Yesterday, friends, current and former staff, and regulars gathered at the Four Horsemen in Williamsburg to mourn Justin Chearno, one of the restaurant’s founding partners, who died unexpectedly this week at the age of 54. (The cause of death is not yet known; he is survived by his wife and son.) The crowd spilled out onto the street, and those who knew him remembered someone whose influence and taste helped to change the entire restaurant industry.
“What made a ‘good’ wine and what made a ‘bad’ wine was completely altered by his really intuitive joy for drinking wine,” says importer Steven Graf. “We were all joking that, even those of us who have like, made a profession of it — we’re trying to find what Justin likes. All these new natural-wine spots, that’s Justin’s palate.”
Born in Youngstown, Ohio, Chearno spent years in the music world before becoming one of the leaders of New York’s natural-wine movement. In the early ’90s, he co-founded the Washington, D.C., art-punk band Pitchblende and later moved to New York, where in 1998 he formed Turing Machine with Scott de Dimon and the late Jerry Fuchs. Williamsburg would quickly become home to independent and DIY venues like Mighty Robot, Zebulon, and Glasslands.
In 2002, Chearno started working at a neighborhood wine store called UVA. “There was Chambers Street Wines, Diner, the Ten Bells, and UVA — that was like the entire natural-wine scene, more or less in New York City and in America,” says Zev Rovine, who first worked for Chearno at UVA and later hired him to work at his company, Zev Rovine Selections. “He gave that confidence to me and to a lot of other importers that they could go and be a little experimental and be a little bit weird and that they had an audience with Justin,” Rovine says. “That grew the industry more than people knew back then.”
That Chearno’s background in the indie scene influenced his approach to wine was not lost on anyone. “It felt very much like the record stores you used to go to when you were a teenager and there was that nerdy guy who teased you into buying something you weren’t sure about,” remembers Graf. “He completely cracked my head open.”
His taste, and confidence, friends say, are what allowed him to help introduce unfamiliar wines and winemakers to the city: He became an advocate for them simply because he liked them. “Once Justin gave his stamp of approval, that’s when anything became cool,” says Basile Al Mileik, who worked at the Four Horsemen before becoming St. Jardim’s wine and service director. Chearno was an early champion for everyone from the Sicily-based wine producer Frank Cornelissen to the rock band the Rapture.
In 2015, Chearno helped his friend James Murphy open the Four Horsemen, first as a wine consultant and eventually as a partner. The restaurant’s opening was a watershed moment for natural-wine bars in the city, and an instant hotspot. “He was very smart, genuine, always smiling, full of insights and knowledge yet never talking down to people,” says PM Spirits founder Nicolas Palazzi. “Being passionate, and comfortable with who he was, led him to be able to build a fantastic team around him at Four Horsemen — people who he, I am sure, tremendously impacted and who will be able to continue his legacy.”
Chearno’s ability to match Parisian neo-bistro culture with rock-star appreciation may be his professional legacy, but his family commitment and social grace are, friends say, what they’ll miss most: “He was someone who would go pick up his boy from school and tell stories about how cool it was to hang with his son,” says Palazzi. “He was the essence of a good person.”
Jorge Riera, who handles wine for Frenchette and its sister restaurants, and was another early proponent for natural wine, says the same thing: “One thing that has stood out about him in the last 11 years is his full embrace of being a deep, caring father, husband and rock for his family,” Riera says. “It was all so natural for him.”
Brooklyn Brewery’s Garrett Oliver considered him among his closest friends and shared many “wondrous dinners” with him over the years. “He was the most self-actualized person I knew,” Oliver says. “He literally dreamed himself into existence; he became exactly the man he’d wanted to be.”
