Oak Wine Bar

Oak Wine Bar
I’ve lived in North Brooklyn coming up on two and a half years now, but it wasn’t until this past summer that I noticed Oak Wine Bar. I was on the lookout for a café with an inviting, shady garden to hang out in on a hot day. Flash forward to the autumn, when I finally took myself to the equally inviting, warm, wood interior.
Owners Paula Maia and Kevin Meegan opened their restaurant nearly three years ago in 2007. With an aim to create a space that brings together the local community with good wine, and food. With a combined total of twenty-five years of experience in the restaurant industry, the partners transform traditional American dishes with international flavors and wine pairings. The menus they put together change seasonally, and make use of artisanal and locally grown ingredients. With everything cooked and prepared in the tiny, open kitchen, there is no room for fussy. As Maia puts it, “For the food to be good it has to be simple with the best ingredients.”
I sat at the bar and chatted with both Maia and Meegan while they walked me through a meal. They both immediately started discussing which wines to drink. Maia, who hails from southern Brazil and is a trained sommelier, excitedly started in on Portuguese wines, showing me pictures of a winery she had recently visited. “They are the most undersold wines right now. But they are absolutely delicious.”
The first wine we started with wasn’t Portuguese, but Spanish. It was a white tempranillo, a black grape usually used to make red wines. This white is the only one available in the world, and starts sweet on the tongue, but finishes with a tart kick at the end. My first wine was paired with two selections from the bruschetta bar, one for $3, three for $8. Both were sweet, which is unexpected for bruschetta, but a delicious twist and not to sweet to make a starter. The first was a seasonal pumpkin spread with honey on a toasted slice of bread. The second, and I must admit my favorite, was ricotta with fig jam. Remember that back yard? It also came with an old fig tree that had a bumper crop of figs this year. Meegan says, “We thought about cutting it down, but in the end decided to build around it.” It was these figs that were now making an appearance on my plate.
The next dish in the lineup was meatballs in an almond cream sauce, $10. The white tempranillo continued to be my companion through this course, and I noticed that it is also the suggested wine on the menu. The meatballs were light and went well with the nuttiness of the sauce.
On to the next wine! This was Portuguese white that Maia had been speaking of so enthusiastically earlier and the first of two wines from the Douro region of Portugal, an area or rolling hills surrounding the Douro River with microclimates perfectly conducive to viticulture. This white was paired in with a sea bass, which was deliciously moist and served whole on a bed of herbs, $16.
The final wine was a Quinto do Crasto, the only red of the evening, also from the Douro. Though you might think of dessert wines as being sweet and white, I highly suggest a red if you are thinking of something chocolate. The Quinto do Crasto was exactly the right compliment to the chocolate mousse that was the finisher to my meal.
Wines here are clearly serious business, but while Maia takes on the chief sommelier duties, Meegan with his Irish origins, takes charge of the beers. Each heads a free tasting, with wine tastings every Tuesday and beer tastings on Sundays.
The restaurant also has a brunch menu. And, get this; they serve brunch seven days a week. With dishes like polenta with chorizo, poached egg and arugula, and a folded truffle eggs and bacon Panini, brunch meets the same exacting standards as the rest of the menu there. That is to say, their own. According to Meegan, “There’s never a glass of wine here you won’t like. We want to enjoy the food and drink ourselves, so we try to make everything the best.”