Max Glenn didn’t originally set out to work in wine.
He grew up outside of Trenton, studied art history in college, and worked in restaurants throughout, eventually spending more than a decade in the South. It was there, in Charleston, that he began writing wine lists and learning to trust his instincts, a shift that led him into beverage programs.
That background still shapes how he approaches wine. For Glenn, what’s in the glass is only part of it. He’s just as interested in how the wine is made and who makes it, something that traces back to his early interest in art.
Now based in Philadelphia, Glenn is the beverage manager at Picnic, the Fishtown restaurant known for its oysters, rotisserie chicken, and a wine program that extends into a bottle shop with around 100 wines in rotation. He lives nearby with his wife, Carolyn Mau Glenn, who is the assistant general manager at Kalaya and also directs the wine program there, along with their two dogs and two cats.
Much of their time off is spent close to home. Glenn tends to return to the same places, drawn to spots that are consistent and comfortable. In a city he moved to without knowing many people, it’s been easy to meet people, whether through work, at the dog park, or running into familiar faces around the neighborhood.
My wife and I will get up in the morning and take the dogs out. We like to walk over to Rival Bros. I’m a huge fan of their brown sugar lattes.
We’ll take the dogs to the park on Palmer and let them run around for a bit. We’ve got a 70-pound dog, so it’s good to let her burn off some energy. My wife and I talk about our day, talk about our work week.
We also go to Penn Treaty Park or get out to the Wissahickon or bike along the Schuylkill River, anything to spend the first half of the day outside. We like to be out and about for as long as we can. Working in restaurants, I’m happy to take any opportunity I can to get some vitamin D and fresh air.
Most mornings, breakfast is Mighty Bread bread, avocados, and eggs. We do most of our grocery shopping from either a CSA or Riverwards. So we’ll usually get those really good eggs and butter from our CSA and then I usually run down to Riverwards to grab a loaf of bread for the week. If we go out to breakfast, it has to be Sulimay’s.
If we’ve just been to the dog park or on a little walk, then we’ll go to City Fitness for a workout.
After the gym, we’ll head back out and walk around Frankford for a bit. I do a lot of my clothing shopping at Franklin & Poe — I get most of my work clothes there — and my wife likes Downerss and Vestige, so I like to indulge her and go there for a little bit as well.
Lately, Suraya has been the spot for us for lunch. I love all the food and it’s friendly. It’s people I know, that I’ve worked with and the dining room is pretty and the drinks are good.
We like to split the mushroom hummus with man’oushe — they have one with salmon and labneh and trout roe — or whatever seasonal flatbread they have and get some lattes or some iced teas. They also do a really good rosewater lemonade. It’s absolutely killer.
If we’re home for a while, we’ll usually play a board game. We’re not big TV people, so we end up playing Ticket to Ride, which my wife’s family got us into. It gets pretty competitive between the two of us.
If we want to treat ourselves, we love eating at Kalaya. If we want to leave our neighborhood, we’ll venture into Center City and probably start the night at Parc for martinis, then go somewhere like a.kitchen[+bar] for a bottle of wine and some really good food. They have these little fried mushrooms that are out of this world, but you can close your eyes and point to anything on the menu and it’ll be a good bite of food.
A lot of nights lately, we’ve been going to Amá for a margarita and a snack to start our night. It’s a short walk from the house, so it’s really easy to pop in for a really good mezcal margarita and a shrimp tostada with both cooked and raw shrimp.
Char is our go-to dinner spot. The joke that I tell my friends is that it’s my favorite wine bar because it’s BYOB. As the wine director of Picnic, I always have a million bottles of wine.
My ideal night is convincing eight of my friends to come meet me at Char for pizza and wine. You can sit with friends, drink a lot of wine, and just hang out. The food is out of this world there. It’s casual food. You can take anybody there.
And then if we’re feeling squirrelly and want to keep the night going, we’ll either go to Next of Kin or the R&D cocktail bar. R&D is really comfortable and easy to hang out in, and Next of Kin is a little more lively. It’s louder and feels more like you’re really going out.
And then truly if the night keeps rolling along, you’ll probably find us at Bottle Bar, which is a bottle and bar shop that has a little bar in the back. You can grab something from the cooler and hang out pretty late. It’s where a lot of people in the hospitality industry go after work, so you run into people you know and hang out for a bit before calling it a night.
Carolyn and I have been lucky enough to eat at some really nice restaurants around the world. And at the end of the day, I don’t necessarily always need the food that I’m going out to eat to be inventive or so special or over the top. And so, when we find a place like Sulimay’s, like Char, like R&D or Next of Kin, they’re always good. They’re so consistent. We can go any time and it’s just good. It’s well-made. There are no frills. And it is comfortable.
MAX RECOMMENDS
If you go into a restaurant and you want to try something that feels a little exciting that is easy drinking and interesting and maybe you haven’t had before, asking for wine from Catalonia in the north of Spain is a perfect starting point.
Wines from southeastern France tend to be fresher and mineral-driven with lower acid. There’s a really nice, ripe fruity quality to a lot of them. The whites tend to be slightly aromatic and very peach-blossom, white-tea, really, really soft. It’s a part of France that’s Mediterranean in climate and so the wines reflect that. If you were sitting outside in 80 degree weather, this would be a great wine to have.
At Picnic, with the chicken, right now, the red that I recommend is Dolcetto from Italy. It’s slightly juicy, very rosy, kind of strawberry in flavor, really low acid, and with a nice savory back tone to it that just compliments the chicken really well.
With the oysters at Picnic, I really like people to start with what we have right now, which is a margarita verde … It’s got this vegetal, kind of slightly spicy, really savory quality to it… and we serve tomatillo salsa with the oysters, so it’s a really nice complimentary flavor.
