This Valentine’s Day, we’re dreaming of some other restaurants we adore: restaurants past and present, places that have given us solace after a long night in the form of spice-slicked noodles or raging-hot miso soup, places that quietly scaffold the love of a tired family or a new relationship, places whose dishes have a Proustian power to bring us back to days well spent, meals long-lingered over, company well kept. In this issue, we’ve penned some love letters to treasured places in the city and further afield…
What becomes clear in these valentines is the way a restaurant can serve as a third place—a place that feels like home but crucially isn’t. A place that breeds intimacy in many forms. This month we’re launching a New Wave Winemaker series, and we’ve invited winemakers in from Germany, France, and California who are breaking new ground to come tell us all about it over curated, ticketed dinners and one BTG takeover. The wine program at Smithees was always meant to deviate from tradition (some might even say to “shock”) but it was also built to create literal and figurative room for these experiences, a place to connect with these renegades firsthand. We kicked off the series with Alexander Schregel’s “New Wave Germany” Tuesday night, and we’ve invited two of the other visiting wine makers: Pierre-Henri Rougeot and Martha Stoumen to tell us a bit about themselves via a Proustian questionnaire of our own making (did Proust really just pop up twice?).
Roses are red
violets are blue
the wines are flowing
so too, our love for you.
xoxo
Smithereens
Speaking of Valentine’s Day
Come hang with us on Friday—we’re keeping it simple: serving up whole fish specials for one and for two: kinmedai, Japanese mackerel, or this Dover sole with sea lettuce vinaigrette…
Solos get special treatment at the chef’s counter; no judgement for those who don’t want to share.
Three Words, Eight Letters, Nine Notes
Have you ever tried writing a love letter to a place?
We rose to the challenge, pouring our hearts out to our most beloved kitchens: it felt awkward, but also somehow right, cathartic…
~~~
Dear Tolo,
You have been a warm refuge in the bitter cold months as well as a destination to cool down on sweltering summer days. Glasses of Riesling with the cold spicy chicken (with the apt description of "mouthwatering") nourish my soul and fuel my deep admiration for you. I have moments where I crave your fries: flakes of seaweed and the lingering flavor of MSG invading my mind and making me long for you. The hugs, laughs, comfort, and joy, the promise of satisfying food and the potential to try a new wine, will always keep me at your door.
—Nikita Malhotra
Love to le croc,
If I am, in any sense, geographically close, I often go to Le Crocodile. There are faces I look for when I stumble in for lunch——Chaya, Gabriella, Dennis, Brian, among others. They are maybe the most essential part. It can’t be understated, however, that to be offered a roast chicken and fries at 2 pm on any given weekday is perhaps a most favorite luxury. I could wax poetic about a perfect Waldorf salad or consecutive espresso shots or that sticky toffee pudding. Instead, a scene:
A Saturday in June: the call time for work is later. We’re hungry, newly enamored, and renewed from the nearby sauna. I tell him maybe we could go sit at the bar: maybe my favorite two seats in the corner. We sit, we order, we hold hands. There are beloved witnesses to this fresh connection on the clock. We hold hands and time stops. He says this reminds him of home—I agree. To be loved is to be known.
—Hannah Harrington
Oh Takahachi,
Your tables are small, your music is muffled, and your sushi just passable, but every time I come you treat me like family. You welcome me with a smile as I walk in the door, and join in chorus to thank me when I leave. And, come to think of it, there is something truly special about you; something that makes me forget how scalding hot your miso soup is, how sticker-bombed your bathrooms are, and how foggy your front window gets. I haven’t been in a while, but I promise I will soon, to share some cheap sake and spicy rolls with someone as close to me as you are.
—Will Harmon
Saltie,
I know this letter is a call out into the void, but your absence is a lingering pain that this letter might work to wring out.
Now that you're gone, I see how few and far between our times together were, knowing all the time how close you were to me. I could have been there all the more; could have tried that other sandwich that I always considered only to fall back on my standards; could have ordered the handwritten specials and the Arnold Palmer riff.
I was too young to understand how quickly the firmament falls away and the foundations of the neighborhood routine can crumble. So many loves and losses have come since then, but your name captures a wistful sigh from those who knew you.
Thank you for showing me the power of small distinctions—I still make ricotta in your fashion. I still scramble my eggs as you did. And perhaps most painfully, you showed me that a lowly hummus sandwich could be the best on the menu: a transcendent, restorative experience—something so few that I've known since you have dared to dream.
