It’sDiningTime!
San Francisco/Bay Area restaurant reviews by Chris NorrisArchive for Napa/Sonoma
Meritage Martini and Oyster Bar, Sonoma, CA
Meritage Martini and Oyster Bar, Sonoma, CA
January 2008
S’OK. My good buddy Dave and I took a pasta making class some months ago at Ramekins cooking school, located in Sonomo, CA. Our instructor that day, Carlo Cavallo is the owner and executive chef of Meritage and I finally had the opportunity to check out Carlo’s restaurant for myself. Unfortunately, we could only do lunch, but we did get a sense for the place. It’s open, casual and friendly. The service was fine. We ordered the sampler of 10 oysters on the half shell, followed by the lentil soup of the day, and then shared a prosciutto panini. Maybe we just go spoiled at Café La Haye, but the oysters at Café La Haye were an order of magnitude better that at Meritage. There was nothing wrong with the Oysters at Meritage, but they just didn’t grab you and say “I’m a damn good oyster!” in the same way as their fine fellow crustaceans at Café La Haye. And the shells were chipped, and we had to wipe off some grit, … The lentil soup was good. Real good. Unfortunately, the extra parmesan cheese and tablespoon of olive oil on top didn’t add much to the soup but sure added a lot of un-needed weight watchers points to the meal. Finally, the panini was OK, but had too much prosciutto, making it tough to chew, and then too much soft cheese which became overwhelming and left us with cheese dripping everywhere.
Are we just complainers? I don’t know. I wanted Meritage to be great because I like Carlo and I really liked his pasta class at Ramekins. I remember my first, uneducated attempt at making pasta. It took half the day, made a complete mess of the kitchen, and tasted crummy. Since the Chef’s class, plus a few more practice sessions, I can make fresh pasta as part of a one hour meal! Regardless, Meritage needs a little work on the details.
Martini House, St. Helena, CA
Martini House, St. Helena, CA
January 2008
S’Ok. The Martini House in California’s wine country has good reviews, and we expected to have a pretty impressive meal. The ambiance, service, open kitchen, friendly staff all point to a happy dining experience. The night we visited, the restaurant offered a mushroom tasting menu that included shitakes in mushroom tea with duck wontons, a salad of hedgehog mushrooms with hollandaise sauce, roasted hen of the woods mushrooms with potato puree, and candy cap bread pudding. The waiter emphasized that mushrooms were a specialty for the establishment, so we bought in on the mushroom tasting menu!
I have to hand it to the chef – the menu concepts were terrific and it’s clear that there is a lot of creativity in the menu. In addition, the flavor of the mushrooms was expertly coaxed out of the mushrooms, without overwhelming the dishes and the mushrooms themselves were almost heavenly. So what happened?! Well, every single dish with the exception of the (very good) bread pudding, was immersed in a reduction of some kind that tasted of soy sauce and was so salty and overwhelming that after a point, we couldn’t eat anymore of our dish! It’s a shame – Café La Haye perfectly executed much simpler dishes and was a world-class dining experience. Martini house presented dishes with incredible potential, but that we would never bother to order again as presented to us.
If I didn’t think our experience might be a fluke, I wouldn’t recommend Martini House at all. Let’s keep out fingers crossed.
LaSalette, Sonoma, CA
LaSalette, Sonoma, CA
January 2008
Woo-Hoo! Oh my, oh my, oh my. Who would have thought that Portuguese cuisine in Sonoma would get a Woo-Hoo? LaSalette is a little restaurant just off the main square in Sonoma, with about a dozen tables and a patio for a few more in the summer. This restaurant has a very good Zagat rating of 23 and according to their website, was noted by Zagat as the “best Portuguese restaurant in the country!” Who knew?! Regardless, Chef Manuel Azevedo has put together quite a restaurant. During our recent visit, we started with the sardinhas (sardines), flash-baked in a wood fired oven and served on a bed of carmelized onions. Simply awesome! For our main courses, we went traditional. I ordered the Feijoada, which is a stew like combination of oxtail, pork and sausage, with rice, black beans and collard greens. The meat was perfectly braised and seasoned and the entire dish was a joy to eat to the very last bite. Laura ordered the Cataplana, a tomato based seafood stew that includes squid, octopus, fish, clams, mussels and shrimp in a velvety, flavorful tomato broth and is served in a copper bowl. Incrível!
Café La Haye, Sonoma, CA
Café La Haye, Sonoma, CA
January 2008
Woo-Hoo! It doesn’t happen very often that you walk into a restaurant and feel like you transitioned into another country. But that happened to us recently while traveling in the California wine country. It was a dark and stormy night (really) and Laura and I decided to see how a little place off the historic central square of Sonoma could really have earned a Zagat rating of 27 out of 30, and still have availability at a reasonable time on just a few days notice.
Think Paris. You walk through the non-descript doorway into the arms of the Maitre’d, who ushers you to one of about a dozen tables. The tiny kitchen, in full view of the dining room, is home to 3 or 4 chefs busily doing their thing. You aren’t wearing a sport coat. You aren’t wearing a tie. You didn’t have to secure your reservation with a credit card. The staff don’t act like its “so special” that they let YOU come to dinner that night. In fact, you’re damned comfortable and feel welcome. And, You are about to experience culinary magnificence!
We started with oysters on the half shell, which were super fresh, full of flavor and exceeded our experience with oysters at Bouchon. Laura followed the oysters with a Savoy cabbage soup with chicken and pancetta that was simply stupendous, while I had the softboiled egg over a celery root “hash brown” with spinach, also wonderful.
With such a great start to the evening, we wondered if the main courses could keep up. We decided to test the kitchen and ordered two dishes that are hard to execute perfectly: pan fried chicken breast, which is almost always too dry and boring, and spaghetti with shitake mushrooms, which is so simple that it often gets forgotten in a kitchen where stacking five ingredients and decorating the plate is foremost in the chef’s mind. That chicken was as close to perfection as you can get, and the smoked chicken hash accompaniment still causes my mouth to water. The fresh made spaghetti with shitake mushrooms in a light cream sauce was glorious! I so love Paris! Oh, I forgot, this is a casual little place in Sonoma!
And the answer to the original question? Yes, Café La Haye deserves that 27 out of 30 on Zagat…
- Chris
