What is a modern American wine bar? It is a bar, obviously; it absolutely serves wine, which has certainly been fermented from grapes that were definitely grown somewhere. It is light and Scandinavian, unless it is dark and Viennese. It is in New York City or Philadelphia or Los Angeles or Taos, and the menu, which is printed, unless it isn’t, exclusively features cold bar snacks, unless it features lobster au poivre.
For taxonomists of dining, it also raises questions: Is this a wine bar or is this a restaurant? “There’s, like, a frustration,” says Jacob Nass, co-owner and beverage director of Demo (opened in 2024) in Manhattan, amiably mocking food media. We keep demanding answers! “Where does the wine bar end and the restaurant begin?” he says, referencing the latest of the headlines. “It’s like, ‘Figure it out already!’”
On some level, the question is absurd. A restaurant can serve wine—a very good, very ambitious, very well-curated selection of wine—and a wine bar can serve a similarly very good, very ambitious, very well-curated selection of food. What is the point of quibbling over labels?
On another level, though, labels are quite useful, both for general communication and because our current collective infatuation with wine bars reflects a change in our priorities: In the post-pandemic era, we do not want multi-hour guided dining experiences. What we want is to hang out. We want to do it casually, glamorously and in public. We want to do it at the cool new modern wine bar, a category as bafflingly flexible as it is unmistakably distinct. It isn’t the impulse that’s new, but the intensity. There are so many cool new modern wine bars; by the time you read this, there will certainly be more. And if the cool new modern wine bar is a reflection of our dreams and aspirations (luxuriously hanging out), it is worth considering exactly how the cool new modern wine bar works.
“The cool new modern wine bar is ambitious, but it does not drone on about it, the same way that off-duty models supposedly wear jeans.”
Grand overstatements: The service at the cool new modern wine bar is meticulously casual. The division between front and back of house is tenuous, if it exists at all. The menu, which likely features at least one crudo and a local sourdough with cultured butter, may not be available online. There may or may not be a website, either to cultivate an air of tossed-off mystery, or because the operation doesn’t have the staff. It does, however, have an Instagram, which features lo-fi posters about DJ sets and pop-ups, and snapshots of the staff. The colors skew bold, and slightly off-kilter, rich eggplant and hot chartreuse and deep adobe orange. Perhaps in retaliation for years of Scandi-dominance, the woods tend to be warm. The branding projects a sense of hand-drawn whimsy, more intimate than twee.
“You’re dealing with something that is historically kind of elitist,” says Jesse Morrow, a co-owner at Company (2022), which occupies a garage in Portland, Oregon. The “punk element” is a way to undercut that. This attitude is a reversal of those at the first-generation American wine bars, which were so focused on wine appreciation (Did you really taste the flinty notes? Did you?) that they forgot that going out and drinking is supposed to be fun. In the 2010s a number of wine bars in New York (Terroir, The Four Horsemen, Ten Bells) began to chip away at the archetype, making way for the current wine bar boom. The education is available if you desire it—these are wine nerds, after all; they love talking about wine—but if you don’t, who cares?! The point is that you’re having a good time.
The cool new modern wine bar is, at its core, a back-to-basics enterprise. “I think that’s a big part of what resonates with people,” says Nass, assessing the immediate success of Demo. “It doesn’t feel like there’s some kind of mission statement beyond the obvious.” The cool new modern wine bar is ambitious, but it does not drone on about it, the same way that off-duty models supposedly wear jeans. It is, in fact, so chill about its pedigree (the cool new modern wine bar is extraordinarily well-credentialed) that it may not identify as a wine bar at all. It is a living room, a house party, a club.
The interiors at Lise & Vito in Greenpoint, Brooklyn.
Stir Crazy (2023) in Los Angeles, for example, is a wine bar according to the media—a notion reinforced by the roughly 300-SKU wine list, printed once a week—but considers itself a café. “We kind of transcend the idea of a wine bar,” says co-owner Mackenzie Hoffman. “‘Café’ allows us to wear many different hats.” They cannot be boxed in. “We have purposefully not tried to go in one direction,” says Nass, who’d originally conceived of Demo as a capital W-B Wine Bar but now personally considers it a restaurant. “There’s equal opportunity,” says Vincent Stipo, one half of Superfolie (2023) in Philadelphia. “You can sit at a table for 10 minutes and get a glass of wine and be on your way, or you can stay for three hours and make dinner out of our menu.”
Every bar and restaurant is selling fantasy. Here, the vision is a single place so breezily hospitable it can frictionlessly realize all your potential needs. At Brooklyn’s Lise & Vito (2023), a low-key hangout transitions into an after-hours dance party where you can double-fist a pét-nat and a draft Paloma; at Stir Crazy, come for golden hour business drinks and stay for a languorous dinner with your young, attractive family. “The shape-shifting ability of our space is kind of the dreaminess about it,” says Hoffman of Stir Crazy.
