The handshakes between Condé Nast and Substack have begun.
And all the stars for Stars, by J.Lee.
Good afternoon, everyone.
Today’s letter is being finished up and sent from the lobby bar at Hotel Chelsea. I have two small pieces of spring advice I’d like to share for everyone. One is, if invited to dinner, to bring a bouquet of tulips to your host’s house. The other is to embrace Easter decorations. Everyone gets so jazzed up over Christmas decorations, but I like a painted egg on my bookshelf. My friend Krithika Varagur gifted me a trio of hand-painted eggs from Munich last year, and I’m thinking of making a few for a friend who is hosting me on Sunday.
Today’s letter includes: The first major hire at Air Mail post-Puck acquisition, J Lee on Stars, a fashion newsletter collaborates with Vogue, and the reason your newsroom might be hungover today.
Have a story you want me to look into this week? Reply to this email or text the anonymous Feed Me Tip Line: (646) 494-3916
All the stars for Stars. By J Lee.
Expense Account is a series on Feed Me by semi-anonymous restaurant critic J Lee. He hosts a podcast with the same name. Today, he wrote about a recent visit to Stars, a new wine bar in the East Village from the same team behind Claud and Penny.
Over the last few years, New York has become a city of wine bars. It feels like a new one opens every week. I’m not complaining, I like to drink wine, but it’s been hard to keep up. It’s rare that one truly stands out (shoutout Lei), even rarer that I feel the urge to write about one. Stars is a little wine bar on East 12th Street, by the team behind perennial favorites Claud and Penny. Stars opened in mid-December, but I’m glad I waited a few months to try it out. I visited on the first day of spring. One of those days where everything feels sparkly, the air smells sweet, and the world is beautiful, you’re bulletproof. It was the first day that Stars had gotten to open up their facade out onto the street, and at 5:30 p.m., there was a perpetual golden-hour feeling in the space. Their zinc bar is quite handsome all on its own, but with that light, and the hand of god, it was one of the most beautiful rooms I’ve ever seen, maybe. That’s to say that I arrived to Stars wearing rose-tinted glasses and found a rose-tinted room. A room that shines. Like a diamond. Or like a STAR.
Stars is small. It’s the perfect size. There are 12 seats oriented around a U-shaped bar, and space with ledges for ten people to stand and drink and wait for a seat. There’s something about the lighting at Stars where it feels like that sunset hour or that moment just after a sunset perpetually. There’s a distinct post-McNallyian luminous glow, a light temperature that feels like it was created inside of a Fujifilm X100VI. The sound design in the space really drives home that you’re in a self-contained ecosystem, your own little planet, or on a boat adrift. You have nowhere else to be, nowhere else you want to be. I imagine this place must get mobbed. On my visit, there was a small wait, but it felt manageable. An amount of anticipation and rubbing shoulders is half the fun. It’s a beautiful bar full of beautiful people where you can have a beautiful glass of wine and even some beautiful food.
The wine list at Stars is well-curated. Lengthy but not overwhelming. When I visited there were 16 wines by the glass, plus 3 special pours, 6 n/a options, 2 sakes, 3 sherries, 2 dessert wines, 3 beers (with an option to make it a Spaghett), 3 options for drinks on the rocks, plus something called a Tuxedo No. 2 (a sake/shochu-based cocktail infused with cherries, it’s delicious). Quite the list for such a little bar. Claude and Penny are famous for their deep bottle lists (I’ve heard stories of crazy grey market private collection wines that are absolutely impossible to get anywhere else), and Stars upholds the family tradition. The list is deep, but for someone who knows a bit about wine, it’s clean, well-organized, diverse, yet concise. And if you don’t know much about wine, their staff is great, they know how to help. Don’t be scared to go off the beaten path, get some oxidative wine with your cheese, they’ll never lead you astray. Of course it’s gauche to talk about price, but Stars makes a real effort to price everything fairly, and to make sure there are great bottles at every price point. I can’t remember the last time I saw a bottle under $50 on a serious list, but Stars has got it. They’ve also got a $4,200 bottle of vintage champagne by Jacques Selosse, if you’re in the mood to drink a wine from 1988. I described to the server exactly what I like and what I’d like to drink, and they brought a bottle of Vouvray by Michel Autran, which was just the perfect wine to drink on the first day of spring. They nailed it. Bright minerality grounded by an undercurrent of reduction, my favorite kind of wine really. Don’t be shy, give it a big swirl, and breathe it in. Imagine drinking lemonade on your front porch; grass is cut and a little damp, and you get a quick whiff of smoke from your neighbors fire pit. It tastes like summer’s right around the corner.
“Sitting in Stars, you’re reminded of early evenings in Paris, in Barcelona, in Tokyo, but Stars is distinctly American. To me, Stars feel like the Fourth of July; stars and stripes, paper plates, and fireworks.”
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