melkor

I stopped by the girl and the fig for lunch yesterday. Although I'm no carpenter, I find nothing objectionable about the cheese counter, nor did the half dozen customers enjoying their food there. As much as I dislike the touristy aspects of the town square in Sonoma, the girl and the fig is always a pleasant place to have an honest meal without having to endure the locals explain why Sonoma is vastly superior to Napa.

That's all well and good, but you'll still get your ass kicked in any number of bars over here that way...

The Martini House in St Helena is the only place I can recall being served excellent coffee in the past few years. Sadly, coffee service at restaurants simply isn't a priority.

I apparently am alone in thinking the room at Fleur de Lys is decorated like a funeral home. Aside from the feeling that you are dining in a casket, I've been most unimpressed with their wine service and stemware. The highlight of the last meal I had there was an incredibly delicious cauliflower soup that was buried between completely unremarkable courses.

Range is also good, though I much prefer Incanto to either.

I've been really unimpressed with the higher end food around lake tahoe. The lower end can be really good though - Womacks Texas BBQ is my favorite place to grab a meal in the area. Hardly a good choice for a wedding, but if they are open while you are in town it'd be worth a visit. Nepheles has a decent wine list and reasonably good food - it would be a flop were it in the bay area, but it isn't bad for food in a ski town.

After you confit the tuna, pack it in jars with the olive oil and process them in a pressure cooker. Just be sure to boil the jars and all that jazz so you don't get yourself a nice case of botulism.

Where?

Thanks for the writeup. I'll change the subject to St Helena, the forum is setup to allow you to edit the content of your post for up to 24 hours, but that doesn’t include changing the subject line. Incidentally, I agree with you on both the restaurant and your reaction to winesonoma's comments. My experience at Julia's Kitchen at Copia has been far better than at Pinot Blanc. Julia’s Kitchen is not only priced slightly lower than Pinot Blanc but they also are working with absolutely pristine ingredients from the on-premise gardens. The bare minimum you’d expect from a restaurant in a tourist friendly wine region would be competent wine service. Perhaps they thought they were working on a carburetor as winesonoma so astutely suggested.

Ah, of course....the nonlinear approach is the ticket! Where's Hunter S when we need him? ← Dead.

Canned anchovies I can live without. Boquerones on the other hand are one of the greatest bar foods of all time. Fresh cured anchovies are a beautiful thing.

The functional difference between some cobbed together thing you do on your own and cellertracker is night and day. CT lets you keep track of pending deliveries, drinking windows, compare purchases against your consumption by region, etc, etc.

K&L in SF has them.

We had dinner at Cyrus last night. Overall it was a very positive experience - the tasting menu is a well-thought-out progression of flavors and textures, and the wine pairings in general work very well with the dishes. As far as it being the best restaurant in Sonoma, if judged purely on the best dish of the night compared to the best dish at other Sonoma restaurants – it quite likely is the best in Sonoma. There are a few things that in my mind put the Farmhouse Inn a step above Cyrus in the Sonoma restaurant scene. At the Farmhouse Inn you feel immediately relaxed and at home, the well-appointed space is warm and relaxing, and the staff is the polar opposite of pretension. The experience at Cyrus begins by finding street parking, walking up to a glass wall with tables against it and entering through a glass door that seems more like an emergency exit than it does an entrance to a restaurant of this caliber. Once inside after you provide your reservation details and walk past the large bar and wine storage you are led into a large formal dining room where a phone call is made to the kitchen to inform them that you have arrived and what table you are being seated at – a bit dramatic for my taste. Once at your table a champagne and caviar cart arrives with an assortment of grower champagnes and a couple of better-known producers all available by the glass. I’m not a fan of restaurants hard-selling anything, and we would have been more likely to order a few glasses had we been asked rather than having ‘the cart’ brought out. The restaurant has been open for five months; the usual leeway given to new establishments is no longer applicable here. The food in general is very good, and all of the dishes we were served were above average in both concept and execution. Service at our table was very professional, though it was clear that other tables in the room were experiencing some service issues. Twice food was brought to two-tops when one of the customers was away from the table. The door to the kitchen is a double glass door that slides open with an electric eye, which is a great way to keep the kitchen separated from the room while avoiding the traditional double-hinged door. Unfortunately there are cabinets on both sides of the door and a large service table in front of it so the staff queues at the door in both directions - not exactly poetry in motion. The wine list is quite impressive. Jason Alexander, a Gary Danko alum, has managed to cover all the bases with the impressive list he’s assembled – label drinkers will be happy drinking their Opus One or current release first growths while others have the opportunity to pick from a wide range of new and old world producers at reasonable prices. The white wines are particularly impressive with a good cross-section of Germany, Alsace, and the Loire along with the usual suspects from Italy, Bordeaux, and Burgundy. Sonoma County is also well represented on the list. Our menu was as follows: Canapes Amuse bouche Blue fin tuna with cherry tomatoes and avocado, soy truffle vinaigrette Seared foie gras with huckleberries, pecans and shallots Pompano with tomato concasse, corn, sherry vinaigrette Rabbit ravioli with hen of the woods mushrooms and goat cheese, cognac verjus Veal loin with potato puree, morels and haricot verts Artisanal and farmhouse cheese with complimenting breads and fruits Ricotta and summer berry testing / Baked chocolate mousse, santa rosa plums, two meringues Mignardises Seasonality plays a strange role on the menu: the amuse was a smoky corn and cumin soup that couldn’t possibly be more seasonally appropriate, and corn with perfectly ripe tomatoes appeared throughout the meal, but I could have done without the spongy out of season morel mushrooms and the truffles which were either preserved winter truffles or bland summer truffles – either way they lent a hearty winter note to an otherwise summery menu. The highlights of the meal were the pompano and the rabbit. The pompano was perfectly cooked, and worked well with the sauce. The rabbit was outstanding, yet more proof that the cuter an animal is the more delicious it will taste – seared rabbit loin served on top of an open ravioli stuffed with braised rabbit with cracklings tossed in for good measure, really a top-notch dish. For a special occasion while in the Sonoma County wine country, Cyrus is a great choice. With the addition of this establishment to the area, visitors have their choice for high-end restaurants (that also offer a place to stay). While my current recommendation for this type of restaurant in Sonoma County would be the Farmhouse Inn, it would be a shame to miss Cyrus.

