Where to find the world’s best wine bars
Paris is the gold standard, but London is learning. Dan Keeling shares the best spots for a good glass
Forest Gate in east London has a place in my heart. In fact, why tell porkies? Forest Gate does not have a place in my heart. But Joyau, a wine bar in Forest Gate, does as it provided an answer to a question that left me speechless during a recent Q&A. “Where in London would you go for a good glass of wine?” asked an audience member, addressing a panel of winos that included the regular writer of this column.
It should have been easy. Yet, although the likes of Planque, Brawn and Chez Bruce came to mind, the fact that they’re wine-centric restaurants with licences requiring customers to eat “a substantial meal” — rather than offering lunch of an entirely liquid variety — meant I drew a blank. I’d have loved to recommend the casual sort of place the French, Italians and Spanish do so well: no reservations, a stash of interesting bottles and the option of simple, tasty food. A wine bar in the purest sense.
A crawl of the nouveau bar à vins mecca — that is, east London — was clearly necessary. At Joyau, drinking a beautiful 2020 Maison En Belles Lies Aligoté as trains to Barking rumbled overhead, it seemed I’d found what I was looking for.
Wine bars today are worlds away from ye old English drinking dens of yesteryear serving pub-grade plonk to cravat-wearing blokes with purple noses. Perhaps the only applicable definition is akin to Justice Potter Stewart’s definition of pornography: “I know it when I see it.” But they are invariably informal places frequented predominantly by a youthful clientele looking for a place for a pre-rave refill, or a neighbourhood destination, with extensive by-the-glass selections often focused on low intervention vino.
Above all, there’s a carefree joyfulness to a wine bar that the formality of even the most wine-centric restaurant can’t match. You don’t have to confirm your booking with a credit card, make an upfront payment or be subject to a cancellation policy. There’s no “hurry up and order because we need your table back” or “the name of this scallop is Sandy, and she was hand-dived in St Ives”. And certainly no one to move the bottle of Pouilly-Fuissé you’ve paid too much for out of reach, then fill your glass too quickly or too slowly.
As far as I’m aware, no wine bars sold tedious meal kits during lockdown, knowing their pleasures can’t be summarised in absentia. (Although a care package consisting of an entire paté en croûte, a corkscrew and a magnum of Ganevat would have been a wonderful thing.)
Of course, as the co-owner of three wine-centric restaurants, it might sound disingenuous to point out such advantages. But before the idea of opening Noble Rot blossomed from it being only a wine bar into a wine bar and restaurant, Vivant and L’Avant Comptoir in Paris were the kind of casually charming places we dreamed of emulating.
Vivant, in particular, was bar à vins bliss. A former exotic-bird shop in the 10th arrondissement with original art-nouveau tiles, floor-to-ceiling fridges with bottles made by the freshest names in natural wine and a lone Japanese chef assembling a simple menu with the aid of a single induction hob, it oozed cool.
Our plan to steal — sorry, reappropriate — this small but perfectly formed blueprint in central London was derailed by the lure of bigger, fully fledged restaurant sites. But echoes of such Parisian je ne sais quoi rippled through influential East End bars of the 2010s, such as the original Sager + Wilde, the late P Franco (now reimagined as 107) and, more recently, Joyau and its contemporaries such as Cadet and Hector’s.
Like Vivant, the new wave of stand-alone wine bars make a virtue of their limitations, employing a skeleton crew with often a single chef, again using one hob and doubling down on quality bread, ferments, shellfish, charcuterie and cheese.
Rather than cooking per se, the creative assembly of dishes is (excuse the pun) the bread and butter of many wine bars. Indeed, on the afternoon I visited Joyau the chef was away and the menu pared back to cheese, saucisson and rillettes — although they tell me that they’re developing a following for a fabulous-sounding double-carb hit known as potato-and-crème-fraîche pie.
In answer to the question, “Where in London would you go for a good glass of wine?” this fits the bill nicely. The wine list mixes traditionalist gems such as Pierre Gonon St Joseph and Egon Müller “Scharzhof” with naturalista domaines that have long been ubiquitous.
Although wine bars proliferate the length of the country, I’ve concentrated my crawl around east London because of its unrivalled number of openings in recent years (Dan’s, Newcomer, Binch, Top Cuvée, Weino Bib, 107 and Hector’s, to name a few). Co-owned by importers Beattie & Roberts and charcutier George Jephson, Newington Green’s Cadet (supposedly pronounced “Cad-ey”) has an impressive pedigree: Tom Beattie managed Clapton’s P Franco, a perennially popular shop and wine bar focused around a communal table, that functioned as a creative stepping stone for chefs such as Tim Spedding and Anna Tobias.
Packed with a thirtysomething crowd, bathed in summer sunshine from its tall front windows, Cadet is as idyllic a setting as the residents of Stoke Newington have any right to expect. It combines simple-assembly dishes like peaches wrapped in shiso with crème fraîche with a couple of cooked ones (pollack with cockles and girolles in a buttery, lardo-infused sauce was inspired) and Jephsons’ charcuterie. My god — what charcuterie! It’s very difficult to find cold cuts as good as this.
I really like Cadet, from the clean lines of the interior to the stylish graphics that Beattie & Roberts use to promote the 30-odd natural winemakers they exclusively serve. But although my idea of great wine also means as few manipulations as possible, my favourite lists also incorporate traditionalist domaines.
Hector’s, in leafy De Beauvoir Town, offers more limited fare, but its excellent selection of bottles and buzzing atmosphere makes me want to return time and again. Sure, you might only be able to eat a gilda, or Iberico ham over crisps, but hard-to-find treasures such as Valentini’s saline Trebbiano d’Abruzzo and Cécile Tremblay’s masterful Morey-Saint-Denis Tres Girard make it well worth a special trip.