Saint Urban Is NYC’s Best New Restaurant for Wine

If you’re interested in sending your friends’ and family’s eyes rolling back into their skulls, I recommend talking about wine. Great stuff, wine, and fascinating to the 2 percent or so of the population who enjoy digging into the minutiae of soil, sun, altitude, and the various vine-positioning systems. Oenophiles (ugh) love to trot out Thomas Jefferson’s old chestnut that wine is “bottled poetry.” I couldn’t agree more. How many people do you know lining up to go hear poetry?

That wine is a wonderful and time-honored complement to a meal is a well-established trope. It is also a boon to restaurateurs. Wine, at least until our current tariff mania, is a high-margin product, and restaurant markups by the bottle are often in the 300 percent range. As wine has gotten trendy over the last few years, especially in its low-intervention, biodynamic iterations, wine bars have proliferated, often with very good food. The wine restaurant, where the work of the brigade follows a deep, thoughtful cellar, is a rarer thing.

A few months ago, a new one sprouted on the bones of an old one. Chef Jared Stafford-Hill relocated a restaurant called Saint Urban from Syracuse to the old Veritas space on East 20th Street in May, bringing his personal 4,000-bottle collection with him. Veritas, which closed in 2013, launched 100 wine careers; it was “the city’s original wine-geek club,” as Adam Platt memorably put it, though others, like Drew Nieporent’s Montrachet, might like a word.

Stafford-Hill isn’t a new arrival. He’s cooked at Craft, Gramercy Tavern, and Alain Ducasse’s Adour, and worked as a server at Veritas. It’s a statement of purpose that he chose this location — he swooped it up as soon as it hit the market — for his return. Here, one of our servers explained, the food follows the wine, literally. Each month, a new tasting menu is unveiled, dedicated to a particular country or region: Champagne in February, Piedmont in November (truffle season, naturally). For September, we’re in the Southern Rhône, home of the Châteauneuf-du-Pape appellation. The menus are ordered so that the produce and pairings emphasize seasonality: the Southern Rhône, in the deep south of France, is home to artichokes, fennel, eggplant, and peppers, all in abundance right now.

Stafford-Hill offers two different tasting menus: four courses for $148 or seven for $188. (They overlap significantly but not entirely.) Alongside, diners choose one of five pairing menus, which range in price from $112 all the way to $480 for true rarities. Some pairings allow deep and vertical tastings of a selected producer; others roam all across the region. (The region of the month takes over the by-the-glass list as well, so if you don’t want to commit to a full pairing, you can try selections you will never otherwise see by the glass.) Finally, for those who want to move outside the region of the month, the full bottle list is always available, and its markdowns are significantly below what many of its competitors charge. Clos Rougeard’s “Le Clos” Cabernet Franc from the Loire is $483 at Saint Urban for a 2008. At Daniel, the same bottle is $1,100. If you’re really balling out, a bottle of 1995 Petrus — arguably the finest producer of Merlot in the world — is $3,938 at Saint Urban and $12,000 at Daniel.

This kind of cellar Saint Urban maintains — its wine list runs to 140 pages — is increasingly rare in New York restaurants and nearly unheard of in new ones. Building it takes time and effort and skill, and we’ve seen very recently how quickly they can be scattered to the wind: During the pandemic, plenty of restaurants sold their cellars to collectors or retailers just to survive. As Victoria James, the beverage director and a partner at Coqodaq and Cōte, wrote recently in her new newsletter that in the slow build back post-COVID, “the trend tilted toward leaner lists: two tidy pages, maybe padded with plenty of white space to soften the blow.” Now, she declares, citing Saint Urban as her prime example, “wine cellars — the deep, ambitious kind — are back in fashion.”

“Back in fashion” doesn’t necessarily mean “popular.” Even priced-to-move lists don’t move if people don’t drink them. Most diners, it’s fair to assume, will never spend $12,000 on a bottle of wine. I am among them. I have never spent $483, either, and don’t plan to anytime soon. But for $178 — a hefty sum, make no mistake — Saint Urban’s “older wines” pairing provided benchmark wines I am not likely to drink again without a windfall. The youngest among them was about 12 years old; the oldest, older than my husband. Should you want to drink 35-year-old Grenache that’s been relaxing in its bottle since around the time Pretty Woman was first in theaters?

I’d recommend everyone try it once. If you’ve only had the stuff they pour by the glass at every random bistro — good, workaday young wine with which I can find no fault at all — you’ve had something worthy, but something different. That Domaine de Beaurenard 1990 from Châteauneuf-du-Pape — the grapes grown, harvested, pressed, and fermented all on the property, by the eighth generation of a family that’s been doing it since 1695 — it’s just something else. This is what I would say to the 2 percent of the world who loves to talk about this: What would’ve tasted in its youth like black cherries and clove has grown into something less moody and high-strung, drowsy, almost dusty, but introspective. A little incense, a whisper of pepper. Blackberry jam put up ages ago by a grandmother who (sorry) made better preserves than yours or mine. And by the way, it’s fabulous with a peppered cap of sirloin, tender, crackle-edged, and perfectly medium rare.

I wish Saint Urban would add an à la carte option menu to broaden its reach. On a recent Saturday night, the dining room was reassuringly bustling, with a younger crowd than I would’ve expected. The room is a bit austere, gray-toned and windowless, but the staff’s hyperattentiveness never comes with the unsmiling starchiness common among this set.

Expect your seven courses to take time. There are amuses-bouches, porcini croissants, cheese courses, mignardises. You expect fish in sauce, game birds and foie gras — it’s all there. I particularly liked a raw starter of Hokkaido scallop, with artichokes, olives, and a tomato-watermelon broth; the peppered rib cab; and an ethereal little disc of peach melba for dessert. To drink: marzipan and heather honey issued from golden pours of CNDP blanc. Licorice root peeking out from the dark corners of both my glass and quail jus. My notes got blurry at a certain point. The table filled with glasses.

Whatever the family doctors of the third century might say, today’s have a different take: Don’t do this too often. Get regular exercise. Try to see the light of day. But the past is worth revisiting now and then, especially as a bulwark against our optimized present. Time softens all of us, wine included. As for historical memory, how often can you order it in visceral form? There’s a 1937 Lafite on the menu. It hasn’t known the horrors of World War II, let alone doomscrolling, vaccine skepticism, or reservation bots. Nearly a century in a glass. There are worse ways to glimpse the smudgy edges of the sublime.