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Farm-to-table Modern American cuisine is the prevalent style in the Napa Valley and Sonoma County, but this encompasses both the delicate preparations of Yountville’s Thomas Keller, whose restaurants include The French Laundry, and the upscale comfort food served throughout the Wine Country. The quality (and hype) often means high prices, but you can find appealing, inexpensive eateries, especially in Napa, Calistoga, Sonoma, and Santa Rosa.
Even before charting on Esquire's list of 2022's best new restaurants, the intimate, bungalowlike establishment of New York City transplant Joshua Smookler (formerly chef at his own Mu Ramen and Thomas Keller's Per Se) was already drawing a crowd for its mash-up of Basque, Jewish, and Korean cuisines. Smookler, whose wife, Heidy He, runs the front of the house, consistently delights with idiosyncratic flavor combinations in dishes like feather-cut ibérico pork, lobster in XO sauce, grilled whole turbot, and dry-aged rib eye.
Chef Ari Weiswasser honed his craft at The French Laundry, Daniel, and other bastions of culinary finesse, but his Sonoma Valley outpost revolves around haute-rustic cuisine, much of it emerging from a wood-fired oven. In 2022, Weiswasser turned the day-to-day reins over to a new chef de cuisine, but the mainstay crisp-crusted, richly sauced Margherita and other pizzas continue to thrive in the oven's torrid heat, as do tender whole fish entrées and vegetables roasted in small iron skillets.
Todd Humphries has overseen swank haute-cuisine kitchens in Manhattan, San Francisco, and the Napa Valley, but he focuses on multicultural comfort plates at his high-ceilinged industrial-contemporary restaurant downtown. The signature dishes include a silky cream of mushroom soup, flatbreads, pho, Thai fisherman's stew, duck banh mi sandwiches (go for the voluptuous duck jus add-on), and sweet, spicy, and succulent chicken wings among many other crowd-pleasers that keep this place hopping even in the off-season.
The seasonally oriented Japanese dinners known as kaiseki inspire the 10-course prix-fixe vegetarian, meat, and seafood menu at the spare, elegant restaurant—redwood walls, walnut tables, mesquite-tile floors, muted-gray yarn-thread panels—of internationally renowned culinary artists Katina and Kyle Connaughton (she farms, he cooks). As Katina describes the endeavor, the micro-seasons of their nearby farm plus SingleThread's rooftop garden of fruit trees and greens dictate Kyle's rarefied fare, prepared in a theatrically lit open kitchen.
First in a historic roadside haunt that perished in the 2017 wildfires and now in a strip mall location more urbane than its exterior suggests, Willi's serves inventive globe-trotting small plates paired with international wines. Pork-belly pot stickers represent Asia, the Mediterranean inspires Tunisian roasted local carrots and Moroccan-style lamb chops, and curried crab tacos straddle two, maybe three, continents.
The owners of Willi's Seafood, Bravas Bar de Tapas, and other Sonoma County favorites operate this "modern tavern" serving global bar bites and comfort food in a multiroom, nostalgic yet contemporary space that evokes home, hearth, and good cheer. Shrimp wontons, matzo-ball soup, Cobb salad, pork belly, and skirt steak all go well with the wines, craft cocktails, and artisanal beers and ciders.
A dependable, varied menu makes this modest corner restaurant occupying a brick-and-glass storefront many Napans' go-to choice for a simple meal. Empanadas and iron-skillet cornbread with lavender honey and butter show up at all hours, with buttermilk pancakes and chilaquiles scrambled eggs among the brunch staples and cassoulet and roasted heirloom chicken popular for dinner.
On Main Street for several generations, Pat's got a new lease on life when a pop-up chef known for gooey-delicious, highly addictive Korean fried chicken (aka "Korean Fried Crack") bought the place and broadened its menu to include chicken pozole, huevos rancheros, and other international comfort food items. The setting—diner with counter and booths on one side, "dining room" with fake grass and picnic tables on the other, and plenty of cabinlike wood paneling all around—is peppy ersatz retro.
As the name suggests, the chefs at this restaurant with an expansive patio often packed on weekends are willing to experiment, starting with sushi plates that include spicy hiramasa (yellowtail kingfish) rolls with rainbow-trout caviar. Rotisserie chicken, wild-mushroom meat loaf, the buttermilk fried-chicken sandwich topped with Swiss, and a slow-roasted pork sandwich served with coleslaw are perennial favorites.
A microbrewery, a wood-fired pizza stand, and a barbecue joint anchor this downtown food park with indoor and outdoor dining areas, the latter a patio with fire pits. On weekends, food trucks motor over, adding, depending on the day, Greek, Mexican, Filipino, and other cuisines to the mix.
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