Every Finance Bro Is Now a Natural Wine Guy

Lately, I’ve been thinking about the food bro.

You know him: He has a Google calendar full of team dinners and a nose for whatever is recommended by The Infatuation, Beli, or a woman he dated who works “in brand.” He’s exerting dominance in finance, tech, consulting, etc. — any field with an expense account and a healthy respect for optimization. He’s a list guy. He treats Resy like fantasy football. 

For him, the food doesn’t necessarily have to taste good; it just needs to signal that he knows what to order.

For a while, his wallet mostly belonged to omakase. Or, as it was coined by The New York Times restaurant critic Pete Wells, “bromakase” — the affinity for spending money quickly and downing slices of protein-rich raw fish, possibly because it’s leg day tomorrow. 

Now? He’s getting into natural wine, something New Yorker critic Helen Rosner already foresaw and wine expert Miguel de Leon called “natty fratty,” his term for “a watered-down finance-bro version of what’s cool in wine” that might be ignoring what made it unique.