Five Best New SWFL Restaurants for Friends and Date Night•GULFSHORE LIFE
Brooke Kravetz blends romantic elegance, a stellar wine program and culinary ingenuity at her year-old Old Vines Supper Club and the more recent Old Vines Naples in Mercato. (Photo by Anna Ngyuen)
At these community-oriented hotspots, restaurateurs deliver shareable plates, stellar wines, and plenty of ambiance to linger over.
by Andrew Atkins
When it comes time to connect with your one-and-only (or perhaps a small, core group of friends), maybe you’ll head to the tasting menu-focused Old Vines Supper Club. Their much-larger recently opened Old Vines Naples at Mercato is already a hub for big groups. But, we’re partial to the original, snug East Naples chef-driven space, which opened last Valentine’s Day. The restaurant decor skews decidedly romantic, swathed in deep reds and inky blacks and decked in floor-to-ceiling ruby velvet curtains.
This is the domain of chef Brooke Kravetz, who pivoted from a pre-med program to attend Cambridge School of Culinary Arts. Locally, she made rounds through regional institutions, including a stint as general manager and executive chef of The Cave Bistro & Wine Bar and chef de cuisine at LaPlaya’s BALEEN Naples. The wines at Old Vines are worth mulling over, especially at one of the weekly Wednesday wine-pairing dinners the team curates. The Old Vines crew samples as many as 80 pours for any given month to find the just-right pairing for their bountiful menus.
The restaurant points to a new era of local fine dining. Instead of the typical à la carte restaurant experience, dining at Old Vines is more like purchasing tickets to a show. Brooke and her team execute dinner as a spectacle, and you need only to sit back and savor as the staff floats out one considered dish-and-drink pairing after another.
Each course of the tasting menus is divided into two dishes; bring a friend and you’ve accessed the whole bounty of generously sized portions doled out in steady succession. Old Vines might take a crab salad, surround it with a cucumber gazpacho and top the parcel with a crisp squid ink tapioca chip. They might render a braised short rib so succulent, so tender, any cutlery is nearly pointless.
For dessert, they may reimagine the s’more in a smoke-filled cloche, spooning morsels of graham cracker ice cream over dark chocolate crémeux and showering it with a hazelnut crumble.
