Real Talk with Amanda Smeltz, Part 1

As told to Jennifer Green | Photography by Kyle Johnson

It’s typically true of people that open-mindedness about food tracks with open-mindedness about other things. So it was especially demoralizing this past week to see headlines associating “death sentence” with “America’s most important restaurants” from trusted sources like Jeff Gordinier. After the acute hardship we’ve all witnessed firsthand with the collapse of our local mom-and-pops, it’s been tempting to hold out hope that some way, somehow, our federal government will come to save us. It is becoming clear that the acronyms are fancy but futile. All Uncle Sam is handing out are tickets to Trumpville.

But it’s helpful to remember how recent it was that most of this country resembled just that: no access, no options, just “fancy foie gras restaurants for the 1% and then…an endless highway gridlocked with cheap garbage for the diabetic masses.” One year ago, we sat down with Amanda Smeltz, beverage director of Café Altro Paradiso and Estela, to discuss this very subject in the context of her upbringing on that “endless highway” to her invasion of “the foie gras restaurant for the 1%” to her exploration of the in-between.

It’s hard to open minds but it’s even harder to close them, and over the last few years, minds have been opening throughout the Lower Forty-eight. Though New York may move at a rapid-fire pace, the same is true here that is true everywhere else.

So maybe we’re the ones we’ve been waiting for. Maybe there’s hope for us yet.

—JG, 4.19.20

“Well, I know my Cabs” and Other Missives from the Parker Belt

I was raised in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. If you drive due west of here through Jersey on Highway 78 you’ll get there in about three hours. It’s the very reason that I ended up wanting to work in New York. Growing up there you don't grow up around any alcohol of caliber at all. There's so little access. Harrisburg is not a dining destination, or at least it wasn't fifteen years ago when I was raised there. So I actually ended up having to move from my home region before I ever saw alcohol of character. And a lot of that I think just has to do with state control.

Twenty, thirty years ago in New York you saw young small importers kind of striking out on their own to bring stuff of uniqueness and interest to the city here. It’s probably twenty years out still back home.

It's this cyclical thing. If nobody gets to see anything different then everyone always drinks the same stuff. And the state always buys the same things. Kind of feeds on itself.

[GG : Kind of like politics a bit]

Yeah, yeah. It feeds on itself. It's like a closed circuit which is weird because, you know, being raised in Dauphin County, even in the last presidential election it still went blue. It's the part of Pennsylvania that's a lot more progressive, with better education and stuff like that. It's not like the Appalachians to the north and the west. It’s been interesting to see even in the capital city there hasn't been a push for that for the laws to change.

I left for school. College in Milwaukee, of all places, and just got into working in restaurants there. I met this very dear friend who had grown up watching Julia Child. We rented an apartment together and she would just always be making these things that I'd never seen or heard of before. She introduced me to soba noodles and, here's how you cook with fresh herbs... I didn't know how to roast vegetables. She was just always doing it. So I became very curious and then she was like, ‘why don't you come work with me at this fine dining place?’

Immediately I was like, ‘this is so much more interesting than waiting tables at whatever fucking place.’ Being interested in food, the interest in beverage comes right along with it once you're in a restaurant of any caliber. So it happened all very quickly. 

And then I started at a fine dining spot my junior year of college where the general manager had opened Gramercy Tavern. Ended up working for him and he just kind of pulled me aside and was like, ‘hey, you're curious about wine. Also you're smart and you're bored, do you want to come help?’

[GG : That could either be a great or toxic combination, smart and bored.]

I mean I think he flagged it because it's typically toxic. You're smart and bored and you're here three to four times a week while you're in school. He knew I was studying philosophy, literature and stuff. He was like, ‘you want to learn the cellar?’ and I said, ‘yeah, sure. What's the cellar?’ So I was nineteen or twenty, doing inventory.

[GG : And here in puritan America you can’t even drink that age.]

