As we gallop into 2014, how better to start this Year of the Horse than with a toast? Sake may be traditional on this auspicious day, but wine is just fine — as long as the setting is as bright and shiny as this brave new year, and if there's great food to match. Cork fits the bill perfectly.

Opened in late November, this stylish, well-groomed wine/food bar is a very new face on the Tokyo block. But the people there need no further introduction to readers of this column — or to regulars of the ace little restaurant known as L'As.

After less than two years in their chic premises off Minami-Aoyama's Kotto-dori, chef Daisuke Kaneko and his front-of-house partner Kouichi Tanabe have moved to a residential area at the far end of the neighborhood. More than just an expansion — though that was needed, given the continuing popularity of L'As — it is also an evolution, and it arrives with a separate new project added on: Cork, a wine bar with a difference.