Brinkley's with Friends

As you well know, we try to focus on the local. We buy local wines whenever possible, and we try to enjoy restaurants that work with local ingredients. Unfortunately, it's tough to find restaurants around NYC that do both. Many restaurants carefully source their foodstuff from local farms, so going so far as to list the farms they work with, yet very few places really embrace the local New York wine regions. Instead, you find French, Italian, and Californian wines on those same restaurants' wine lists.

Thankfully, we know of one place to rely on for both. When we tried to grab dinner with some friends at our old standby, Public, we found that we couldn't get a seat. Thinking quickly, we decided to head around the corner to Brinkley's. A spacious bar and restaurant, Brinkley's focuses on the products of New York. The menu is filled with hearty fare from local farms, while the bar is stocked with only wines and beer from New York.

Brinkley's is a popular place. On this trip, we managed to sneak in ahead of the crowds, and found ourselves a table to camp out at for the evening. We enjoyed a long, casual evening with our friends, sharing some of our knowledge of New York wines with them among the many topics of conversation. It was fun for us to be able to show off our knowledge and make some recommendations, since it's not often that we know the wine list so intimately. We knew it here, of course, because New York wines are our bread and butter. And we're always grateful to find restaurants who showcase them as we like to do.