Stars

Twelve seats around a U-shaped zinc bar, a walk-ins-only door policy, and a wine list that runs to fifty pages: Stars compresses a great deal of considered ambition into a small East Village room on 12th Street near Third Avenue. Esquire included it on its 2026 Best Bars in America list, which for a wine bar of this scale is a meaningful signal — the category is crowded with larger, better-capitalised rooms.

The project comes from Chase Sinzer and Joshua Pinsky, whose nearby restaurants Claud and Penny established the team's reputation in the neighbourhood before Stars opened. Wine director Julia Schwartz shaped the list, which skews deep enough to reward serious browsing without demanding it. The format is wine bar in the strictest sense: the food menu runs to nine savory dishes and one dessert, built around snacks and small plates rather than a kitchen-driven dining experience. Deviled eggs, frico, griddled shrimp toast, and two rotating cheeses anchor the menu alongside marinated vegetables and pickled apples.

The walk-ins-only format is a deliberate choice that shapes how the room operates. Standing room supplements the twelve counter seats, which means the bar fills and turns over on its own rhythm rather than a reservations schedule. That suits the East Village block it occupies, where the evening crowd tends to move between spots rather than commit to a single table for the night. Stars functions as a destination for the wine itself, with the food menu calibrated to extend a glass rather than anchor a meal — a distinction that matters when deciding how to build an evening around it.