Skip the Resy Drop and Show Up at 5pm
A James Beard award, then a Resy drop that sells out in seconds — James Murphy's Grand Street wine bar has been climbing for a decade. The walk-in path is the answer nobody talks about.
Warm bread arrives first and does most of the work of explaining why this room has held its reputation for a decade. The natural wine list — deep, weird, and mostly correct — does the rest. The food is small plates that rotate on the seasons: a carrot dish one week, Jimmy Nardello peppers the next, Berkshire pork sausages when the kitchen wants them. What arrives in front of you on a given Tuesday is not what someone Instagrammed last month, and the room seems to prefer it that way.
James Murphy of LCD Soundsystem is the co-owner most of the press writes about. The two people who built the restaurant are Nick Curtola, who runs the kitchen, and Justin Chearno, whose wine program won the 2022 James Beard for Outstanding Wine Program. Chearno died in August 2024. The list still runs on the instincts he set. When The Four Horsemen opened on Grand Street in 2015, natural wine in North Brooklyn was still a niche argument. It is now the local dialect, and this is the room that taught it.
Editorial Deep
The menu rotates enough that naming last month's dishes is a way to sound out of date. What's consistent: the warm house bread, which is the one order every table gets and every table finishes, and the Jimmy Nardello pepper dishes that show up when the peppers are in. Beyond that, expect four to six small plates for two people, built around whatever the kitchen is chasing that week.
Small, wood-heavy, low-lit, and loud in the way a wine bar is supposed to be loud — conversation from the next banquette, LPs on the system (Murphy's fingerprints), the bar staff moving fast behind the counter. Exposed brick on one wall, a long marble-topped bar down the other side, warm sconces overhead. Forty-odd seats total. The room fills by 6:15 and doesn't empty until close.
Service is warm without being performative — the servers know the wine list at a level that would embarrass most sommeliers, which is its own kind of inheritance, and they read the table before pitching a bottle. Pacing is the one weak point: on a full night the kitchen pushes food faster than a table of two can eat it. Ask them to slow the second round. They will.
The math works because the wine list is the argument. You are paying restaurant markup on natural bottles that are hard to find at retail and harder to find with someone who can talk you into the right one. The food alone would price aggressively against Williamsburg peers; the food plus the cellar plus the room is the reason the bill lands where it does without complaint.
Yes, on a Tuesday, at the bar, without a reservation. That is the version of this restaurant that has held up for a decade and will keep holding up. The Saturday-night-Resy-drop version — the one that requires setting a phone alarm a month out — is a lesser return on the same evening.
What to eat
Don't miss.
Warm house bread; order four to six small plates for two; ask the floor for the bottle
“The natural wine room lives up to its reputation, if you know when to show up.”
Go on a Tuesday at 5pm and skip the Resy drama; if you can't, Nightmoves next door handles the wait and I Cavallini across the street is the same team in Italian mode.
The Verdict
