Nectar Wine Bar Brings Downtown Vibe to Harlem

In the beginning, there was only Harlem Vintage. Nestled into a new-wave apartment building on Frederick Douglass Boulevard, it opened four years ago and was a pioneering wine shop in an area where buying wine or alcohol usually meant pushing your money through a hole in bulletproof glass. But the cash register at Harlem Vintage, far from being protected, sits openly on a low counter, whose transparent top is inset with an intricate pattern of oak leaves. More important, what gets rung up here — by and for Harlemites — is an eclectic and tightly edited collection of artisanal wines, along with a few fine brandies and whiskeys.Now comes the wine shop’s offspring: Nectar, a popular wine bar that opened next door to Harlem Vintage last month. The proprietors, Jai Jai Greenfield and Eric Woods, wanted Nectar to have a different feel from that of Harlem Vintage’s medley of rich woods, exposed brick, and candlelight in the evening. And so it does, its cool vibe established by a sleek white bar, asymmetrical sailcloth panels covering the walls and ceiling, a battleship-gray concrete floor, and a burgundy-toned rear wall of horizontally stored wines. Nectar looks like no other bar in Harlem (although more “downtown”-style spots are sure to come), and its 40-selection wine list, including 11 bubblies, also stands alone in its offbeat originality.My usual habit at a wine bar is to order the wine that’s least familiar to me. But that was just about every wine at Nectar, so I asked the manager, Beth Bay, to choose for me. The white wine she poured melded subtle spice, lime, and honeydew melon. I had no idea what it was.“The grape is called Zierfandler,” Ms. Bay said. “It’s Austrian.” Next, she poured a red, telling me only that it was from the Loire, her favorite region. It turned out to be a light and chalky gamay from the Domaine Les Hautes Noëlles. Both wines were well met by a trio of cheeses served on a plank: Ossau-Iraty, a Basque sheep cheese; a four-year-old Gouda called Saenkanter, and a Gruyère-like Comté Marcel Petit. Along with its cheeses, selected by consultant (and basketball columnist for The New York Sun) Martin Johnson of the Joy of Cheese consultancy, Nectar’s only other food offerings are charcuterie and hummus. Well, almost: To go with the sweet sippers (Nectar’s list calls them “stickys”), you can nibble on El Ray Venezuelen chocolate in three intensity levels, plus white.The minimal menu is purposeful. “Eric and I felt that if we just stuck to our knitting, and did a place where the wine came first, instead of trying to be a restaurant with a decent wine list, we’d have a better chance of not flopping, like so many places do,” Ms. Greenfield said one recent afternoon at Nectar.“We may expand to paninis this fall,” Mr. Woods added, “but we are limited by a small kitchen. In any case, we really don’t want to be a restaurant-cum-wine bar.”Both Mr. Woods and Ms. Greenfield are MBAs (his from Columbia, hers from the Kellogg School at Northwestern) who were drawn away from finance by a common passion for wine. Mr. Woods moved to Harlem from the Upper East Side a few years ago, while his business partner, after a suburban stint in New Jersey, is now renting a place in Harlem while house hunting there.During Harlem Vintage’s first two years, Ms. Greenfield kept her day job as a trader at Morgan Stanley. “They were very good to me, and I felt like, let’s not jump ship until I find out if this wine business will be viable, and whether it needs me on a day-to-day basis,” Ms. Greenfield said. “It turned out, not only did it need me, but I wanted to do it. Still, it was definitely no small thing going from a six-figure salary to no salary.”You can drop by Nectar for its expertly chosen wines — but find another spot if you want to keep an eye on sports. “Lots of people have said, ‘Oh my God, you should get a big flat-screen TV,'” Ms. Greenwood said. “But that would take away from people engaging in conversation. And it would bother our customers who just bring a book. The wide screen invades everything we do, but we’re not going to let it happen here.”One recent evening at Nectar, I struck up a conversation on a touchy topic with Dennis Decker, a white brownstone owner who had moved to the predominantly black neighborhood 10 years ago. Some old-time Harlemites, Mr. Decker told me, weren’t comfortable with Nectar’s downtown look and vibe. Compared to traditional local watering holes, they didn’t feel it was a place for them.When I mentioned this concern to Mr. Woods, he shrugged and said, “Our strategy is that everyone who comes here should feel comfortable.“But here’s the reality,” he continued. “It’s in the natural state of people to feel that change is not something comfortable, and as they get older, they get less comfortable.”In fact, Nectar’s clientele, at least on the evenings I’ve spent time there, has been a model of racial balance. The only time I didn’t see a Caucasian face at Nectar was an early evening when the place was choked with a group of diverse young people — all of them, as it turned out, from the law firm of Weil, Gotshal & Manges, who’d come uptown for a wine tasting.The young lawyers are well and good, but Ms. Greenfield said, “What I delight in is people who come in weekly, who call this place their second home. It could be a retired couple who moved down from Westchester, or people born here in Harlem. Remember ‘Cheers’? For the people on that series, the bar was their hangout, their second home. That’s what we want for Nectar.”Except that there’s an important difference between Nectar and Cheers: The clientele of the Boston bar wasn’t at all diverse, and real-life wine buffs would much prefer the pours at the friendly little wine bar in Harlem.

Nectar Wine Bar Brings Downtown Vibe to Harlem

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