Rolo’s Wine Program Is On Fire

In early August, Leo Bayless-Hall woke up to a nightmare. He’d gotten up early to open the weekend brunch shift at Rolo’s, the popular Ridgewood, Queens restaurant where he’s beverage director, only to receive the news that a refrigerator in the basement had caught fire in the middle of the night. Luckily, the street-level dining room and the apartments above were left unscathed. But tragically, the fire claimed the Rolo’s wine room, eviscerating almost every bottle in their extensive, carefully curated beverage program. “I went in before cleanup had started,” Bayless-Hall recalls. “It looked like the whole place—the walls, the doors, the fridges, the shelves, the bottles, everything—was coated in a jet black layer of smoke.” 

Many of the bottles had exploded; others were covered in the melted wax from their caps. Some laid entirely empty, their corks making a break for it in the heat of the flames. The fire remediation team wiped down every remaining bottle and placed them back on their shelves, allowing Bayless-Hall and the rest of the Rolo’s team to investigate the extent of the damage. Quickly, it became clear that none of the wine from their basement storage was salvageable. “We knew right away that we weren’t going to be able to sell these bottles of wine,” Bayless-Hall explains. Upon examination, some of the collection was fine, “but a few of the bottles were really gross, and had clearly been maderized, or cooked.” Rolo’s made the devastating decision to ditch their entire list, rather than risk a bad pour: “If every single bottle is going to be a dice roll, we have to just take it all as an L.” 

It was a tough call for Bayless-Hall in particular. Since he took over as beverage director two years ago, he has doubled the wine list at Rolo’s, focusing on adding American wines, especially from the East Coast, to the menu, as well as diversifying the offerings within broad categories like Riesling and Burgundy. “I had a real attachment to some of this stuff,” he says.

But in a lucky twist of fate, Bayless-Hall’s rapacious hunt for new bottles provided a life raft for Rolo’s after the fire. The collection had become so vast that they acquired an offsite storage location at the beginning of the year. It wasn’t meant to be a contingency for emergencies: “I’d been buying some cooler, older stuff,” he explains. “They were well above the standard price point for what we had been offering. We were slowly figuring out ways to put some of that stuff onto the menu, but a lot of it was waiting in the wings.” After the fire, the Rolo’s team decided to open up their offsite collection as a way to keep serving great wine while they rebuild what they lost. 

By the following weekend, Rolo’s was ready to start offering these pours, with the aim of keeping the price relatively stable from their old list, despite the higher costs of the bottles. “Every wine director will always brag about how good their prices are,” Bayless-Hall says. “But now that we got forced into this position, it’s important to us that people keep thinking about Rolo’s as a place to drink wine that is well-priced and accessible. That means that, for the time being, our markups are the lowest they’ve ever been.” He estimates that the current markup is, on average, a third or even half the restaurant’s typical pricing. For more premium bottles, he adds, they’re selling them almost at cost: “I just want us to break even.” 

So far, he says, the backup plan seems to be a success. Whether it’s because the staff is thinking more about wine than they would otherwise, or because the prices are better than they might have been before the fire, Bayless-Hall has noticed an uptick. “It’s only been a few days, but we’re selling more wine.” 

Since the fire, the team has been opening one special bottle a night, offering pours of rare wines like a 2002 Robert Ampeau & Fils Les Charmes Mersault (“super lactic and intense,” according to Bayless-Hall), a jeroboam of a 2025 Peter Lauer “Kupp No. 8” Riesling Kabinett (with “really tightly wound acidity” and “zesty citrus”) and a 2013 Thomas Perseval Le Village Blanc de Blanc (“low-intervention, zero sulphur added, and zero dosage with 7 years on the lees is a very ambitious undertaking”). Because of the relatively small collection, there’s not enough bottles of each to necessarily add them to their wine list, but these nightly pours allow patrons to sample their cellar while Rolo’s rebuilds.“Maybe it’ll be something we do indefinitely, or at least until we go through all these bottles,” says Bayless-Hall.

Whether it’s a Pierre Paillard Grand Cru Champagne or a Paolo Bea Italian red, Rolo’s loss is, at least temporarily, a wine lover’s gain. “I want people to be drinking wine that they’re excited about, and that I’m excited about, and that seems like something we’re going to be able to do in a way that’s kind of cool,” Bayless-Halls explains. “It’s for a shitty reason, but it’s ultimately exciting.”