Oh hell no. I mean I was, but I was drinking Yuengling. I don't think I knew anybody who drank wine. The whole way through growing up, I don't think I ever even saw it. And the American history that surrounds all that is super interesting, too. There are way more Germanic people in Pennsylvania than there are other Europeans. There's no French influence in the whole state. There's Dutch, there's German and there's some English but all those people aren't by nature wine-drinking people, they're beer-drinking people — as opposed to in California where there have been Italian immigrants out there for 200 years who took vines with them. So a lot of people who are from the American Southwest or Texas, because of the influence of Spanish and Italian immigration, are familiar with wine. But these are beer people where I'm from, you know?

So it was at this fine dining restaurant where I started seeing the diversity [of wine]. All I was tasting was industrial wine at the time, and mostly domestic. The Parker thing had totally exploded in the middle of the country. That’s all everybody was drinking. I must have tasted 5,000 different Napa Cabs and Merlots and Syrahs and Chardonnays.

I'm so grateful that that's how I learned because I know what people are asking for all the time. I know where they come from globally. I know why they reject the wines they do, why they think that certain wines are strange. That experience is kind of invaluable. There’s almost no other way to get through it except to sell a 300 bottle wine list that's just full of shit. I remember how long the California Chardonnay Page was, like this long [motions upward]. Every single one of them, looking back on it, tasted the same. I didn't know at the time.

[GG : Kevin of Disgorgeous said a really smart thing in your episode, which is that as Americans we’re raised on brand allegiance. So when you look at a page with thirty SKUs of California Chardonnay you're looking at brands that are attractive to people…]

That's one of the hardest things about our landscape, really regardless of what industry you work in. Because of how effective branding has been, especially in a culture where consumption is one of the primary rubrics for just existing in the world — consumerism is the way that you're just supposed to live your life. You work your job so that you make your money so that you can buy the things, and then the things that you buy become heavily identified with your personhood. Who you think you are becomes the things that you buy.

[GG : And now everyone has their own magazine called Instagram and you're invited to publish those items of your life that define you.]

Where you accumulate your brands, put them in a bit of a color reel for people, and you go: this is my lifestyle. This is maybe a little bit heady, but there's an art critic I've always really liked named Dave Hickey and he's got a really savage line in one of his critical essays where he just says, “taste is residue of privilege.” So when we talk about having taste all we're talking about is access to certain things.

Where did the notion of good taste come from? It comes from looking at other people with resources — with more power and money than us, essentially.

Wine works exactly the same way for the American people and, sadly, I think in the rest of the developed world, too.

For example: ‘my boss told me this was a good wine to drink. He's the guy who makes 150 million a year, so when he takes me up to Ben’s Steakhouse in Midtown and tells me that these are the good wines, I listen. So I'm now twenty-two years old. Young, male, with a bunch of weird money in Lower Manhattan and I'm gonna walk into a restaurant and say, “what Napa Cabs do you have?” because I've been taught that whole category of wine is a brand in addition to the specific brands within it.’

[GG : Exactly. It's a brand umbrella. And then you get down to this narcissism of small differences where this is vastly different from that because even though they're in the same brand category, 'I'm so well versed in this brand that clearly I can make this distinction.']

Oh boy, this is a line you'll hear in any restaurant: ‘well, I know my Cabs.’ Or, 'I know my Chardonnays.' Really. That is such a weird English formulation— why are they yours? Because you spent a lot of time with them? Clearly you've spent a lot of time with them. That's fine. And this is one of those weird instances where sheer exposure does not necessarily create knowledge or insight. That's been a strange thing to learn.

[GG : That’s wine in a nutshell.]

Yeah totally. You need some guidance along the way when you're learning. You also need exposure to difference and variation in order to really be able to hone in on not just what you like but what's good. 

[GG : Otherwise you're fooled into thinking that you can understand everything because you understand this one thing.]

