Inside the Wine Cellar at Houston’s One Fifth

By most restaurant standards, closing after 11 months would be considered a pretty epic failure. At One Fifth in Houston, it’s by design.

In 2016, chef Chris Shepherd and his business partners opened what’s essentially a restaurant incubator, designed to be overhauled annually, yielding five different restaurant concepts over the course of five years. The space, a former church, has seen two iterations so far, beginning with One Fifth Steak, then transitioning into its current format, One Fifth Romance Languages, which opened in September, 2017, and highlights the wine and food of France, Italy and Spain, in particular.

Shepherd—along with wine director Matt Pridgen, with whom he’s worked for the past 10 years—is most comfortable in an ever-frenetic kitchen. At his beloved restaurant Underbelly (currently closed, and relocating to make way for steakhouse Georgia James), the local menu changed daily, yielding a constant blur of flavors.

“You never knew what was gonna be on the menu,” says Pridgen, who became adept at creating an agile wine list that could bend to the whims of Shepherd’s wide variety of dishes. “I wanted wines that wouldn’t mask the flavors of the cuisine, wines that have balance and finesse and really pair well with Chris’s food—which could go from Korean one day to Mexican the next.” 

So, when presented with the challenge of operating a wine program that needed to be reinvented every year, Pridgen was well-equipped. For One Fifth Steak, he went big, building a 500-bottle program around Champagne to align with Shepherd’s behemoth raw bar, plus burly reds—nebbiolos from Piemonte, Rhône blends, Priorats and a supersized American cabernet list—to match the dry-aged beef hanging in a locker behind the bar.

“Most sane people open a restaurant and build a wine list for the long term, hoping they will be around and profitable for as long as possible,” wrote Pridgen at the top of the wine list at One Fifth Steak. “No, we aren’t doing that… are we insane? Maybe… but we are going to have a damn fun time doing it!”

So far, Shepherd has steered the themes based on what he wants to cook, and the design and wine follow suit. In practice—and because in Texas, it’s not legal to sell off wine, or even to relocate it to a different restaurant—this means that Pridgen has stocked about 60 percent of the list with wines (usually priced at $100 or less) that can easily function in the context of any theme. (The steak-worthy reds at One Fifth Steak, for example, were easily rolled over onto the Romance Languages list.) The other 40 percent is in constant flux, and augmented where needed to fit the concept. “Here, I’m planning for the future, but it’s the immediate future, not the long-term future,” says Pridgen.

Despite flipping the list so frequently, Pridgen says he’s still able to get older vintages by working with distributors who offer back-vintage releases and with wineries that consistently hold wines back for a number of years before putting them on the market. For instance, one of his favorite South African wineries, Hamilton Russell, has been selling vertical packs of its pinot noir, an easy prefab for his fast-paced program.

Now, less than six months out from the restaurant’s next iteration, Eastern Mediterranean, Pridgen is already making room in his cellar for the new concept. He’ll give space to reds and whites from southern Italy and Greece, Sicily and Corsica while also exploring regions that most people won’t be all that familiar with—“myself included in a lot of cases,” he says. He’s researching bottles from Lebanon, Israel, Croatia and Turkey, as well as those from Macedonia, Morocco and Slovenia.

“I’m the world’s worst about buying wines that I’m not necessarily going to put on the list immediately… I love to have things on hand and let them sit for six months or three years,” says Pridgen. “This is one thing I’ve really had to change in my buying style.”