Patina Wine Bar wants to offer ‘unpretentious’ wine experience to Park Ridge
The idea behind Patina, the newly opened wine bar and restaurant in Park Ridge’s Uptown, was to take some of the pretentiousness out of wine.
“We wanted to open a wine bar that was just relaxing and fun,” co-owner Carissa Schaffer said.
And Patina, located in the space that used to house Sweet and Tart, is filled to the brim with wine: behind the bar, stacked on industrially inflected, wall-mounted shelves and in cabinets lining the front portion of the dining room that looks out onto Prospect Avenue.
Schaffer, who spoke to Pioneer Press on the tail end of the lunch hour, said she also runs Glenview’s Cafe Lucci and Bobby’s in Deerfield with business partner Tim Arifi. She has previously operated dining establishments in Chicago’s Lincoln Park neighborhood.
The walkability and neighborhood feel of Park Ridge’s Uptown were big draws for Schaffer and Arifi as they were looking to locate their next establishment, she said.
“We’ve always loved Park Ridge because I feel like everyone here really likes to go out, eat and drink and likes to do that in their neighborhood,” she said. “I love that they do like the concerts in the park and the farmers markets and everything.”
They had been thinking about opening in a few other neighboring suburbs, Schaffer said, but “once we got this, we were like ‘we’re done; it’s over.’”
Business has been very good so far, Schaffer said.
“It has been absolutely amazing,” she said. “I actually have never had a better restaurant opening where the neighbors have just come out in droves.”
It’s possible that Patina’s participation in Park Ridge’s Restaurant Week, which took place March 3-12, helped drive customers to check out Uptown’s newest addition.
“The first thing we did [after opening] was sign up for the chamber and they were like, ‘Hey, I know you’re just opening but it’s Restaurant Week — do you want to participate?” Schaffer recalled. “I’m like, ‘We’re in. We’ll do it. We’ll figure it out.’”
They have big plans, including offering brunch, wine tastings on the last Saturday of the month, a wine club and trips to some of Patina’s distributors that are located in Illinois.
“We made a very conscious decision not to have a champagne by the glass,” she said. “What we decided to do is to put sparkling wine and a sparkling rosé and it’s from Illinois.”
Illinois isn’t exactly known for top of the line wine, Schaffer said, “but these wines are fantastic.”
Her hope is to organize trips for patrons to Peru, Illinois, where the two distributors of the wines in question are located, to tour the vineyard, do tastings and see the area. Her husband, who is also Patina’s sommelier, took several trips of that variety while studying for his sommelier’s certification, she added.
Schaffer said her favorite items on the menu currently were the March 17 special, mussels with sausage and white wine sauce, and a red blend from Bulgaria called Bessa.
The wine bar’s name is a homage to Schaffer’s father, who owned a decorating company called Patina Decorating, she said. But she also said she liked how the term “patina” evokes “a beautiful surface that then over time turns into its own new and beautiful thing.”
It felt fitting for her newest venture with Arifi after years of learning about and working in the hospitality business, Schaffer said: “We kind of just took everything that we’ve learned and were like, ‘alright, this is what we’re going to make with it.’”
