Just A Taste

The Restaurant

Just A Taste opened in 1986 inside a small first-floor space at 116 North Aurora Street, one block north of The Commons and the structural centre of Ithaca's downtown restaurant row. Founders Jennifer Hicks and Tom Wickham conceived the room as a Spanish-influenced wine and tapas bar at a time when neither concept was familiar in upstate New York; the project preceded the national American tapas wave by nearly a decade and remains, almost forty years later, the senior cellar room in the Finger Lakes region. The dining room seats roughly sixty across an intentionally intimate single space: low-ceilinged exposed-brick walls, hardwood floors, deep-burgundy banquettes, candles on every table, a copper-topped twelve-seat bar that runs along the front window with direct visual access to the wine cellar's back wall, and an outdoor patio (open May through October) that has become one of Ithaca's most-considered first-date settings.

The kitchen project under chef-owner team has evolved gradually but never radically across the room's forty-year run. The menu sustains a careful balance between Spanish-tradition tapas (the patatas bravas, the gambas al ajillo, the chorizo-and-Manchego plate that has been on the menu since 1986), Mediterranean and Italian small plates (the burrata-and-prosciutto, the lamb meatballs in a saffron-tomato sauce, the wood-grilled octopus with smoked paprika), and a small but careful entree section that adds heartier options including a daily lake-fish preparation, a hand-cut pasta dish, and a wood-grilled lamb chop. The kitchen's small-plates structure invites long, slow tables: a typical Just A Taste dinner runs two hours, opens with a sherry or a Finger Lakes Riesling at the bar, traverses six to eight small plates across the meal, and closes with the room's signature chocolate-pot-de-creme or a flight of Spanish dessert wines from the cellar.

The wine programme is what has built Just A Taste's nearly-forty-year reputation as the Finger Lakes' most-considered cellar room. The list runs about three hundred and fifty references with deliberate depth in Spanish wines (Rioja verticals, Ribera del Duero, sherry collections that rival any cellar in upstate New York), a careful Finger Lakes Riesling section, a serious natural-French progression, and a flight programme that rotates weekly across themed selections - the 'Spanish Whites,' the 'Old World Pinot,' the 'Finger Lakes Rieslings.' The corkage policy is generous and the cellar's depth has made the room a longstanding favourite of Cornell wine professors and Finger Lakes winemakers; the late John Mariani, the longtime Esquire food writer, named Just A Taste among the top ten small-city wine bars in America in his 2009 national survey. For an Ithaca evening that needs to register as quietly serious without producing the noise of a chef-driven destination room, Just A Taste has been the answer for thirty-nine years and the room has gracefully resisted any pressure to become anything else.