Sit back, kids, and I’ll tell you a tale. A tale about a handful of restaurants in the early 2000s. Among them were places called Diner, and Marlow & Sons and Roman’s, and, later, Reynard. And for a time, as Brooklyn was becoming capital-B Brooklyn, these were where you dined if you wanted to blanket yourself in the Williamsburg ethos.
Ah, you’ve heard of them! Of course you have, and you’ve also probably heard of Andrew Tarlow, who pioneered this vibey, rustic-table style of dining that now feels as normal as breathing.
You might not, though, have heard of Lee Campbell, who ran Tarlow’s wine programs for many years — unless you can quote the 10 crus of Beaujolais from memory. But Campbell, who forged her career working the floor at such key Manhattan restaurants as Verbena and Gotham Bar and Grill, was a pivotal figure in wine, and of the nascent Brooklyn ethos, as the borough’s restaurant industry began to boom. At Tarlow’s restaurants, she built lists full of bottles that were, to float a bunch of nowadays buzzwords, made by small producers, farmed using more light-touch — often organic — farming, and produced with minimal tinkering in the cellar. These were proto-natural wines, evangelized by Campbell before anyone, certainly in New York, was using that term. She was a driving force behind the popularity of many now-iconic producers, like Pierre Overnoy in the Jura, at a time when they were deep-cut esoterica. It’s fair, in other words, to consider her the mother of natural wine in New York restaurants.
So when word got out that Campbell had again teamed up with Tarlow for his first Manhattan foray, the much lauded Borgo, there was cause for excitement, of the sort you might have to hear that TV On The Radio was back out on tour. (If you’re nodding, you almost surely dined at one of those restaurants back in the day.)
Campbell has returned to her native New York after a sojourn in Virginia, where she began making wine and promoting the state’s wine industry. And she’s doing what she did all along — finding and sharing wines that are unexpected, that almost preternaturally predict what’s going to be on trend several years from now. It’s no surprise she made enemies of some small-minded diners in the past, by doing the scouting and boundary-pushing that’s now almost innate to the modern wine buyer’s job.
And yet. At a time when natural wine is not only ubiquitous but at the risk of a bubble, Campbell has again moved three steps ahead. She has grown uninterested in seeing the world in terms of “natty,” as she puts it, or not — making her the grown-up in the room amid endless bickering. She is, in short, over wine having to be in philosophical buckets, and more interested in what always drove the wine programs at Tarlow’s restaurants: “beautiful wines that people aren’t really heralding.”
At Borgo, that takes the form of a tightly edited 15-page list that leaves few corners unexplored. Her fondness for Italian white wines is evident — to go with Borgo’s Italianate fare — but those occupy cozy space with Burgundy upstarts like L’Aubraine, traditional dry Jurançon from southern France, and even, yes, Virginia.
Resy caught up with Campbell to get her take on the current state of wine in New York, her return to Manhattan restaurants, and what we should all be drinking right now.
RESY: What brought you back to New York, back to restaurants, and back to the restaurant floor?
Lee Campbell: Number one, I think I’m just a restaurant person. Essentially I just can’t ever really get the restaurant monkey off my back. I feel really alive in restaurants. I love having a party every night, and serving really fun wines to all my friends every night. And that is essentially what I think a restaurant is for me.
I went to Virginia because I thought that I was at a point in my life where I was ready for a real change, and I thought that that change meant leaving New York City. I also hadn’t left New York during the pandemic. So many people got that little respite, where they went up into the hills or whatever. And I stayed and consulted on two restaurant openings, which was really very intense.
Also, I went to college in Virginia [at the University of Virginia]. So I think there was this conflation of wanting a change, having this nostalgia about this Virginia collegiate youth that I had, and being excited about the promise and potential of Virginia. And I still am, but I just can’t live there full time because essentially I’m a city creature. I’m just a born-and-bred New York girl. It’s great, with the Blue Ridge Mountains and the Shenandoah Valley, but the end of the day, you can’t find dinner at 8 p.m. on Tuesday.
But again, what brought you back to restaurants? It’s an interesting time for anyone to decide they’re going to go back into the restaurant industry.