Sometimes focusing on one category is a way to excellence. I think the real reason that it doesn't [often] work that way is because of homogenization. If what you drank for your whole life (because you were from Marseille or something) was just decent Bordeaux before industrial homogenization took over and made things all taste the same, you probably did have a shot at getting a really deep and rich experience. Even if you only work with Chenin Blanc in your vineyard your entire life — if you're doing things without homogenization and industrialization — you’re going to see variation because of seasons. So it's not necessarily that it's bad to focus on one category, it's that when we think of those categories as brands or when we look for uniformity … that’s when our ability to find depth bottoms out.

That said, I'm really glad that I did start out with a kind of wine list that was a direct response to what people were drinking at the time. It was a reasonable business decision to make on the part of the owners. You know, this is early 2000s in Milwaukee. But the crazy thing about it is that because what I was tasting was so much the same, the early examples I have of stuff that was different are seared in my brain. Like the first time I had ice wine from Niagara— I'll never forget it. I was standing by the private dining room. This is probably twelve or thirteen years ago now and I was just like oh [squeak]! I'd never had aromatic late harvest wine before. No one drank the shit, also, where the fuck is Niagara? I had no idea that there were grapes up there. I didn't even know about New York winemaking culture. I’m actually glad for that weird homogenous landscape and for learning in a Parker era because I saw how huge the difference was between everything that everybody drank and then the examples that were not that.

I saw that the difference was a chasm. So it wasn't hard for me to begin to want to bridge that gap. That’s how I caught the bug. And also I needed to make money. I was studying philosophy, right? Narrowly escaped going to a PhD program. I knew I wanted to go to graduate school but I sort of chickened out on a more academic path and ended up getting an MFA and did that here in New York. It was easy to transition into restaurants and to look for another wine gig. So that's what I did.

The Schooling of Smeltz

2009 is a long time ago now even though it feels like yesterday. 

I had a buddy who was working at the Ace Hotel which had just been opened and he hooked me up with the people who were opening the Breslin. They had a kind of bumpy start with their beverage director so they promoted this woman who was a bartender. Her name was Carla Rzeszewski. And within about two or three weeks of doing the job she realized, there's no way I can run wine for the hotel and this restaurant that has opened to smash reviews alone. So I raised my hand and was like, ‘I've done cellar work before, I've done low key somm stuff before.’ And she was like, ‘ok, well let's give this a shot.’ Then I opened on the wine team at the John Dory a year later in the same building. I did wine stuff there for two and a half, maybe almost three, years. I took a break in 2012 went to San Francisco for about six months and spun my wheels.

I knew before I left that [buddies of mine at Roberta’s] were looking for a wine director and then when I came back they were still looking. I went in and met them and I was like, this place seems like a total disaster but it's probably the kind of disaster that I'm going to love. I was with them for almost four years as the wine director of Roberta’s and Blanca, the tasting menu restaurant that's in Bushwick. 

Then I decided that I was ready to throw some of my ideas that I'd developed while I was there against the wall. It was at a time when not a lot of people in New York I think had been really focused on natural wine at all. A handful of major players were, like Lee Campbell at the Tarlow group and Pascaline [Lepeltier] when Rouge [Tomate] was uptown-ish, 2010-12, you know, when there wasn't a lot of presence for anything but the Parker stuff. And if it wasn't Parker, it was blue chip old world: Cru and Veritas, all these fine dining temples like Tribeca Grill where the wine lists were this long [motions to the ceiling] and were full of, you know, heavy-hitting French classical wine. So those were your two options here in town. You’re either at a steakhouse or you're working somewhere like Le Bern to get a serious education in old world wine. Only a few people were walking another path having to do with non-industrial. Juliette Pope at Gramercy Tavern wasn't a wholesale advocate but she was introducing a lot of those wines onto her wine list when no one in restaurants like that was looking at them. A lot of this ground had been laid, too, by other people. For example, Paul Grieco at Terroir in the East Village was so influential for many people because he was willing to go out on a limb in some ways and be like, ‘ok, it's neither a Grand cru Burgundy nor is it a cult Napa Cab. You should drink Gemischter Satz from Alsace.’ Between Hearth and Terroir, that was a really big deal. Then other wine bars popping up ten years ago like Joe Campanale's joints were way more obscure, like you could drink Greco di Tufo instead. So that momentum for drinking things that were different was already starting to build. Restaurants like Balthazar in the 90s were starting to highlight early waves of French natural wine and whatnot, but no one had just gotten behind it.

