Seated in the expansive backyard at Popina drinking a nicely chilled bottle of Marco De Bartoli’s Grappolo del Grillo is one great way to spend an afternoon in Brooklyn. Visitors to one of New York City’s best-kept-secret Italian restaurants might pair the wine with an inventive seafood dish from the kitchen of chef and co-owner Chris McDade. His partner and the man who selects the wines, James O’Brien, will happily open another bottle once the first one runs out.
O’Brien, who learned to love Italian wine while working at Danny Meyer’s Maialino in Manhattan, wher he met his eventual partner McDade, calls the De Bartoli grillo a “super versatile” white that he sells by the bottle at the restaurant and in the wine shop that supplanted the dining room during the pandemic.
Fortunately for the two young partners, Popina, located on Brooklyn’s Columbia Street Waterfront, has a large backyard. Over the past year, the partners have improved the outdoor space, effectively tripling the number of diners they can serve, and creating an attractive place for families to grab an early Italian dinner or for a romantic date once the sun goes down.
O’Brien says that when Popina opened in 2017, the wine list was Italian and American, reflecting the restaurant's menu; McDade has almost always cooked Italian but his Southern upbringing bleeds onto the menu as well (a “hot chicken Milanese” is one of the longtime customer favorites). Since the wine shop opened O'Brien has made it a more global list, but Italian wines remain a focus. The De Bartoli is one of the standouts, he says, because it’s an indigenous Sicilian grape from a storied producer who is best known for his marsala, and because it has the texture and acidity to pair with a variety of seafood dishes.
At Popina, O’Brien has paired the Grillo with a steelhead trout main course with grains and preserved lemon, and with the appetizers and pasta dishes that McDade rotates onto the menu featuring small, sustainable fish, like anchovies and sardines. The chef, a Georgia native who grew up eating canned sardines, is about to publish his first cookbook, The Magic of Tinned Fish, in June. (Check back for a profile of McDade on La Cucina Italiana very soon.)
Popina serves Italian food with hints of Chef Chris McDade's Southern heritage.
O’Brien notes that De Bartoli has two grillo labels; the other, a vignaverde, he describes as a stainless steel fermented wine that is “zippy and bright.” For this Wine of the Week, he’s selected the De Bartoli Grappolo del Grillo because of its complexity, which he likens to that of a white Burgundy, albeit at a fraction of the price. “This is more textured and fleshy and voluptuous but with great acidity to it,” he says, adding that it retails in the mid-$30 range and is on the Popina wine list for about $70.
For O’Brien, who developed and refined his taste for Italian wine at Maialino, where he says that he could sell a ‘64 Barolo on any given night, the Popina list allows him to highlight wines that reflect his egalitarian attitude. De Bartoli may be best known for marsala, but to O’Brien, the grillo represents an opportunity not to challenge drinkers with the strong flavor of fortified wine, but essentially to give the people what they want. “I want to pour a wine and have it be like wow, that’s delicious with the food,” he says.