Fair enough, I've never found Zuni to be amazing but it’s consistently good whereas Boulevard ranges from abysmal to excellent depending on the dish, the time of day, the position of the moon, etc.

I'll happily find and sell you some 99 Dolce for $400/bottle. To answer the original question, I'd go with an interesting birthyear bottle - assuming of course you know what year he was born. Hiring a personal chef to cook for him is also always a good choice. If you want to buy a special bottle for him, dessert wines are a good pick - 1975 d'yquem should be available in your price range.

Oh, don't forget to bring a jacket - SF is 30 degrees cooler than upstate NY at night this time of year.

Koi Palace or Hong Kong Flower Lounge would be the top two for Dim Sum. Take a look at the San Francisco restaurant index for a pile of suggestions. Zuni would be my first pick for new american, Incanto for Italian. For a more down-home Italian offering check out L'Osteria Del Forno in north beach. I'd suggest checking out one of the Peruvian places in the city (Mochica, Limon, etc), since that is something Albany doesn't have.

I think that must be Kelly's Burgers? I don't know if it's still open or not but they did (do?) have a great burger. ← Kelly's Burger is still around, they offer a good grease fix in the middle of the night but I wouldn't compare their burger to Absinthe or Zuni.

Aside from supplies for backpacking trips, I buy almost no convenience items. The closest I get is buying mustard instead of making my own; ketchup is worth making myself. Veg comes from the garden, farmers market, or a local grocer – almost never from a place like safeway and certainly never in a bag. If you have anything that remotely resembles decent knife skills you save almost no time buying pre-cut veg and the difference in quality is enormous. I buy bread, that’s a convenience item, but a necessary one since my bread baking ability is questionable at best. Food tastes better if at each step of the way the ingredients are taken care of. My morning latte is vastly better than what I can get at a café because I take the time to properly roast and cool the beans, I give them time to gas out, and I take the time to properly steam the milk and pull the shot. The same is true for something as simple as a salad – if you spend the time to find the best greens you can, clean and dry them carefully, and make a dressing that goes with whatever type of greens you bought, you’ll have a much better dish than opening a bottle of dressing and pouring it onto a sack full of greens. I suppose I’d feel differently about it if I didn’t have time to cook, but I do, so there isn’t any excuse not to do things right.

Having been to Incanto for dinner again wednesday night, I'm now certain that they are serving the best rustic Italian food in the city a spot that Delfina long held in my mind - I’m amazed that this place isn’t harder to get into. They have a vastly better wine program than Delfina - a well-priced list full of interesting wines that pair well with the food and are served in proper glassware. Like many restaurants in this style the pastas are stronger than the mains, but that is more because the pastas are exceptional rather than the mains being in some way flawed. Overall, the food is similar in quality to Delfina, although the desserts are markedly better at Incanto. Service is both professional and very friendly and the space, while not overly romantic, is very comfortable. They have a couple of tables out front under heaters, but it gets fairly cold out there so unless it’s a warm night I’d suggest eating inside. The menu changes too often for these recommendations to be terribly useful, but if you see either the fried padrones peppers on the menu or the strozzapretti pasta, order them. This is very much a place to go with friends, order half the menu and share everything.

Delfina is a pretty bad place to drink a top notch wine, their wine glasses are closer to jelly jars on a stick than they are to proper glassware. I've never had a dish I considered overly salty at Delfina either - I'd have to say it was either an off night or you're more salt sensitive than most.

Most everything is worth at least one visit. Acquerello is quite capable of serving a very good meal, you'd just have to pick the right menu options. I'll go back, but I'm hardly smitten with the place.

I love the space at Acquerello, the staff is very friendly and professional - I'm not at all surprised people go there for a special occasion. The food ranks more or less even with Quince, both have serve some very good dishes and some dishes that just don't work. Given how much of a pain it is to get into Quince, I'd choose Acquerello over Quince most of the time. It is entirely possible to have an outstanding meal at either restaurant if you order the right dishes. My experience at both restaurants has been that about 50% of the dishes are very good or better, certainly good enough to be worth a visit. Besides, those biscotti to end the meal are amazing.

Pier 39 is most certainly the tourist destination Jason is talking about - there is a park where piers 4 through 24 should be.