Cafe Mado’s Wine List Is Well Worth the Trip to Prospect Heights
Sommelier Kenny Toll brings his impeccable palate from Place des Fêtes to Redwood Hospitality’s newest restaurant.
Cafe Mado opened in the spring of last year, to high praise: The New York Times included it on its 2025 list of the 100 best restaurants in New York City, for one. It’s the latest of Redwood Hospitality’s hits, which includes much-missed Michelin-starred Oxalis (on hiatus while it finds a new location) and its outstanding sister restaurant Place des Fêtes in Clinton Hill, lauded as one of the best wine bars in the city.
When I visited Cafe Mado in September and October, the food was indeed exceptional. But now it’s getting an equally exciting wine program, thanks to the person who helped make Place des Fêtes’s bottle list such a resounding success: Redwood Hospitality sommelier and wine buyer Kenny Toll.
Toll worked at Place des Fêtes as lead sommelier, from its opening in 2022 until this August, when he took over the wine program at Cafe Mado in Prospect Heights, at Oxalis’s old address on Washington Avenue. Oxalis is where Toll began his career in hospitality; it’s where Place des Fêtes began too, as a pop-up in the empty parking lot behind the restaurant’s garden in 2020, during the outdoor dining days of the pandemic. “It’s kind of full circle, coming back now,” Toll says, about returning to the former Oxalis space.
The restaurant is an all-day cafe, offering coffee and breakfast pastries from Redwood’s Laurel Bakery in the mornings and lunchtime sandwiches, salads, and small plates. At dinner, the restaurant switches into a higher gear, what the Times described as “Oxalis in deep cover.” The menu is very seasonal, vegetable-forward small plates with two or three mains. It changes almost daily, with dishes like butter bean purée, Castelfranco radicchio with plum and Piave, a cheesy farinata (a chickpea pancake), and a toothsome tajarin slick with sungold-tomato pomodoro. It’s casual, adventurous, yet elegant—and Toll’s wine list compliments that perfectly.
For the seafood-forward menu at Place des Fêtes, Redwood’s beverage director Piper Kristensen wanted to focus on Spanish natural wines (French name notwithstanding). Toll dove into the new-wave Spanish wine world and assembled one of the most forward-looking wine lists in the city. Now, for the list at Mado, he’s channeling that same enthusiasm but returning to the French angle of Oxalis’s wine program, with a focus on Burgundy, Jura, the Loire Valley, the Rhône Valley, Savoie and Bugey. It all pairs well with the kitchen’s classical techniques and rich flavors, where chef Nico Russell’s time in southern France is evident.
“We’re still in the natural wine world, but leaning more classic,” Toll tells me. “This is the path for a lot of people that start with super-natural wines. I still love them, it’s where I cut my teeth. I didn’t go through any certification program, so it wasn’t like I entered into the wine world through Bordeaux and Burgundy. But slowly, you want to go deeper, and you start to uncover these storied, classic regions,” he says, “kind of from the side.”
Toll’s list ranges from appellations like Champagne and Côte de Nuits at the top, balanced by value-driven bottles from négoce projects or declassified vines. “They’re almost like loopholes. Maybe this wine says Beaujolais-Villages, but it’s actually vines in Fleurie that we’re getting, and it costs way less,” Toll says.
He stocks newer, small producers but also those you might call “traditionalists,” who were working without pesticides and sulfur long before it was fashionable: a mix like Salima and Alain Cordeuil in Champagne, Château de Béru in Chablis, Bénédicte and Stéphane Tissot in the Jura, Antoine Lienhardt in Burgundy. The list is rounded out with favorites from Italy and beyond, particularly Germany (Wasenhaus, Gut Oggau, Christian Tschida). There are always some exciting new producers that Toll has turned up, as well as hard to find wines like library vintages of sparkling chenin blanc from 2013 and 2015 from the now-shuttered Les Capriades estate in the Loire Valley.
Whatever wine he’s telling you about, it’s clear that Toll knows his stuff. He was an actor before pivoting to the wine industry—two very different careers that share essential skills. “It’s all about presentation and confidence in what you’re giving your audience,” he explains. “People know if you’re bullshitting. They know it in theater, and I think it’s the exact same thing in wine. You can fake it up to a certain point, but after that you’ve got to know what you’re talking about, you’ve got to know what you’re doing. I think that’s why I realized that I love not just wine, but the storytelling aspect of this, too.”
There was a time when Toll wasn’t sure if he’d ever be able to work as either an actor or a sommelier again. In 2023, after contracting a non-covid respiratory virus, his right vocal chord was paralyzed and he lost the ability to speak. Doctors told him that he might recover his voice—in two years. In the meantime, he was only able to speak in a low register for a short period of time before his voice gave out. Some days he couldn’t speak at all, resorting to polishing glassware and other silent tasks.
It must have been an incredibly distressing couple of years for someone whose livelihood relies on being clearly heard from a stage or over the din of a busy restaurant. “There was a moment where I thought I would never have my voice again,” Toll says. “I thought, ‘If I can’t act and I can’t sell wine, what am I going to do?’”
Thankfully, at the two year mark, his vocal chord regained movement, and after surgery earlier this year to remove a node on the chord, Toll has fully recovered his voice. On an evening at Cafe Mado he can be heard, clear as a bell, greeting diners and having a conversation at each table about the wine list, sharing his knowledge and his passion. He also teaches wine classes for Redwood Hospitality in the Place des Fêtes space; recent ones focused on Burgundy and the Jura.
A few days ago I stopped into Cafe Mado for Steak Monday, the restaurant’s weekly pre-fixe menu that I will venture is the best deal in the city. (Cafe Mado is intentionally open on Monday, a night when most restaurants are closed, to welcome those who work in the industry.) For $80 per person, you get a three-course, family-style feast. The night I was there the plates included a mussels escabeche, a bright and bitter chicory salad tamed by plums and Bayley Hazen blue cheese from Jasper Hill Farms, followed by grilled chuck steak with shallots in a lush sauce, honeypatch squash, and the best onion rings I’ve ever had, followed by a paw paw financier dessert. Toll poured stellar by-the-glass pairings, all of which ranged from $18 to $25: a saline Arnaud Combier white Burgundy that was a perfect match for the unapologetic brine of the mussels; an autumnal, dark-berried Domaine Guion cabernet franc with the steak; and a Domaine de Haute Perche Anjou Blanc, driven by white-fleshed fruit and steely minerality, with dessert.
Cafe Mado is just a block north across the parkway from the Brooklyn Museum, Prospect Park, and the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. I can think of no better way to end a day of art and nature in the neighborhood than with dinner at this restaurant, alongside a glass of wine and the story behind it—as told by Kenny Toll.