In a world where so many sandwich counters struggle to shine as brightly as your afterimage, I'm forever sitting at your counter.
—Logan Rodriguez
A Guide to a Flawless Dining Experience at Ops,
I may have just moved here from Phoenix, Arizona, and I shouldn’t brag about having anything figured out—but I have absolutely figured out how to eat at Ops since arriving back in October. I love Ops.
I’ve eaten there more than anywhere else since moving here and I wouldn’t have it any other way, so this is how we do it:
1. Sit at the bar.
2. Get at least one bottle of wine. That list is like the Woodstock 1999 artist lineup. I will not expand on that.
3. Order the Market Salad that arrives looking like a bouquet of flowers from your significant other.
4. I truly have no guidance to give about what pizza you should get because they’re all very good and it just comes down to you as a person. Cowabunga!
5. Get that second bottle of wine but keep the next step in mind when ordering it.
6. Finish with a piece of the Amaro Cake and a shot of amaro too. YOLO!
I hope what you just read has changed your life and you are now a better person but if it hasn’t then you probably already knew all this and are doing well!
——Haran McElroy
Rose VL,
I think about you at least twice a week. I’m still looking for a bowl of soup to replace you. The long distance is wearing on me.
Xoxo
—Isa Zeh
To Zimmi’s,
You may be new to the scene, you may be too loud for my soft-spoken mannerisms, and you may attract some diners with too many brashly-formed opinions about what they’re eating but—in weaving my way to you through snow-laden streets on a quiet Sunday evening, passing by the IFC marquee memorializing David Lynch and wondering at the fragility of life, the nearness of disaster, the chest-tightening omniscience of absurdity these days, I found myself opening your foggy door to a warm, charmingly cramped room and relishing more than comfort in the anchovy-strewn pissaladière, the artichoke soup, the silken ratatouille, and braised lentils by the spoonful—all washed down with a l’amour perse. L’amour indeed: you wield the kind of magic that makes a girl fall in love with New York, all over again, as thick snowflakes stick to your tiny, shimmering storefront.
—Cordelia Calvert
Dear Spicy Village,
I am not beautiful when I am with you but I am happy. My white shirts all bear the marks of your love; red dots of chili oil becoming rust in the wash. But I would stain a thousand shirts in a thousand lives for just one more bowl of #15 spicy lamb huimei.
—Jacob Dorman
To the Alley in Oakland,
I love you for having a kitchen; so it wasn't totally illegal when my mom would drag my little brother and I to your little piano haven by the lake, well after babysitter operating hours, when all of the other kids had already been tucked in for bed.
You'd been there for eighty years before we made our way through your worn, saloon-style doors. We'd prop our elbows up on the counter, and for a few hours a week we'd watch Mom's eyes flip through the songbook and see how the light would return.
—Nathan Zabala
No Spitting
New Wave Winemakers
Sometimes I think about the many ways we can go about presenting a wine: there are the technical details of punch downs and must weight and the different types of vessels used—and then there are the stories about the producers themselves; visits to cellars in the dead of winter, the generosity of a home-cooked lunch to pair with vintages from the past, and winery dogs vying for your attention to throw them a stick in the vineyards. On the eve of Valentine's Day, I sway towards narrative; these stories imbue each wine with meaning and importance.
The wine program at Smithereens was built to have space for wine dinners throughout the year, because we want to share those stories, we want to be that space where you make organic connections with the wine and the winemaker. Our New Wave Winemaker series presents four winemakers forging their own path: Alexander Schregel from Rheingau; Pierre-Henri Rougeot from Meursault; Martha Stoumen from Northern California; and Katharina Wechsler from Rheinhessen. These are young winemakers, building on top of old traditions to offer up a new perspective for the future. Tuesday night, we kicked things off with Schregel, who showcased bottles of his second vintage:
Looking ahead to March, we asked Rougeot and Stoumen a couple questions to get a sense of who they are, what they’re pouring, and what they’re dreaming of…
—Nikita Malhotra
Pierre-Henri Rougeot
Pierre-Henri Rougeot is a young vigneron with generations of family roots in the town of Meursault. He grew up learning farming and the craft of winemaking with his father, and by way of studying in Beaune.
