Amy Racine is the Beverage Director of JF Restaurants, Michelin-starred Chef John Fraser’s restaurant group, which includes North Fork Table & Inn in Southold. We caught up with her to learn more about the restaurant’s offerings this summer.
Tell us about your background and what brought you to North Fork Table & Inn.
I grew up in Ohio. Cooking and family dinners were a big part of my life. We would go to the farm stand and grab corn, peas, fruit… anything that looked good and the whole family jumped in to shuck and prep for dinner. Wine was also always on the table, but I never really thought about its importance in the culinary world until I went to Culinary Institute of America, Hyde Park and later moved to Napa. Seeing wineries and diving into that world was wild. I couldn’t believe how magical the process was from growth to glass. Fast forward through cutting my teeth at The Greenbrier Resort, Amangiri, Sons & Daughters in San Francisco, and finally Dovetail, where I landed with Chef John Fraser. Five years into my time with the company we go out to the North Fork and there’s this whole world of farms and wineries just a stone’s throw away from my home in New York City. I was so excited to start working out there. I invited some winemakers to meet me and dine with us in the city, went out to see them, and spent as much time as I could on the North Fork to get as best of an understanding as I could.
Tell us about the beverage program. What can diners expect this summer?
After my introduction to the North Fork, I wanted to make a list that was highly representative of the area. We started with a small list that was about half represented by the North Fork. Since then, we’ve made more friends, drank more juice, visited new properties, and that list has grown. We have what we call a “Global:Local” blind tasting. It’s one grape (or style/blend) from the North Fork and its global counterpart presented as a blind tasting. It’s so much fun — we give our guests as many or as few hints as they want. I found it’s the best way to summarize how great the North Fork wine country is in the little amount of time we have with guests. Through the summer, guests can come in and experience new wine on our list weekly. We keep the selections rolling. Cocktails are changing with the season. Our bartenders visit local farms, find ingredients they’re excited about, and incorporate them into our menu. It’s really incredible.
Do you have a favorite cocktail on the menu?
The Stonefruit Old Fashioned has been on our menu since we opened. It’s so simple but so good. We take local fruit, and incorporate that into an old fashioned as the season best dictates. In the winter months, we keep the peaches and plums as a preserve and stir them in. In the summer, they are so ripe and juicy we just gently massage the slices into bourbon. Regardless of the season, we’re presenting local goods in the best, most organic way possible.
Tell us about the wine & cocktails classes you’re offering.
We have this amazing wine country around us and want to present our guests with a place to taste local vineyards in one space. Our sommelier is extremely talented and can walk guests through why local Nebbiolo is comparable to Barolo or who makes local sparkling in the same method you find in Champagne. It’s a very approachable and comprehensive approach to the world of wine. We offer local classes, or can customize to whatever our guests want to learn more about. Our cocktail classes are a side-by-side experience with the North Fork Table & Inn head bartender. We build cocktails together, taste together, experiment together. It’s really an opportunity to start with an intro to cocktail building, and quickly expand into variations on cocktails. These, too, can be tailored to taste or we offer some really fun curated experiences on our site.
What do you love most about the North Fork?
The people. The land and climate has so much to offer and manipulates the fruit to create flavors you can’t find elsewhere, but it’s really the people at the wineries who make these wines world class. The talent has more knowledge of the land than ever before, and there is so much creativity behind what the wine is aged in, how long, creative new varietals, etc. IE: Macari makes a pet nat, Corey Creek makes a Chardonnay fermented on oyster shells, One Women Wines grows Gruner Veltliner. The knowledge of the land is there, it’s what those with the knowledge do to push the North Fork forward that is what separates it from anywhere else in the world.
