After being so impressed with Marlowe & Sons a few months back, Tara and I headed to Diner (same owner) last night, with Abby in tow. It was the same excellent wine list and a tasty market-driven menu that must change daily because our waitress had to write down all fifteen of the specials on our paper table cloth. We ordered every single appetizer including the delicious cardoon (a delicious artichoke-celery like vegetable) salad, a crunchy coleslaw with knobs of blue cheese and tostada mounted with a generous serving of wild mushrooms and sardines. To wash it all down I chose the Olivier Cousin Gamay 2005 (it was funky and smelled like an untamed animal at first, offered a slight prickle on the palate and was unbelievably refreshing with a slight chill). The odds of anyone at Diner picking a gamay are unusually high. There were at least six bottles of gamay from Beaujolais and the Loire – all from great producers. I don’t know who buys the wine at Diner or M&S but you gotta love a person bold enough to carry that many.

There was a glorious moment when Tara, Abby and I looked to our right where a table of tattooed Willamsburg hipster dudes sat, and then we glanced to our left, at a group of suited businessmen. The suited guys weren’t your boring banker types but more professorial looking and the juxtaposition and crazy mix of clientele made Diner all the more interesting. When both tables emptied at once we had wild fantasies that they were all gay and both vastly different sociological groups were hooking up. After ogling tattoos and pinstripes we stared down a bottle of something altogether much sexier (in my book); it was a table that had just ordered a Guillot-Broux Macon. It cost seventy bucks for a bottle but in this economic climate, our forty-dollar gamay was the limit!