Restaurant Review: Northampton Wines and Wine Café

Almost any wine you might imagine—paired with a meal: This could be the mantra of Northampton Wines and Wine Café, where vino plays a starring role in day-to-day operations. But its handsome restaurant lays claim to a few laurels of its own.

Housed in the charming all-brick “Trolley Barn” that the Greenville Gas and Electric Light Company built in 1891, this wine shop and ensuing restaurant draws on a diverse crowd—oenophiles to be sure, but also a well-pressed international business contingent and those seeking something a bit off the beaten path. It’s almost unthinkable to come to the restaurant without leaving with a bottle or two, and more increasingly, to come to the shop without stopping for a bite.

On the Greenville wine scene since 1975, and at its present location since 2000, the mammoth wine shop casts its net far and wide to cull wines from around the world. The largest contingent from one area—the United States—makes up the majority of the 3,000 wines at Northampton and fills the main hall, an industrial space with soaring ceilings overhead made cozy by raw brick walls and carpeting underfoot. One can dine in here as well, a concept the owners introduced in 2003 with the opening of the Wine Café—the full service restaurant adjacent to the retail store—when it became apparent that people often wanted to taste food and wine pairings.

On the evening we perused the aisles of Northampton Wines, we elected to dine in the understatedly elegant restaurant where white linen tablecloths and high-backed upholstered chairs beckoned alongside subdued taupe walls and raw brick. A curved wall dotted with niches for gleaming wine glasses, decanters, and bottles keep well within the theme.

The evening’s two-page menu put together by Chef Elizabeth Bardsley features a handful of appetizers, a few soups and salads, and eight appealing entrées, some with a hint of Lowcountry, others Continental haute. With each item, three wine pairings come recommended and are welcome suggestions when looking to try something new. Or, we could have selected a bottle from the shop, which would be served at our table subject to a corkage fee.

Our server was attentive without being intrusive, bringing soft baguette slices and butter rosettes as we made our choices. He steered us in the right direction, encouraging the hot chili seafood appetizer, but he needn’t have worried about high-heat warnings. The Port Royal shrimp, scallops and Long Island calamari, flash fried and tossed in hoisin sambal sauce—sambal being a slightly-sweet spice mixture favored in Indonesia and the Philippines—had the perfect complexity for our palates. The seafood morsels were tender, with a pleasing crunch added by sautéed skinny scallions, and sliced red and green peppers.

We also tucked into the four cheese ravioli—two plush pockets—whose mellow richness was perfectly foiled by the tang of julienned prosciutto ham and grated Pecorino Romano cheese.

Entrées, including venison, braised lamb shank, filet mignon, Scottish salmon, and veal—each with alluring side dishes—made it difficult to settle on a choice. But the highly recommended Maine scallops, paired with a glass of La Cala Vermentino, a supple Italian white with an underlying acidity, was the perfect mood brightener for this rainy evening. Three fat scallops sat atop velvety cheddar cheese grits—possibly some of the best we’ve ever tasted. A smoky bacon cream sauce stopped short of overwhelming the delicate scallops, whose mellow sweetness was the perfect match for the more savory elements of the dish. Fruity green asparagus and crisp haricot vert provided a welcome fresh crunch.

The separate dessert menu, with excellent pairing suggestions of Sauternes, eiswein, sparkling wines, and other good matches for sweets, didn’t go unnoticed. We lingered over house-made ice cream—pungent honey-lavender (pure deep, dark honey, only the slightest hint of the herb), cinnamony pumpkin, and brickly butter pecan. A thinly sliced strawberry fanned out across voluptuous white-chocolate croissant bread pudding. This light little square of soft goodness, dotted with fresh blueberries and drizzles of white-chocolate-scented crème anglaise, topped a perfectly graceful evening, proving that indeed, when thoughts turn to wine, a good meal should soon follow.