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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.
Not one to rest on her laurels, the creative director of this urban-rustic restaurant responded to winning a prestigious fine-dining award by welcoming a new chef, mixologist, and wine lead, all with impressive credentials themselves. The worth-the-splurge cuisine, hinging on hyperfresh local ingredients from superstar purveyors, comes off even more intricate than before in dishes that might include kanpachi crudo or goat-cheese croquette apps or a smoked pork chop with Japanese sweet potato entrée.
A decade after his beloved, same-named Healdsburg restaurant closed, celebrity chef Douglas Keane of Top Chef Masters and other fame reopened a "2.0" version inside an 8,000-square-foot steel, glass, and concrete structure set in an Alexander Valley vineyard. Keane bills his prix-fixe culinary experience as a "dining journey," with guests (couples'-rate only; single diners charged double) changing rooms a few times for multiple internationally inspired courses based on hyper-seasonal mostly Northern California ingredients.
Inside a former residence that received a high-design makeover down to its open-air patio, this restaurant began as an exclusive perk for Stone Edge Farm Estate's wine-club members; though now open to all, it still flies under the radar. Prix-fixe meals built around organically grown ingredients from the winery's nearby farm might include an appetizer like tuna adorned with crispy shallots, kumquats, and cashews followed by a salad of picked-the-same-day greens and a sensitively spiced fish, meat, or vegetarian entrée.
Gung-ho Culinary Institute of America students in their final semester run this excellent if unheralded restaurant in a historic stone structure. A solid value, the three- or four-course prix-fixe meals—oft-changing, nicely plated dishes—emphasize local ingredients, some so local they're grown on-site or nearby.
From the limestone floor to the cedar walls and cypress tabletops, most of the materials used to build this downtown Napa restaurant specializing in seasonally changing multicourse kaiseki meals were imported from Japan, as was the ceramic dinnerware. Delicate preparations of eel, abalone, bluefin tuna, and slow-roasted Wagyu tenderloin are typical of the offerings on the prix-fixe menu, which also includes impeccably fresh, artistically presented sashimi and sushi courses.
Chef Ken Frank's La Toque is the complete package: his French-inspired cuisine, served in a formal dining space, is complemented by a wine lineup that consistently earns the restaurant a coveted Wine Spectator Grand Award. Ingredients appearing on the à la carte and prix-fixe tasting menus often include caviar, Alaskan halibut, Wagyu beef, and rich cheeses in dishes prepared and seasoned to pair with wines jointly chosen by the chefs and master sommelier.
A vintage-style neon sign outside this bungalow restaurant announces "Great Food," and the chefs deliver with well-plated dishes served in two buildings, one a Craftsman gem, or on street-side patios that are especially festive during weekend brunch. The offerings at women-owned and -run Lovina change often, but a recent menu's roasted Cornish hen, lobster and prawn risotto, and seared wild halibut with gnocchi and wild mushrooms are typical of the imaginative cuisine.
For years this cavernous casual-chic restaurant with a contempo-barn interior and wraparound patio steps from neighboring vineyards was northern Napans' preferred stop for a top-shelf cocktail, dry-aged steak, and high-90s-scoring local Cabernet. You can still order a tomahawk or New York strip, but chef Philip Tessier, formerly of Yountville's The French Laundry and Bouchon Bistro and New York City's Le Bernardin, has introduced more refined cuisine, much of whose produce is grown nearby.
Possibly the most romantic roost for brunch, lunch, or dinner in all the Wine Country is a terrace seat at the Auberge du Soleil resort's illustrious restaurant, and the Mediterranean-inflected cuisine more than matches the dramatic vineyard views. The prix-fixe dinner menu (three or four courses), relying mainly on local produce, might include caviar or diver scallop starters, delicately prepared fish or vegetable middle-course options, and mains like prime beef pavé with béarnaise, spiced lamb loin, or Japanese Wagyu A5.
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.
The restaurant at Solage attracts the resort's clientele, upvalley locals, and guests of nearby lodgings for sophisticated farm-to-table cuisine served in the high-ceilinged dining area or alfresco on a sprawling patio warmed by shapely heaters and a mesmerizing firepit. Dishes on the lighter side might include house-made pasta or sake-marinated fish, with duck breast, crispy pork, or a tomahawk steak among the heartier options.
The chef-owners of this neighborly restaurant say their fare "walks the line between comfort and haute cuisine"—mostly California-inspired and "hyperseasonal" items that range from vegetarian butter-bean cassoulet (there's also a pork-belly version) to a 30-ounce tomahawk steak. The same could be said for the casual but knowing hospitality and the decor (bare wooden tables yet linen napkins), but it all works: dining here engenders quiet excitement.
Inside an ivy-laced old stone building and atop many a Napa Valley visitor's bucket list, chef Thomas Keller's destination restaurant lives up to the hype with intricate yet not overthought cuisine. Some courses on the two prix-fixe menus, one of which highlights vegetables, rely on luxe ingredients such as white quail; others take humble elements like carrots or fava beans and elevate them to art.
The location of Dustin Valette's farm-to-table restaurant holds a special place in his heart: the bar and its Wine Wall taps dispensing mostly Sonoma County wines occupy the space where the Geyserville native's great-grandfather ran a bakery a century ago. Valette describes the menu—aged meats creatively adorned, local fish with recently plucked vegetables—as a "love letter" to local agriculture, a point driven home by the large, bright paintings of farm and culinary activity hanging above the dining-room floor.
Torc means "wild boar" in an early Celtic dialect, and owner-chef Sean O'Toole, who formerly helmed kitchens at top Manhattan, San Francisco, and Yountville establishments, occasionally incorporates the restaurant's namesake beast into his eclectic offerings. A recent menu featured tuna tartare, squash risotto, three hand-cut pasta dishes, a side of mushrooms foraged by a local pro, and Maine diver scallops in a lobster emulsion, all prepared by O'Toole and his team with style and precision.
The founders of Quail & Condor, both formerly of SingleThread Farms, followed up the success of their small bakery in town with this shop and restaurant that by day showcases their naturally fermented sourdough breads in sandwiches ($–$$) distinguished by their expressive flavors. Come evening, the kitchen shifts into fine-dining mode, producing multicourse prix-fixe French-inspired "Le Dîner" meals, served at counters and a communal table, that quickly evolved into a local hot ticket.
Northern Sonoma native Dustin Valette opened this homage to the area's artisanal agricultural bounty with his brother, who runs the high-ceilinged dining room, where the playful contemporary lighting tempers the austerity of the exposed concrete walls and butcher-block-thick wooden tables. Charcuterie is an emphasis, but also consider the signature day-boat scallops en croûte (in a pastry crust) or dishes that might include coriander-crusted duck breast, Duroc pork tenderloin, or pan-roasted trout.
Tabletop linens and lights softly twinkling from this ruby-red roadhouse restaurant's low wooden ceiling raise expectations the Parisian-style bistro cuisine consistently exceeds. A starter of cheeses or French onion soup awakens the palate for entrées like chicken cordon bleu, steak au poivre, or seafood dishes that might include scallops in a rich yet somehow delicate gastrique or subtly sauced wild Alaskan halibut.
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.
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