The Secret Is Out

"Wait a minute, Ian. You've written all this about Starrs, and you're just now mentioning wine? It is a wine shop, after all."

There are two ways to order wine while dining at Starrs: a wine list and the shop itself. The second option is the way to go. The wine list offers three dozen or so bottles covering an admirably wide price range, but this seems superfluous when Starrs' large selection is on the other side of the doorway. Though the restaurant adds a corkage fee of $8 to any bottle you purchase from the store, it's still a good deal, considering the wine mark-ups at most higher-end restaurants — and Starrs waives the fee if your bottle costs more than $100.

Of course, shopping for a bottle of wine immediately before dinner might add a new level of stress to your dining experience, especially if you've already been seated in the restaurant. This shouldn't be a problem for the wine-savvy. Though I don't shop at Starrs as often as I'd like — when not dining out for you, my budget restricts me to a diet of cat food and Thunderbird — its selection has always struck me as strong and idiosyncratic. In other words, you'll still find those little tabs of paper with flavor profiles and 80- or 90-something scores affixed to wine displays, but as often as not the store's staff will have written them. For those of you on a budget or not as wine-savvy, I've always found that Starrs' selection of Australian reds provide a lot of bang for my buck.

Would Starrs benefit from a more symbiotic relationship between its wine selection and menu? Probably. There should certainly be more than two wines by the glass, a red and a white, for instance — though the economics of a small restaurant open only three nights a week might preclude a more ambitious by-the-glass program. Then again, one of the joys of discovering wine is wandering the aisles of a good shop, talking to the employees and reading all those labels and tabs of paper. Just remember to get back to your table in time for the first course.