I follow people in communities. It’s not like when I went to work for Louis/Dressner [one of the first importers of would-be natural wines], I was like, oh, I really want to work for a wine importer. I just follow people who move me and inspire me. Andrew Tarlow is one of those people. I was part of his community previously, so I knew what the ethos is and I knew what the dynamic would be. And he continues to really motivate me.
I find Borgo has such a remarkably balanced, thoughtful, grown-up wine list — which to be fair is not a given these days in New York City, or anywhere. So what was your inspiration?
I think it was middle age. It’s leaning into your age, leaning into where you are. I’m not as “natty” as I used to be. Quite honestly, I don’t think I was ever as natty as anybody thought I was! It was just a moment in time, where I was doing things very differently than a lot of other people. But I actually don’t think I was quite ever as iconoclastic as people put on me.
But the other thing is, you do this long enough, all roads come together, everything converges. When I started in wine in the late 1990s, and you’ll remember those days, we didn’t have a moniker called “natural wines.” There were a few people bringing in some really strange wines, but they would be in the [import] book with everything else. In fact, Andrew and I were dying because we just remembered last night that I used to work for a guy named Mark Whitmore, and he had a small firm called Vineyard Expressions based here in New York, and they were some of the first importers of natural wine into the United States. But they also had a really deep Australian book. So the cutting-edge wines within the same book in the late ’90s included both [very commercial Australian wines like] Grateful Palate and Yalumba, along with [natural-wine pioneers like] Dard & Ribo.
15% shiraz and 12 % syrah.
That’s right! So if those are your origins, which are ridiculous to begin with, it just all keeps coming together. I also spent a short amount of time working for [the pioneering wine importer] Terry Theise. I’ve always drawn my inspiration from disparate sources. I think Borgo is about bringing those sources together. Also, it’s this storied space that used to be I Trulli. Early in my career, we used to come here and drink through Charles [Scicolone]’s wine list, and I think this was the first place I ever had a wine flight. So I think it’s bringing together all the threads. That’s what Borgo feels like to me.
You prefaced my next question, which was about the pioneering work that you did at Diner, at Marlow and Sons, at Reynard. Most of the wines you served would now be considered the old-school natural wines. But at the time, in the 2000s, it was much more like, well, it’s Brooklyn. These are more drinkable wines. This fits.
Yeah. It was always a little bit more about accessibility. And quirkiness, perhaps. Like, what, are we going to sit around drinking Burgundy all day? No, we’re going to drink through all the different crus of Muscadet. And again, it’s like, we can’t even afford to drink Ladoix anymore, so let’s drink Morgon. Now you feel like, oh God, can we even afford Morgon anymore? The waves keep changing.
But I think with that era in Brooklyn, it was more about, these are beautiful wines that people aren’t really heralding, and I’d like to bring them to people’s attention. And I think that’s more what the work was back then.
I remember going on a very meaningful date at Marlow and Sons, and drinking nothing but cru Beaujolais.
Yeah, right?
Which was a good way to plan out an evening.
Here’s what’s hilarious: I took off three years from drinking gamay [the grape in Beaujolais]. I’m just getting back to it now, which is fun.
It’s a good time to get back to it. But I’m curious, with your experience and coming back to New York, how do you view the wine scene here today? Because in a way, it’s now all of the things we used to talk about — we wanted it to be more casual, we wanted it to be more fun. But it’s also weirdly polarizing now. There have been some dark years, where everyone was like, are you in the natural-wine club or not?
I mean, I’m very Marxian — Groucho Marx, that is. Meaning I’d never join any club that wants to have me as a member. So I abhor clubs. I abhor cliques. I abhor trendiness, I really do.
I think that as a woman of color, you spend a lot of time watching other people jockey for power, and I think a huge part of my purpose in life is always to extend the olive branch and make people feel welcome at the table. So I think in a lot of ways Borgo suits me, because I get to meet a lot of people where they are. Yes, they might know Barbaresco but but they don’t know these. So it’s just, like, let me tell you about Fabio Gea. It’s really fun.
Also, Manhattan has changed a lot since the pandemic. And what’s so interesting is that Diner opened 25 years ago and was hipster central, hipster ground zero. But all those people are old now. The original artists that went to Diner in the early days are solidly middle aged. A lot of them have moved to Manhattan, and a lot of them have a bit of money, and they’re thinking about wine differently.
