisation. You can open bottles you’re excited about without reprinting menus or erasing chalkboards midway through service. You can move inventory that needs to move. You’re not beholden to a five-case drop of something you don’t believe in just to guarantee weekend supply. It lets the people who serve the wine treat it as part of a larger hospitality strategy, not just an inventory puzzle. When done well, the verbal program becomes a live system—responsive, adaptable, and expressive of a restaurant’s daily rhythm.
The ideal situation, for both guest and restaurant, is the same: the right bottle, arriving at the right time, with as little friction as possible. But friction is what makes good information design matter, whether it’s printed or spoken. The challenge isn’t removing it—it’s shaping it gracefully.
Critics like John Sumners in Wine Enthusiast (“Not Having a Written Wine List Is Trendy—and a Bad Idea”) and David Mastro Scheidt (“No Wine List? No Way”) have called the no-list trend opaque, arguing that it privileges insiders and confuses everyone else. They’re not wrong, but I think they miss the nuance. The verbal model isn’t about withholding information; it’s about building intimacy. It’s an attempt to make wine feel alive again—to invite conversation, to guide guests toward something they might not find on their own.
When I’m working the floor, someone inevitably slides the wine book back across the table, untouched, and says, “I’m in your hands, bro.” It’s nice to hear, but rarely true. What they usually mean is, I don’t want to think about this right now. Fair enough: dinner is about pleasure, not homework. But I often slide the list back and say, “I’ll give you another moment.” I need them to have a general sense of the program’s regional focus and median price before I pull a recommendation out of the ether. When I return, they’ve usually at least glanced at the list and they say something like, “Okay, I want a great bottle, but not the five-thousand-dollar Château Margaux.” That’s a start. Or they’ve realized I don’t have Shiraz, and we end up talking about Rhône reds instead.
A printed list gives everyone a map. A verbal list asks us to build one together. When it works, that collaboration is beautiful; when it doesn’t, it’s awkward. Most guests aren’t trained to describe what they like, and most sommeliers aren’t trained to listen closely enough to translate it—or to interpret the other behavioral cues. The exchange only succeeds when both sides have an anchor. A good somm reads your tone, your appetite for risk, the mood of the evening, and meets you there. They undersell before they oversell. They make the choice feel mutual. A bad one performs confidence without context—they talk at you, not with you. The difference is subtle but seismic.
A note for the guests: you have to participate. Give real clues. Tell me what you’ve liked before, even if you think it sounds gauche. Offer a price window, not a ceiling. Be curious, but don’t surrender responsibility. “I trust you” only works if you mean it. And trust that I’m gleaning more valuable information from how you communicate about wine than what you say.
The all-verbal list can be a brilliant expression of a restaurant’s personality—provided it’s rooted in mastery, not opacity. Ops works because it’s simple and low-stakes. Margot’s works because it’s visible. Lei didn’t work because there was no anchoring information about the wines by the glass, and the experience didn’t feel thoughtful. If you’re going to ditch the paper, fine. But what replaces it can’t just be charm; it has to be competence.
I’m always interested in the ways people want to innovate with wine service. The goal isn’t to defend a single format but to keep experimenting with how wine arrives at the table. There should be room for multiple moods and methods. If the flow of service allowed for it, I’d love nothing more than for a sommelier to take me into the cellar and talk through bottles the way a chef might walk you through a garden. Another model I’ve imagined for years (though not my idea originally): every wine is the same price, so the recommendation is really guided purely by taste. It would take clever menu engineering to make it viable, but it’s hardly impossible.
A verbal wine program has to make sense within the system it lives in. It should be designed with intention and serve the larger project of hospitality. Otherwise, what feels like intimacy starts to look like laziness—or worse, manipulation. The best service, no matter the format, rests on generosity, transparency, and skill. We all want the sense that someone, somewhere, has already thought it through. The best lists, spoken or printed, just let us believe for a moment that hospitality is effortless. It never is. But it’s lovely when it feels that way.
If you’ve seen a version of this done beautifully—or disastrously—hit reply. I’m collecting stories.
True story - years ago in a Seattle neighborhood bistro near us adopted this practice and a server rushed through/mumbled/mispronounced the wines so badly that we spent years trying to find what sounded like “Queen Latifah” wine that was exceptionally good, thinking she might have bought a vineyard. It was a primitivo. Would have loved the list to know exactly where it was from, but the upside is now whenever we encounter a great primitivo, we can wonder if it’s “that good Queen Latifah wine”.
I love the way the wine ‘lists’ are evolving in really thoughtful, smaller places.