Over my years at Roberta's the more I tasted and traveled, the more I put things together. I just had less and less of a palate for anything commercially made. My palate was shifting fast and the wines that were moving me, that were exciting me, all happened to fall into this category of things that were biodynamically farmed with lower oak regimen with lower sulfur use…unfined and unfiltered, all these kind of hallmark things. I was just like, I'm no longer able to argue with this. So I'm just going to throw my weight into it, because it was Roberta's and it was so rough and tumble like a pirate ship, and everyone was like, oh of course they’re into natural wine out there in Brooklyn or whatever. And I was like, you know what, fuck these people. I did it for long enough then I was like, I'm gonna go do something different.

Michael Madrigale uptown at Bar Boulud and Boulud Sud had recently left his wine director job of almost a decade. And I reached out to the Dinex guys and said, I hear you're looking. So then I went uptown to work at Columbus Circle in fine dining. It was one of the most interesting years I've had in a long time because I went up there to sort of ask some questions of natural wine, of the New York drinking public, of different neighborhoods in this city, all the shit that people say is possible or not possible. And to get back around really high-end wine, too, and just start tasting it again for myself, to be like, ok, I have my opinions, how many of them are going to be pushed on my tasting stuff up here?

And the truth was, seventy-five to eighty percent of what I tasted that was either there in the cellar before or that I was purchasing for those restaurants — I didn't like the way it tasted. I didn't like it at all. And then one out of ten or one out of five, depending on the producer, would just be lights-out beautiful. In the world of blue chip wine there are also those people who farm like their great grandparents, who make wines exactly like their great grandparents, who have never lost their way, who have never conceded to industrial things or maybe did in the 90s but have really started to turn their work around. You see a producer as big as Domaine Leflaive and you know they've gone completely organic. They're pushing it even further and they own a lot of land…

I did this year uptown buying for these two higher end restaurants with a completely different clientele and a totally different wine history. The previous wine director Madrigale had built up this incredible collection of Burgundy and Rhône wines, so I went in there to buy a lot of French wine in those categories and then to add a bunch of my own stuff on. I tried to insert in as much natural wine as I could in those categories. 

And then what I saw was we'd have two tables of older people sitting side by side at Boulud Sud, fancy fucking restaurant, looks like Cirque de Soleil inside. You'd have two people next to each other. One of them would be drinking a tired ass old Burgundy which tasted fine for 150 bucks. And the next table would be drinking mid- to upper-end tier Gut Oggau from Burgenland for about 120 bucks and they'd both be enjoying their time. I watched them and what I saw was our people know so little about wine that they can't discern differences.

Americans can't discern differences. I'll sell you higher-end Château de Béru from Chablis which is unfined, unfiltered, with minimal sulfur, and then I'll sell you Raveneau at the next table and they literally can't tell the difference. Somms can tell. You know, some. Really experienced wine drinkers can tell. They'll feel differences even if they can't articulate them… But the guests largely don’t know. Americans still don't know anything about wine.

[GG : How much of a problem is that, if you can— not trick people, but — just slide the glass in front of them that is a better agricultural product? To what extent does it matter if they know what they're drinking?]

To me not at all. I just care that the stuff gets sold and drunk. Because I've then achieved my goals. My goals are to support the growers I believe in and to feed people better stuff.

[GG : To sell a better commodity?]

That's my job. I get paid to sell things. So my discussion with myself has always been, how can I sell things that I believe in more? How can I support people who I believe in more? Then, how can I get things in people's bodies that are just better for them?

I don't even have to have that conversation with a guest necessarily. As long as I'm getting them close enough to what it was they wanted, they're happy. Then I've done my job.

Stay tuned for Part II | 4.23.20