Where Does the Wine Bar End and the Restaurant Begin?

Pét-nats, pan roasts, and a lobster on the loose at Penny and Demo.

- MATTHEW SCHNEIER

Wine bars are taking over the city, naturally—keeping pace with the natural wine boom and as a matter of course. There’s no imported trend New York will not digest and then supercharge. The diminutive bars à vin of Paris, where you get a splash of better-than-ever local plonk and a little saucer of saucisson sec, are urban treasures where you can expect grumpy service (in English, at least) and indulge existentialist fantasies. But the influential neo-wine bars that began cropping up in New York—Estela in 2013 and the Four Horsemen and Wildair, which followed in 2015—were really wine restaurants, not in the sense of the old Montrachet, with its groaning cellar and white-tablecloth cuisine, but reservation-requiring, full-menu-offering, ambitious renovations of the grubby-casual original. In tweaking the formula, they have scrubbed off some of the grit that ennobled the form. Today’s New York wine bars, groused Aaron Ayscough, a Paris-based wine writer, feel like seated indie-rock shows held inside fancy theaters. “Admittedly,” he added, “I still enjoy those.”