But I’m never going to make it too easy, too obvious. And what’s really important for me, at a time where you could just put together a wine list based on unicorn wines, is I try really, really hard to taste as much as I can, to understand where growers are evolving. And not to just buy wines because I’m offered allocations. I try really hard to put wines on that mean something to me, as opposed to just falling in line.
I’m coming to resent the unicorn thing. I think it’s gone too far. Somebody said to me the other day, oh, I can’t believe you put Overnoy on your list. And I was just like, well, I have a few bottles to sell. They’re not cheap. Not everybody’s going to notice it. But it’s sort of like Taylor Swift planting Easter eggs. If you really look at the list and you see what’s going on, then you’ll see there’s some Overnoy. And if you want to spend that money, I have three bottles and you can buy ’em. You can’t buy them all on the same night, but you can drink them.
One attitude that I love about Andrew as my boss is that he really believes that wine is for drinking, not for hoarding. Obviously wines can be aged, and there is a optimal moment for a lot of these wines, but otherwise, this idea that hey, here is my award-winning wine list and I don’t want to sell these bottles? No! It’s a growing and ebbing and flowing thing, and it should be based in generosity. You should want to sell these wines. I believe in buying wines because they make sense to Borgo, they excite me, and I really want to share them with people.
I was going to say, and I mean this as a compliment, but yours is not an Instagram wine list. There are certainly amazing things to drink, but compared to people who, they build their programs around cults of celebrity, that’s not what’s going on. Even if those bottles of Overnoy are going to vanish quickly now that you’ve spoken of them.
I don’t want to name any names, but there’s just some wines I’ve almost come to resent. We all probably have different ones, but it’s just like, everybody else is going to fight over those. That’s fine. Just let them have it.
It’s interesting: For a long time there was frustration over these cults of personality in wine. And then, everyone said, natural wine is coming along and that’s going to change everything. It’s going to democratize everything. But now you see the same sort of cults of personality within the natural wine world. It’s basically the same game, just with less sulfur.
You hoped that somehow we were going to do it differently, but this is just the nature of human beings. We are tribalists, and a little silly.
How do you find it working in Manhattan? I feel like you more or less created the wine aesthetic for Brooklyn. And now, as is happening for many people in 2025, you find yourself over the bridge.
I love it. I’m not going to live here. I don’t ever want to live here. But I love having an excuse to get dressed every night and come to Manhattan. And I worked in Manhattan to begin with, Andrew worked in Manhattan to begin with. So for us, it’s very much a full circle moment.
Still the Manhattan of yore was very different. I worked at all these restaurants around Union Square. I worked at Gotham Bar and Grill, I worked at Verbena, I worked at Union Pacific. And it’s not the hub, anymore. Maybe it’s like Dimes Square now.
The fact I’m nodding at these names means we’re both aging ourselves. But it is true. Dimes Square probably is what Union Square was. So, when you go out and you drink wine around town, what fascinates you? What seems fun?
I have to be really honest. I was gone and now I’m back and all I’ve been doing is working. So I’ve been doing very little drinking around town.
In that case, what on the list at Borgo really excites you right now? What do you love …
Turning people onto? Let’s see. I mean, I like talking about Swiss wine. And I’m in this weird moment where I’ve become kind of obsessed with the Aeolian isles. Salina and Lipari and Stromboli have become very fascinating to me, and the beautiful malvasias they make there. And just to tell you the truth, non-macerated Italian whites are really exciting.
You’re zagging while everyone is zigging. Everyone has to have an orange wine section now, and you’re like, non macerated is where I take things.
If you’re a terroirist, if you love to taste soil and climate and vintage, it’s hard to do that with macerated wine.
But I will say that I think I’m also at a point in my career where I’m not as affected by new trends. I make wine in Virginia, and beyond that, I don’t know how to introduce anything else that’s new. I think we’ve gotten to the end of the flat earth or something. I don’t know. I’m sure we will have to start talking more about Japan, things like that.
Yeah, you say this now, but watch the Aeolian isles become a thing in three years.
Well, they have limited vineyard space, so it is never going to get too big. And I was like yesterday years old where I realized Ischia is not part of the Aeolian islands. I was like, oh, Ischia is actually in the Bay of Naples! Got it. Always learning.
