The Four Horsemen – a Brooklyn wine bar with a Michelin star

The Four Horsemen occupies a narrow storefront at 295 Grand Street in Williamsburg, opened in the summer of 2015 by LCD Soundsystem frontman James Murphy, his wife Christina Topsøe, entrepreneur Randy Moon and wine consultant Justin Chearno — four partners who had almost no restaurant experience between them. They marketed the room simply as a wine bar, reasoning that if they under-promised, the kitchen could do the over-delivering. The strategy outlasted its own modesty: the restaurant was awarded a MICHELIN Star for the first time in 2019, carrying the distinction into the 2020 Guide, and in 2022 the James Beard Foundation gave it the award for Outstanding Wine Program. By 2026, after more than a decade as what one food writer called Williamsburg's cool-kid natural wine bar with celebrity credentials, Four Horsemen had also been named a finalist for the James Beard Award for Outstanding Restaurant. It holds one MICHELIN Star.

01The room and the setting

Murphy opened his new venture as a 38-seat natural wine bar in the heart of Williamsburg, wiring in a vintage preamplifier so the room could listen to his favourite albums from start to finish. The novelty did not go unnoticed: Pitchfork reviewed the restaurant when it opened in 2015, and a later New York Times review joked that the Four Horsemen "must be the first natural-wine bar" to earn a write-up from a music publication.

The space has barely grown since. It remains a narrow Grand Street room built around a bar and a row of window seats, with no second floor and nowhere to expand. Dinner runs nightly from 5.30pm to 10.45pm, with lunch added Friday to Sunday from 11am to 3.30pm, and no overflow seating when the room fills, which it does most nights.

02The chef

The kitchen has belonged to chef Nick Curtola since opening night. A San Francisco native, he trained at Camino in Oakland, spent a stint in Italy, and worked in New York at Franny's, Glady's and Roman's before becoming the Four Horsemen's opening executive chef, a job he still holds.

Insider tip

Dinner nightly 5.30–10.45pm; lunch Fri–Sun 11am–3.30pm. Reservations recommended; no walk-in overflow.

Pete Wells reviewed the restaurant for The New York Times in 2019 and awarded it two stars out of four. When the James Beard Foundation named the restaurant a 2026 finalist for Outstanding Restaurant, it credited Curtola, who "has been onboard since the beginning," with taking the food from simple bar snacks into something precise, seasonal and deeply coveted.

03What to order

The menu changes constantly, built on small plates meant for sharing rather than a set procession of courses. Recent line-ups have included salt cod fritters with chermoula and yellowfin tuna dressed with yuzu kosho and tonnato, alongside clams in broth, a sugar snap pea salad with ricotta, beef tartare and soft shell crab.

Bread comes warm with Rodolphe Le Meunier butter, and a crispy potato pavé arrives with crème fraîche, chives and Japanese curry. To finish, look for sticky toffee pudding or toasted sesame ice cream.

04Wine and drinks

The wine list is the reason many people cross the East River in the first place: several hundred bottles of natural and biodynamic wine, built up over a decade by wine director Justin Chearno, who had already turned the Williamsburg shop UVA into one of the country's most influential natural wine retailers in the early 2000s, well before anyone cared about natural wine.

That programme won the James Beard Foundation's Outstanding Wine Program award in 2022. Chearno died on 22 August 2024, at the age of 54, and the list he built remains the spine of the room.

05When to go and booking

Reservations are recommended rather than optional — the room is tiny and demand has only grown with each accolade. Expect dinner nightly from 5.30pm to 10.45pm, and weekend lunch Friday to Sunday from 11am to 3.30pm, in a space with no overflow seating.

By 2026, more than a decade after opening as a modest neighbourhood wine bar, Four Horsemen had become a James Beard finalist for Outstanding Restaurant, on the heels of opening a second restaurant of its own.

06The neighbourhood

Grand Street sits in the residential heart of Williamsburg, a few blocks back from Bedford Avenue, whose L-train stop is roughly a quarter of a mile away and remains the simplest route in from Manhattan.

The same team behind the Four Horsemen — Murphy, Topsøe, general manager Amanda McMillan, co-owner Randy Moon and the kitchen under Curtola — has stayed rooted to this stretch of the neighbourhood even as the restaurant's reputation has spread far beyond it.

For a weekend. For a lifetime.