Unlike the standard-issue restaurant, where you sit once you are seated, the cool new modern wine bar is designed to foster movement, or at least suggest that movement is possible. Demo may have an ambitious and indulgent food program—a half-chicken with turnips is in no world a “bar snack”—but it’s built for mingling. “There’s always a lot of getting up to shake hands and chat and have a glass together,” Nass reports, a product of an unconventional layout featuring two separate bars. “We could have just had more dining tables,” says designer Courtney Schneider, but “this felt more interactive.” Thanks to bar-height tables, New York’s Cellar 36 (2023) “doesn’t feel like sitting in the restaurant,” co-owner Nodar Toronjadze says. “It just feels like you could stand up anytime you want.” At Céleste (2023), in San Francisco, it’s quite likely you’ll have to; the hyperminimalist space offers almost no seating at all. “Standing room is very much our signature,” says co-owner Lalo Luevano. The food may be Greek taverna, but the ambiance is dive.
“We still get people who walk in, and they’re like, ‘Table for two.’ And I’m like, ‘The world’s your oyster, babes. Get in where you fit.’”
If there is a single inspiration for this mode of nonrestaurant dining, it is “Europe,” or, occasionally, “Mexico City.” For Superfolie’s Stipo and his partner, Chloé Grigri, it is specifically “France,” where, Grigri explains, there is a wider variety of not-quite-restaurants; abroad, “the line is a little bit more blurred in terms of how you label something.” Place des Fêtes (2022), in Brooklyn, takes its general inspiration from Spain, although it is not “Spanish.” In the U.S., says Brittany Myrick, who owns Lise & Vito, “wine bar” has historically connoted the same structured formality as “restaurant,” whereas she wanted to capture what she’d seen in Paris or Barcelona, a laid-back hole-in-the-wall with a great wine list and good snacks. “We still get people who walk in, and they’re like, ‘Table for two,’” she says. “And I’m like, ‘The world’s your oyster, babes. Get in where you fit.’”
Above all else, and in all its iterations, the cool new modern wine bar is built for spontaneity, or at least the illusion of it. For years, “going out” was fraught because of the pandemic; when people started to emerge, the reservation apps had taken over, and suddenly everything required planning and commitment, which, while often virtues, aren’t very fun. The cool new modern wine bar is, by contrast, effortless. Some do take reservations, but they are designed to exude ease. “You don’t have to love wine,” says Myrick, who is herself a sommelier. What you have to love is the romance of going out.
Colorways
At Stir Crazy, the back wall is painted a deep eggplant, echoed in the upholstery on the back of the banquette. At Lise & Vito, the chartreuse banquette contrasts with the pink terrazzo bar, which is designed to evoke either a party atmosphere or a meat plate (the bar can provide either). The moody olive tiles behind the bar at Superfolie are meant to recall the Mediterranean Sea; the burnt sienna at Place des Fêtes gestures toward “Spain.” If there is a universal thread here, it is that the colors are both bold and slightly quirky, eye-catching but with an edge.
Service
“We’re not messing with a high level of customer maintenance,” says Jori Jayne Emde, a co-owner of Corner Office, in Taos, New Mexico. That means the water comes in a carafe; after the initial half-glass, you pour your own wine from the bottle. There is no fussing and no preening. “We don’t have a big staff,” says Nodar Toronjadze, of Cellar 36, which is by design. “That kind of allows you to have service where it’s not super attentive, but just the right amount.”
Seating
The cool new modern wine bar has a number of seating options: barstools and booths and tables and banquettes—even folding chairs—in various combinations. You could hunker down at a low top. You could perch at the drink rail, like a European. (“In Europe,” notes Place des Fêtes chef and co-owner Nico Russell, “you do everything at the drink rail.”) The flexibility of seating—real or imagined—gives the cool new modern wine bar a distinctly nonrestaurant energy.
Menu
The food program, if there is one, is designed for flexibility, catering simultaneously to light snackers and diners seeking a multicourse meal. Generally, the menu is progressive, culminating in a tight list of selected mains (duck leg à l’orange with Sichuan peppercorn at Corner Office; Stir Crazy’s stuffed cabbage with barley in porcini consommé). The ingredients and influences vary, but there will be steak tartare.
Name
The cool new modern wine bar’s name is not clever. There are no puns. It is one word, or two words, or potentially three, counting the preposition, if it is French (Place des Fêtes, Plus de Vin). It is often artfully ambiguous. “Demo” is named for the park around the corner from the bar, Father Demo Square, but the name “flirts with the possibility of a deeper meaning,” says Nass. (Demonstration? Demolition?) “Céleste” is named for a fictional regular; “Superfolie” is a made-up French word.
Logo
At Place des Fêtes, it is a loopy illustration of an anthropomorphized wine bottle. At Superfolie, it’s a line drawing of an elephant-esque creature with wings. Often—at Céleste and Cellar 36 and Demo—it is the name in script that appears to be hand-drawn. It is not slick. It is not formal. Like the cool new modern wine bar’s Instagram, the logo is studiously analog. Cellar 36 considered an alternative design that was “much more beautiful,” says co-owner Toronjadze, but it wasn’t right. “It’s a shame,” he remembers thinking, “but I think we have to go with something a little more direct, simpler, slightly more, I would say, industrial.”
Extracurriculars
In addition to being (in some combination), a restaurant, a café, a hangout and a party, the cool new modern wine bar is a venue. There are pop-ups and parties and DJ residencies, suggesting that the cool new modern wine bar is a character in a cool new social universe, and its cool attractive friends are simply stopping by! “There’s a little bit of a punk element to it,” says Jesse Morrow at Company. This isn’t fussy wine; this is fun wine.
