Magazine Street is getting a new wine bar and ‘red sauce Italian joint’ in same block

Start talking wine and the stories can just keep flowing through the style of wine or the maker or the region of origin or maybe just the ideal food pairing. It’s all the better when you can actually open and sip that wine as you go.

This is the versatile flex of wine shops that double as wine bars. That’s a niche that’s been growing (see my round up below), both in number and variety in New Orleans. It's carving a third space in the city’s hospitality spectrum as specialty retail shops with a social side.

The latest example is Patron Saint (1152 Magazine St., 504-321-7771), and it opened right around Thanksgiving at 1152 Magazine St. in the Lower Garden District.

The couple behind it, Leslie Pariseau and Tony Biancosino, also have a new Italian tavern and pizzeria coming soon just next door called St. Pizza. Described by Biancosino as a “red sauce Italian joint.”

Talking wine, drinking wine

Patron Saint is in the same complex as the Merchant House furniture and decor store. It’s easy to miss whooshing by on Magazine Street but makes an immediate impression as you walk in.

This is a stylishly designed reuse of an old industrial space, with an airy roominess that feels calming and inviting.

The long marble bar is the centerpiece to Patron Saint, with a few tables set around the room, too.

Pariseau has focused the selection on low intervention wines (aka natural wines) and from small producers around the world. Hard cider is another specialty here, represented in a wide variety.

A line up of a half-dozen or so wines by the glass (and often a cider) is at the ready.

What's on rotation changes almost daily. What’s constant is the easy interplay with staff who have been tasting their way through the shop’s selection, too, and offer insight over the bar.

You can get plates of cheese or salami or tinned imported seafood to eat with your wine, or to take home, with a selection of breads and a small range specialty foods on hand, too.

Pariseau and Biancosino created Patron Saint during the pandemic, initially as a collaboration with Coquette and Lucy Boone Ice Cream in the restaurant space that today is Lengua Madre. That collaboration was a temporary one as the tides of the pandemic shifted, but the response from the neighborhood inspired the couple to develop the wine shop/wine bar further.

Pariseau is a writer and producer (she co-founded PUNCH, a media brand around drinks and drinking culture). Descriptions of particular wines attached to the racks are fun and illuminating and leave no doubt the resident wine buyer is also a writer.

“Wine is deep and never-ending and a lens through which to see nature and people and climate change and agriculture and capitalism — and we can get as deep into that as anyone wants to — but it's just a beginning point,” Pariseau said. “It would be nothing without the people drinking it and the conversation around it.”

St. Pizza taking shape

Biancosino, who works in TV and film, grew up in New Jersey in a family that ran restaurants outside Philadelphia. He’s been pining for the type of casual Italian restaurants he knew from back home, and that’s the intent behind St. Pizza.

Located two doors down from the wine shop, St. Pizza has its pizza oven right up front, with a counter for slices and also a takeout window for service from the sidewalk.

Beyond this counter, you’ll pass through a curtain to find a small dining room trimmed in dark wood and a bar for dishes like Italian subs and meatballs and spaghetti.

St. Pizza is nearing the end of construction, with an opening slated for January.

Wine bar/wine shop niche grows

Patron Saint joins a growing roster of spots in the wine bar/wine shop niche, which adds to the warmth and personality of neighborhood shops, qualities that make local businesses like these the antidote to the blank coldness of big box retail and e-commerce.

Just this year, we got the Little House (640 Bounty St.) in Algiers Point, with its big patio outside and Really Really Nice Wines just about 2 miles up the road (3500 Magazine St.)

They join places like Swirl Wine Bar & Market (3143 Ponce de Leon St.) in Mid-City with its hidden patio and Italian wine focus, Faubourg Wines (2805 St. Claude Ave., where if you’re lucky maybe the Press Street train crossing will block you in and you’ll just have to stay for another; the Independent Caveau (1228 S. White St.), a true find tucked away behind the Restaurant Depot, with a first-class deli case; and a really deeply hidden gem at Next to Nothing Wines (3928 Euphrosine St.), located on the loading dock of the Art Egg Building off Earhart Boulevard.

The concept isn’t new in New Orleans. Martin Wine Cellar has long offered wine by the glass between the racks.

But now the idea is blooming in different ways, and I’ll drink to that.

Patron Saint

1152 Magazine St., 504-321-7771

Thu., Fri., Sat. noon-10 p.m., Sun., Mon. noon-8 p.m. (closed Tue., Wed.)

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