“It’s the most amazing wine I’ve ever had,” my friend said as he led me to his kitchen. “I drank it the entire time I was in Spain and have been saving a bottle since I went there.”

My mouth hung agape for several seconds, after which I went into what turned into a 30-minute treatise on the basics on viticulture, winemaking and fermentation. A remarkable thing happened, though: he wasn’t bored. I’m so used to friends and family closing their eyes and putting up their hand after a couple minutes of my wine-geek babble and saying, “OK Josh, that’s enough. I was really just being polite.”

The expensive daytime excess of the Meatpacking scene$750 magnums of champagne, as much as $20,000 spent at a tableis gluttony that would give Marie Antoinette pause, but some city venues, many within the past few weeks, have stripped away the ostentation and high cost of the party brunch and added their own flavor.

It’s officially summer, and for me that means it’s officially rosé season. Because nothing breaks the heat quite like a chilled bottle of dry rosé. Living paycheck to paycheck, I look at these special wines as mini summer-vacations-in-a-bottle.

You’re sitting across from your boss (who fancies himself a bit of a wine geek) at dinner. The sommelier presents the bottle, then asks if he’d like it decanted. Your boss replies with an ardent affirmative, and the sommelier carefully pours the entire bottle into a decanter.

Temping is a hellish gig with few rewards—and little pay. It’s definitely worse than working in the food service industry, because at least there you get a free meal. Back in the early 2000s, I took a “long-term” job running the reception desk at the Standard Bank of South Africa. It was your typical phone-answering position for the majority of the first week. Until Friday afternoon.

I was walking a bottle of my restaurant’s excellent Willamette Valley Pinot Noir to table seven when I realized, mid-stride, how warm the bottle felt in my palm. Before I had a chance to turn back, however, the table saw me. I was locked in and had to present it.

My wife and I honeymooned in the south of Spain. It was a compromise. She wanted the beach. I wanted Europe. So we went to a European beach. My secret plan the whole time, however, was to get down to the area of Spain where sherry is made. Sherry is, in my humble opinion, the most maligned and underrated wine produced in the world.

A couple weeks ago, I talked a bit about the basics of matching wine with cheese. I am going to assume that not everyone who read this has a plate full of $30-a-pound artisanal cheese hanging out in the fridge. Because of this, I am prepared to give you some more practical options for wine and food pairing, using the same ideas I set forth for matching wine and cheese.

“Ah, yes,” he sighed, “Now that’s a Pinot Noir.” Ladies and gentlemen, I implore you: Don’t be this guy. Not because he waltzed in at 8 o’clock without a reservation on a Friday night and announced to the host that we must have a table for him because he knows the owner (although that is reason enough, in my book), but because he committed the most egregious folly that any faux-wine expert possibly could.

NEXT TO THE tall, unmarked door of Cal Elliotts restaurant Rye, there is an awning that says Southside Speakeasy Lounge.The place was closed, but it felt like a symbol pointing the way to the speakeasystyle restaurant next to it.

THERE WAS A time when having pizza for dinner was a cheap, low-key alternative to other dining options. In fact, dinner was usually liquid and pizza—picked up from Ray’s, Rosario’s or Stromboli’s sometime after midnight—was intended to soak up the meal to prevent a hangover. Those days are gone.

SECOND AVENUE IN the East 40s is not someplace you’re likely to find me. So imagine my surprise when, on a recent evening that wasn’t marred by rain, a companion who rarely ventures north of Delancey and I were barely in a cab back Downtown before we started planning a return visit.

Lets start with an admission: I have a Thai restaurant prejudice. Its a reflex, a Manichean outlook that instantly assigns a place to one of two categories.The first serves diners who crave the bright, herby flavors and searing spice the best Thai food offers.The other caters to what Ill call, lacking a better term, the Euro-American preference

If the tragedy of the Commons represents the antithesis of community, then there is nothing tragic happening at these commons. “We’re looking to create an old-fashioned communal hang out,” explains Jacob Rabinowitz, part owner of the newly opened Prospect Heights beer joint Washington Commons. In its infant stages, a vibrant familiarity already seems to be sprouting among its patrons, with packs of thirsty locals rubbing shoulders and chatting loudly around the sociable horseshoe-shaped bar.

Despite cashing in on the endlessly trying “speakeasy” style that has turned Nattyswilling frat boys into rye connoisseurs, The Richardson remains one of the more enjoyable places to drink on the newly hip Graham Avenue corridor. Beginning in April, owner Joel Lee Kulp decided to put a stop to all of the drunken where are we having brunch tomorrow conversations and opened his kitchen on Saturday and Sunday mornings so patrons could come back for eggs and daylight cocktails.The food—including cheese plates, toasted sandwiches and an I’m-going-home-alone-tonight bowl of garlic-dill pickles—has always been good here, and breakfast is no different: house-made gravlax, Belgian waffles, chocolate croissants and Gimme! Coffee drinks all appear on the menu.

Cocktail bars perform a curious type of magic: they manage to take the same booze, fruit and mixers I use to make drinks—OK, probably nicer booze—and make them taste twice as good, so good that I don’t even feel like a sucker paying $12 for a glass of hooch and ice.The other bit of alchemy in action is their ability to take the low-level alcoholism practiced by any and every out-and-about New Yorker and transform it into something like good taste. As in, “I didn’t just spend $50 on Schlitz and Mr. Boston’s Coffee Brandy, I drank something special that a regular old alcoholic couldn’t appreciate.”

saying the name of the seafood stew conjures breezy seaside caf%u9CEE Ciopinno originated in the 1800s when Italian fishermen settled in San Francisco. It includes a mix of whatever fish and shellfish (often served in the shell) is pulled fresh from the water on the day its made.

It shouldn't have worked.When the construction began in the cavernous former Scopa restaurant space on Madison Avenue, we thought it was surely doomed.Who invests that kind of money these days to open a restaurant without a TV star chef or a brand name to back it up? When Pranna finally opened in the fall of 2008, right at the beginning of what is now acknowledged as one of the worst economic troubles ever, we decided to begin to taking wagers on when it would close.

It important to understand that Mayahuel is the new, tequila-flavored sibling to legendary East Villages Death Co. A waiter at that church of cocktails, with its painstakingly curated menu, once gently guided my friend from his plebian order of vodka cranberry to a more dignified raspberryaccented rum cocktail.