In 2017, he decided to add a small négoce where he could make wines his way. The fruits come from his family estate: vineyards that are farmed organically. The production is really small, one barrel here of one cuvée, two over there, max 4 barrels of Gevrey. Pierre-Henri makes his wines with little intervention, meaning no SO2 until bottling, no fining, and no filtration; the reds are macerated with whole clusters and age in neutral barrels, while the whites are pressed directly in barrels, no bâtonnage and aging on the lees.
What wine do you dream of opening one day?
Another bottle of Vosne-Romanée Les Beaux Monts from Domaine Leroy, I let you choose the vintage.
Where in the world would you most like to travel to at this moment?
Japan.
What is your favorite soil type?
Sloping limestone soil with Old Chardonnay on it.
What is your go-to song during harvest?
In 2024 it was Orange Coffee - Rocketman.
What is your idea of perfect happiness?
Live rock music, hot dog and a bloody good Pinot noir not destemmed.
Join us on Tuesday, March 4th for a paired wine dinner with Pierre-Henri Rougeot (tix up on Resy 2/15)!
Martha Stoumen
After 8 years apprenticing around the world, Martha Stoumen set out as a self-funded, first generation winemaker to answer the question: “What does California taste like?” When she founded Martha Stoumen Wines in 2014, she started by exploring warm and breezy regions that allow for natural farming. She was thrilled to find a handful of dedicated farmers, primarily growing Mediterranean grapes in the Ukiah area of Mendocino County, Contra Costa County, and Suisun Valley. She has been making wine from their fruit and laughing with them ever since.
Martha Stoumen exemplifies an unexpected kind of winemaking that prioritizes patience and minimalism, offering up fresh takes on California classics.
What wine do you dream of opening one day?
I'd like to re-open a wine I've had in the past actually: an early 1980's vintage of COS Cerasuolo di Vittoria, the first wine they made. I went to work there in 2012, and lucky for me, the day I arrived they had a full vertical dating back to their first 1980 vintage. I didn't know at the time that Giusto Occhipinti, an owner, would become a lifelong friend of mine—so I'd love to re-open this and imagine him and his two friends just making wine on a lark, in an old, traditional large-format chestnut barrel. I think back to making wines with my friends the first year I started, and how silly we all were—it all flowed so easily and the stakes were low, so we just had pure fun. Every year is a total joy, but there's nothing like your first vintage!
Sometimes you want new wines you've never had, sometimes you want the same wine because you've changed so much as a human since you last had it.
Where in the world would you most like to travel to at this moment?
I'd love to take my mom to Italy. She lived in Florence when she was in her early twenties, but then started a family and had no money for travel. When I lived there briefly for art school in my early twenties I brought her dog-eared, marked-up copy of The Agony and the Ecstasy and her 30-year-old guidebook with me, and walked the same streets my mom did. She's now in her 70's and has wished out loud to me over the years that she could go back to Italy. I want to make that magic happen for her! She's been waiting 50 years. How cool it would be to walk the streets together.
What is your favorite soil type?
Sand. The most welcoming of soils. Drinking wines grown in sand feels the same way that lying on a warm beach feels on the rest of your body. Blissful.
What is your go-to song during harvest?
“Oh Baby,” from LCD Soundsystem's American Dream album. Harvest 2017 I'd wake up at 4am, navigate the 24' flatbed truck across the Richmond Bridge and up towards Mendocino County for grape picks, and that was the sole CD I bought for the truck's player. It was so early I'd often be on the bridge alone, and the truck was tall enough I could look across the San Francisco Bay at the city lights. It was my daily ritual. “Oh Baby” is reserved for moments long before the sun comes up at every harvest now.
What is your idea of perfect happiness?
Laughing so hard that the tears join the party. There's been a lot of that in my life lately after a hiatus, and I'm here for it.
Join us on Tuesday, March 11th for a paired wine dinner with Martha Stoumen (tix up on Resy 2/18)!
Katharina Wechsler
And we’re capping it all off with one special night with Katharina Wechsler who’ll be pouring some Rheinhessen wines BTG on Wednesday, March 12th. Drop by or snag your res.
Before You Go
Just in time for Valentine’s Day, Eater declares us “hot.”
Read all about Logan’s “masochistic deep dive” into cocktails feat. OJ and his twist on ye olde classic: the Ward Eight.
Don’t let the snow deter you from coming in; we’re glowing through the gusts and it’s even cozier this way.