You want to go out and have a glass of wine. Good wine. Not the kind that comes in a box or a gigantic bottle. But you don’t want to sit through a six-course meal just so you can go to a place with a decent wine list. Your date just wants a pint of beer and a snack other than pretzels. So where do you go?

Leslie Thistle and Shane McCarthy can help.

The duo recently opened Bangor’s newest food and wine destinations, Cafe Nouveau and the Bangor Wine & Cheese Co., located in the former Bangor Furniture Co. building on Hammond Street. The cafe, which offers about 100 wines by the glass along with beer, coffee, and tapas-style entrees, lies three steps down from the wine shop, which sells a selection of bottles from around the world, pastries, coffee, smoked seafood and cheeses.

“We pretty much created the kind of place that we wanted to go to if we ever had a night off again,” McCarthy said, laughing. Since the businesses opened two weeks ago, he and his business partner, Thistle,

haven’t had too much down time.

Word has spread quickly about the cafe and wine shop. They already have regular customers, including a couple who live downtown who stopped by for lunch the first day the cafe opened. They found a favorite Sauvignon Blanc on the wine list and each ordered a glass. After lunch, they went next door and bought two bottles. Later, they ordered a case of wine, and they’ve come back several times to eat.

“To me, that just validates that what we were doing was right and it was going to work,” McCarthy said.

At night, people drive by and see the long-dark storefront lit up through the floor-to-ceiling windows. What they see through the glass lures them in.

The cafe sparkles, with delicate stemware, bottles of wine, and a tall, shiny bar made of quarter-sawn red oak. Frosted glass lamps painted with grapes cast a soft light on the room. Dark wood trim, sage green accents and an exposed brick wall give the space a warm, inviting atmosphere that carries through to the bright, airy shop next door.

Presentation is everything here, from the casually elegant dTcor to the artful food presentation.

“Not only is the food good to eat, it looks beautiful too,” Thistle said. “We’re very fortunate that we have a young person who’s passionate about food – someone who’s as excited about food as we are.”

Their chef, Steve Morin, is a 23-year-old California native who trained in France at the Institute Culinaire. He moved here when his fiancee got a teaching job in the area.

“What I’m trying to do personally is give Bangor and northern Maine some of the dishes I picked up across the country and overseas when I traveled,” Morin said. “I’m really trying to push the envelope and see what I can do with food.”

His dishes are complex and delicious, served in small portions to complement the wine. This is not a full-course meal that will leave you stuffed and tired at the end. As Thistle says, “This is not dinner.

“It was really important to us not to have a full-service restaurant next door to Rosemary [Baldacci, who owns the neighboring Momma B’s Kitchen],” Thistle said. “We wanted to be complementary to the other businesses downtown.”

Take the roasted breast of duck on a saffron risotto cake with a terrine of spinach and sweet red pepper, topped with a raspberry compote. It sounds like a lot, and it seems strange to see duck on the menu for only $10.95. But it’s a small, beautiful dish. Add a salad and you have a light meal.

Morin’s zesty crab rangoons, filled with Maine crab, chevre and scotch bonnet peppers and topped with mango cream, are among his most popular dishes. These are nothing like what you’d find at a Chinese restaurant. The sweet cream tempers fiery peppers and the crab filling is velvety and rich.

It’s a tapas-style approach to dining. Rather than order one dish per person, a couple could order three or four and share, or one dish with a salad or soup.

“For a wine bar concept, it’s really what works,” Thistle said.

Morin changes four or five items on the menu each week, to give the regular customers a little variety, and he tweaks favorites to give the duck or lamb a different twist.

“Every week they’re going to have something new to try,” Morin said. “I just want the people to come in, see what I have to offer and hope they like it.”

In addition to dinner, the cafe serves salads, soups and sandwiches, along with quiche, lobster brioche and other entrees for lunch.

Both McCarthy and Thistle are veterans of the Bangor food scene, but it was wine that brought them together. They met up when he was working at a local wine shop and she was working for a wine distributor. She had sold her restaurant, Thistle’s, in 1997. He had worked at the Sea Dog, where he had learned all he needed to know about beer, and wanted to learn more about wine. Although they were getting a lot of exposure to wine in their daily work, something was missing.

“We knew that we both were unhappy with what we were doing,” McCarthy said.

So they started talking, first about a restaurant, then about a wine bar. They knew they wanted to work together, to share responsibility and ease the burden of owning and operating two businesses. What they didn’t want was a reincarnation of their previous restaurant ventures.

“It’s not a rehashing of old stuff,” McCarthy said.

“It’s a combination of all of our previous experience,” Thistle added.

They thought Bangor needed something different – both had heard stories of people traveling to the coast or to Portland for food or wine. They researched the demographics, figured the wine bar-wine store concept could work in the area, and started looking for a place – with parking – to set up shop downtown. In the summer of 1999, they found it.

“These businesses were really a marriage made in heaven,” McCarthy said. “We couldn’t have done this anywhere else.”

The unoccupied half of the Bangor Furniture Co. building seemed like the perfect fit. There were two large spaces linked by a small staircase: one half for the cafT, the other for the shop. The interior was “uninhabitable” at the time, but Bob and Suzanne Kelly, the House Revivers, transformed the space. They created exactly what McCarthy and Thistle wanted while maintaining the architectural integrity of the building.

“They had a vision of the caliber … of what we wanted inside,” McCarthy said. “We’re looking forward to all the things we can do in here.”

They plan to hold tastings and classes, so that they and their customers can learn more about wine together.

“Shane and I have a long way to go,” Thistle said. “We’re not wine experts. We’re just fortunate we’ve been exposed to a lot of wines over the last few years.”

Even if you don’t like wine, there are plenty of options, from microbrewed beers to coffee drinks and other nonalcoholic beverages.

“We didn’t want to call this a wine bar because we didn’t want to scare away people who don’t drink wine,” McCarthy said. “You don’t have to drink beer or wine to have fun here. We just want to be something different that’s not a boring place.”

This definitely isn’t a boring, snooty place full of wine snobs. It’s more of a casual place where people who like wine can go. And Thistle and McCarthy hope they, and their customers, can learn a little in the process.

“The most exciting thing is to allow people to experience how much fun food and wine can be,” Thistle said.

Cafe Nouveau is open from 11 a.m. to 11 p.m. Monday through Thursday, 11 a.m. to midnight Friday and Saturday. The cafT does not take reservations. Bangor Wine and Cheese Co. is open from 7 a.m. to 9 p.m. Monday through Saturday. The wine shop will be open Sundays through the holiday season. For information, call 942-3338.