Food was one of the driving forces for choosing Northern California as the destination for my milestone-birthday vacation. Chez Panisse and The French Laundry, whose reputations are deserved, offered incredible multi-course meals we’ll not soon forget. Equally memorable, though, were other restaurants and eateries where we took meals.
Hambone and I also stood in line for at least a half hour to order burgers at Taylor’s Refresher, a St. Helena institution and an inspired place to fill your belly between vineyard tastings. Now owned by the Gott brothers, this walk-up drive-in has an extensive burger-fry-shake menu, but also offers chicken sandwiches, a rare-seared ahi burger, and a monster Cobb salad, to name a few non-beef items. The burgers were solidly good and the sweet potato fries were stupendous. Really, I'm still thinking about the sweet potato fries.
Besides, milkshakes and sodas, the beverage menu offers beer and wine, including the 2004 Karl Lawrence cab half-bottle that we paid twice as much for the night before at the French Laundry. Price aside, I'm amused by this fact: in Napa can you find the same bottle of wine at a roadside burger joint as at the very finest restaurant.
Rounding out our meals, we ditched our reservations at Zuni Café and Piperade (yes, I double-booked) to eat sushi at an incredibly hip Japanese restaurant that had a technobeat, Ozumo. We sat at the sushi bar and were served an amuse—a first for us at a sushi bar—of tuna “salad” on cucumber wafers. To start, we ordered hanabi (slices of hamachi and avocado with a warm ginger-jalapeno ponzu sauce). We ate the following nigiri—maguro, mushi ebi (tiger prawn), hamachi (as always), sake, kampachi (amber jack, this is the same fish I had at The French Laundry where it was called kahala), and kaki (kumamoto oyster). We had rolls—yokozuna (grilled unagi, crab, tobiko, avocado and asparagus), spicy scallop (scallop, kaiware, cucumber). All the fish was wonderfully fresh and the slick ambience was quite a change of pace from upscale-rural Napa.