There's a particular kind of relief that comes with walking into a 450-square-foot room, spotting a zinc bar with twelve seats, and realizing you don't need a reservation. Stars, which opened in early December on East 12th Street, understands something that many restaurants have forgotten: sometimes you just want wine. Not cocktails. Not a tasting menu. Wine, a sommelier, and the space to breathe.
The team behind Claud and Penny—Chase Sinzer and Joshua Pinsky—have engineered something deceptively simple here. Walk-in only. Twelve seats. A wine list that tops 1,000 bottles, with eighty-eight of them priced at $88 or under. By-the-glass pours start at eleven dollars. In a city where a cocktail routinely costs twenty, this is an act of deliberate defiance. The message is clear: you can afford to be here, and you don't need to plan ahead.
The food is intentionally sparse—deviled eggs, griddled shrimp toast, chicken liver mousse, stuffed peppadew peppers—and that sparseness is the point. There's one cook. The rest of the staff are sommeliers. This isn't a restaurant that happens to have wine; it's a wine bar that serves snacks because people need to eat something. The shrimp toast arrives crispy and salted, the chicken liver mousse is rich and briny, and both dissolve into the background the moment you're back in conversation about what's in your glass.
What makes Stars matter now is how it refuses the tired theater of fine dining. There's no pressure to perform, no sense that you're being evaluated for your choices. A sommelier will talk to you about what you want—or what you don't know you want—without condescension. A Monday night solo visitor can walk in, order a glass, sit at the bar, and spend two hours exactly as they choose. This is what abundance actually looks like: not more options, but the right options, priced so that everyone can participate.
Come on a weeknight evening when the bar is quieter, when you can actually hear the person pouring your wine.