Nunu Chocolates's New Wine Bar Was a True Community Effort

As of yesterday, Nunu Chocolates's new wine bar is "finally up and running," says Justine Pringle, who owns the Atlantic Avenue storefront with her husband, Andy Laird. And the opening couldn't have come at a better time: "It's going into the holiday season, so chocolate sales have been a lot better than they were last year," Pringle says. "Our full production chocolate kitchen is going between 15 and 17 hours a day, seven days a week."

The kitchen is a welcome step up from the commercial kitchen Pringle had been using before the shop re-opened. It's the focal point of the revamped Nunu space, which was reconfigured to make room for both the open kitchen and the 19-seat bar.

The new bar, Pringle says, was a community effort: Pringle chose the wine selection with Salvatore Bklyn's Rachel Marks, who also works as a wine distributor, while Ben Granger from Bierkraft helped Pringle and Laird with the beers. Nunu's coffee comes from Crop to Cup, a small Brooklyn-based company that works with farmers around the world to distribute fair-trade coffee. Crop to Cup has sold its coffee at the Brooklyn Flea, which is also where Nunu's furniture came from: the two women behind Nightwood, a line of reconstructed furniture and textiles sold at the Flea, created custom-made pieces for the bar.

Nunu's new emphasis on alcohol has inspired Pringle to sell a "beer box" of six different beer-infused chocolates that she previously sold through Bierkraft; she's also in the process of creating a booze box that will feature chocolates whose flavors include whiskey, grappa, and armagnac. Though Pringle's currently racing to keep up with demand -- she's also selling chocolates at the Union Square Holiday Market -- she's at least got more room for her ideas: although Nunu didn't add any square footage, she says, somewhat incredulously, "it seems we have more space now than we did before."

Nunu's new hours are 7 a.m. - 9 p.m. weekdays; weekend hours are forthcoming.