A polished mainstay stacked with good wine and backed by real smarts on the floor and behind the bar.

There’s an impish, hedonistic urge that comes with being surrounded by shelves and fridges of wine – and you’ll feel it instantly at City Cellar. It’s not just the sheer number (some 35 pages worth) of labels that impresses at winemaker Larry Cherubino’s bar and bottle-o, mind. Here, staff are every bit as polished as the handsome stemware, and hearty house cocktails like a gingery Zen Rosso rich with shiraz gin more than hold their own. Even if your purse strings don’t stretch to the lengths of grower Champagne or decade-old Barolo, a splash of Cherubino’s plum-driven nebbiolo-cab blend offers its own sense of grown-up luxury – doubly so alongside a coil of juicy pork sausage sauced in pesto and salsa verde.