Do you get to interact at all with the next generation of sommeliers? Do you get to mentor folks who are working with you? Do you see things that feel a little different from the past?
The more things change, the more they stay the same. The one thing that sometimes concerns me is a [lack of] foundational knowledge that I was able to get without going through a course. I want to make sure people are still gathering some very fundamental knowledge, outside of what’s cool and hip, without necessarily having it spooned to them in the way you get through some of these professional organizations.
Right, knowledge by hazing.
It’s just like, these are the 20 bullet points and this is how you taste and this is how you experience wine. And I find it pretty reductive. But I’m also happy to see that you no longer have to know about cigar service to be a master sommelier!
Again, we didn’t have all these categories when I was coming up, so you just had to learn a lot of different things. Now there’s a contingent of wine professionals that are natural wine professionals, and then there’s a contingent that aren’t. And I’m very grateful that I came up before there were those sort of separations.
And some of this stuff is also based on, did you go to this thing and did you go to that thing. And Instagram, and showing people what you’re doing. I kind of want to get back to experiencing wine without showcasing it or commodifying those experiences. Like, just actually being in the moment and really learn or connect with a terroir or with a vineyard.
What do you love drinking right now, for yourself?
If you leave it to me, I tend towards mineral white wines. And I’m just drinking a lot of things like Malvasia Istriana, and Malvasia di Lipari, and Malvasia from anywhere. [Laughs] I’m re-experiencing the Alto Piemonte, which is fun. And I know this is trendy, but I’m still very taken with Portugal.
Is that trendy?
Yeah, I’m still really excited to discover all of the different regions of Portugal, all the different grapes and styles. There’s this one wine that I can’t stop thinking about: a producer called Ramilo, and they’re in Colares, and they make a beautiful malvasia. There you go, another one! I drink a lot of malvasia. But they make a red wine that’s really beautiful. And I keep thinking about that. It is fun to still have wines that you can’t stop thinking about in a weird way.
What about wine service? New Yorkers can be very particular, but at the same time, I feel like wine service used to be a very specific thing and people had expectations. And now it’s like anything goes, any path from the bottle to the glass.
I love service. I have a lot of fun at the table. I have a lot of fun kind of surprising people with what the notion of a sommelier is. I can be involved as much or as little as people want. And yeah, I think I spend a lot of time just sort of disarming people.
Do you find less bro energy than there used to be?
I mean, I do, but that might be the nature of our restaurant. It’s also a thing where, I’ve never been in a lot of spaces that had that energy. But it’s still New York …
And now they’re drinking Overnoy! It’s so weird.
There you are.
I was talking about this yesterday. Somehow weird wines from the Jura have become the new collectibles. And you’re like, what, this wine? For $2,000? You couldn’t sell these wines 15 years ago.
It’s ludicrous. But the good news is I’m always going to be able to find something to drink that nobody wants. So it’s all good. And I just think I’m excited to be in sort of my midlife and finding a way to work in this industry that feels sustainable and feels doable. And just having a really great time.
What about the cost of wine? There’s so much great wine in New York right now, and a lot of people are drinking wine way younger than I did, and they are not flinching at paying 20 bucks a glass for, to your point, weird macerated things that they have no idea what they are.
I remember back in the day at Reynard, my cheapest bottle of wine was $38. And I remember thinking, oh, but people won’t buy the cheapest. So fast forward … not that long. And now the cheapest bottle of wine is [much higher]. And people still won’t buy it. Like, maybe that’s too cheap.
I’ll buy it. I am cheap.
Thank you. But I think wine for Americans will always, will for a very long time, still have that sort of elitist cachet. I think it’s going to be a long time until we can beat that out of it. I mean, that’s why I’m involved in Virginia wine. My feeling was if we can make wine something that is honestly in your backyard, honestly, then maybe you will stop thinking it’s this elitist thing.
Borgo is open daily for dinner from 5:30 to 10 p.m. and walk-ins are accepted at the bar as early as 5 p.m.
Jon Bonné is Resy’s managing editor, a two-time James Beard Award winner, and author of “The New French Wine” and other books. Follow him on Instagram. Follow Resy, too.
