What’s a Fun Restaurant for Visiting Wine Snobs?

Welcome to Ask Eater, a column from Eater New York where the site’s editors, reporters, and critics answer specific or baffling restaurant requests from readers and friends. A new question and answer will run every Thursday. Have a question for us? Submit your question in this form.

Hey Eater,

I have some seriously knowledgable wine-loving friends coming to town from Napa, and I want to impress them with my restaurant pick. They’re staying at the Public Hotel, so they clearly value a hot scene, and I’d like to not make them travel too far. What’s a nearby spot to take them that makes me seem in with the wine scene? Obviously, good food is a must, too. Help!

— Aspiring Wino in Need

Dear Needy Wino,

If you were to follow any sommeliers on Instagram, your feed would likely regularly feature pictures of wine bottles you’ve never heard of, stacked bragadociously next to each other with a certain geotag discreetly hanging out on top: Rebelle.

The restaurant, open for two-and-a-half years on Bowery as a follow-up to now-closed Pearl & Ash, is run by a bunch of cool-kid sommeliers. It’s most certainly a club to which not many belong, but it sounds like your wine friends will fit right on in.

And as you requested, the food here is good — one-Michelin-star good — but it’s definitely the wine list that rides shotgun. So go and sit nearby as your wine friends geek out on the plentifully obscure options. Just get drunk, and enjoy the ride.

— Stef