By Catherine Jacobi
On East 20th Street, chef Jack Logue, who has led Michelin-starred kitchens, and his longtime wine partner, Chris Miller, take over an address with a serious wine pedigree dating back to 1999.
Three ceramic vessels in lit niches between oak fins, above the banquettes of the main dining room. Photo: Alex Staniloff
Em Amphora’s main dining room, three pale ceramic vessels stand in lit niches between ribbons of waved oak, looped handles and all. The restaurant describes them as handcrafted amphora sculptures; their shape gives the restaurant its name: the two-handled vessel used to transport wine across the ancient world. Chef Jack Logue and wine director Chris Miller opened Amphora on September 17, and the vessels are the first thing you notice once your eyes settle into the low, warm light.
The black-paneled storefront at 43 East 20th Street. Photo: Alex Staniloff
The address has poured serious wine before. Veritas opened here in 1999 and became one of New York’s defining wine restaurants, eventually building a cellar of some 75,000 bottles. More recently, the room housed Saint Urban. Amphora inherits that unusually wine-minded address with more than 2,500 labels of its own.
Chef Jack Logue on a banquette in the dining room. Photo: Alex Staniloff
Logue was born and raised in New York, on the Upper East Side, with two grandmothers who took cooking seriously. One kept to traditional Italian recipes, and her meatballs remain a family legend; the other, from Kentucky, would bake five or six kinds of pie for a table of eight. After training at ALMA in Italy, he worked at Daniel and became chef de cuisine at Betony. Stints abroad broadened his repertoire before he returned to New York to lead The Clocktower at the New York EDITION, where the restaurant held a Michelin star during his tenure.
Chris Miller at the bar, glass of red in hand. Photo: Alex Staniloff
Miller’s background includes Café Boulud and Atera, and he first partnered with Logue at The Lambs Club, where they built a Burgundy-focused program of more than 200 labels. In 2025, they reunited for Buchette del Vino in Times Square, a more casual wine concept inspired by Florence’s historic wine windows and built around making good bottles feel more approachable.
Logue and Miller share a booth in the main dining room. Photo: Alex Staniloff
That thinking carries over to East 20th Street. The cellar leans toward Burgundy, the Northern Rhône, Piedmont, and Champagne, with names such as Domaine de la Romanée-Conti, Coche-Dury, and Giacomo Conterno, plus verticals that let you follow a single house like Krug or Ridge across several vintages. Guests can choose between three- and four-course menus or a longer tasting menu, with wine pairings available in two tiers, while the five-seat bar offers a shorter à la carte option.
The bar, with its pale stone counter and tall wine cabinets. Photo: Alex Staniloff]
Read the pairings closely, and one bottle suits the name: Argillae’s Primo d’Anfora, an Umbrian wine fermented and aged in terracotta amphorae, accompanies the Atlantic black bass.
A server pours sauce beside the Atlantic black bass. Photo: Alex Staniloff
Logue’s cooking begins with Northern Italian and Southern French techniques, while drawing on flavors encountered in Australia and across Japan, China, and Thailand. You can find that on the plate: Montauk fluke with Sungold tomato, melon and shiso; a raviolo that reworks vitello tonnato with milk-fed veal; Rohan duck breast with chanterelles, cherry and sansho, the citrusy Japanese pepper. A trio of canapés arrives in a rippled white porcelain dish, and one dessert sets milk chocolate with burnt honey, hazelnut and passionfruit beneath a lacy golden lattice.
Three canapés with a glass of rosé. Rohan duck breast with chanterelles and cherries, with a glass of red wine. Milk chocolate, hazelnut and passionfruit under a golden lattice. Photos: Alex Staniloff
The interiors are by Bentel & Bentel, whose first hospitality project, Gramercy Tavern, opened directly across East 20th Street in 1994. At Amphora, whitewashed brick and waved oak frame gray banquettes, while suspended glass forms soften the black ceiling and a large landscape painting stretches across the dining room. Near the front windows, the bar faces glass-fronted wine cabinets, keeping the cellar visually present throughout the space.
The main dining room under its suspended glass forms. A round table beneath the landscape painting. Photos: Alex Staniloff
The name also has a distinctly New York echo. Leslie Buck designed the Anthora, the blue-and-white paper cup created for the city’s Greek diners, with an amphora on each side. According to his son, even the name came from “amphora” as filtered through Buck’s Eastern European accent. Long before Amphora arrived on East 20th Street, the ancient vessel had already found its way into one of New York’s most familiar everyday objects.
Amphora, 43 East 20th Street, New York. Dinner Tuesday through Saturday, 5 to 11 p.m. amphorarestaurant.com, @amphoranyc