How New Jersey Restaurateurs Are Creating A ZoomTown

by John Foy and Lana Bortolot

In 1992, Francis Schott and Mark Pascal opened the Stage Left and Catherine Lombardi restaurants in a two-story building in central New Jersey’s New Brunswick theater district.  

Since its inception, Stage Left has hosted 11 winemaker dinners yearly. Faced with the shutdown caused by the Covid-19 pandemic, Schott and Pascal moved their winemaker dinners to Zoom, the popular online meetup. “When we heard people say, ‘that’s crazy,’ we knew we had a good idea,” Schott said. 

After brainstorming about how to reimagine 28 years of on-premise dinners without a kitchen crew and service staff, they kept their four-course menu format, but designed it so “all the love can happen in the prep and very little is asked of the guests in terms of final assembly at home,” said Schott.  

The kickoff dinner was May 2 with George Hendry, owner of Hendry Ranch winery in Napa Valley. Guests had the option to pick up their food and three Hendry wines at Stage Left, or have the wine and dine package delivered to their home.  

Schott and Pascal’s nearly three decades of experience proved itself with the instructions included in the food package: “By 7:15, your soup will be on the stove. Your terrine will be plated and ready to go, your short ribs will be warming/holding in the oven. We’ll all dial into the Zoom session between 7:15 and 7:30 so we can sit right down at 7:30 and enjoy dinner and wine and conversation together.” I imagined there was a chorus of “yes, chef,” throughout the New Brunswick area.

With their first Zoom event a sell-out, the partners lined up other winemakers and winery owners. Perhaps, their biggest test will come on June 7 when they leap six hour to welcome Burgundy’s renowned winemaker and owner Etienne de Montille. It will be dinner time for the Stage Left attendees and a nightcap for Monsieur de Montille at his home in Volnay, from which, he will present chardonnays and pinot noirs produced at his Racines winery in California’s Santa Rita Hills appellation. 

Subsequent Zoom dinners convinced the partners that such dinners and tastings will become a permanent feature of Stage Left. They realized that diners like the focused discussions that the online meetup format offers, and the communal chatting that continues after the winemaker has virtually departed. The only downside, said Schott, “there are no hugs.”  

Bin 14 is a boutique wine bar in gentrified Hoboken. Surrounded by apartment buildings with views of Manhattan, many of the bar’s customers are millennials and other professionals now working from home across the Hudson River from their shuttered office towers.  

General manger Joel Liscio is Bin 14’s Zoom conductor and wine educator. He uses the platform to keep his apartment-bound clientele connected to his weekly “Wine Knowledge Happy Hour” that had been previously conducted at the bar. 

Liscio’s tastings can be thematic, or reflect his customer base. With many apartments occupied by singles, Liscio first tasting was canned wines. “If you are by yourself in quarantine, a full bottle might be too much,” he said. The 90 respondents to that tasting, grew to 150 for a recent rose’ weekend event. It began on Friday with roses having one-year of bottle age; the new 2019 roses made up Saturday’s tasting, and an Oregon and Veneto sparkling rose capped the event on Sunday. 

Reflecting Hoboken’s “Mile Square” moniker, all the participants live near enough to walk or bicycle to Bin 14 to pick up their wines before the tasting. Food is included in the package, but Liscio allows participants to opt out of the food, replacing that portion of the cost with more wine. Hoboken’s apartment dwellers don’t have to worry about drinking and driving. 

Liscio plans to pivot permanently to Zoom tastings as he finds that his Bin 14 patrons like doing the tastings in the comfort of their homes. And Zoom allows him to accommodate more people than the wine bar’s 80-person occupancy limit. 

Though the current pandemic has tried the wits and resources of all in the hospitality business, it’s also proved to be a font of creativity, as these enterprising New Jerseyans demonstrate.