NAPA, Calif. — Late in the summer, late in the afternoon, I woke from a nap by a glittering pool. Over the last few days in California wine country, I had eaten macaroni and cheese out of a golden egg and broken into a juicy quenelle of caviar over softly set custard. I had drawn slices of aged beef, so tender it barely required chewing, through a sticky, peppery Cognac sauce and rinsed, after dessert, before petits fours, with a glug of Sauternes.
In other words, I had reached my final form and stepped into the old stereotype of the restaurant critic, driving a rental car through wine country, racking up the expenses. And I was feeling sedated by this ideal of luxury: technically flawless, incredibly expensive and, in the end, somewhat predictable.
For decades, the region’s hospitality business has grown alongside its wine industry, and tourists have come here for the small towns and extreme leisure — restaurants, golf courses, spas — and maybe the odd novelty magnet that says “Wine Time” in wiggly letters.
When I woke up and checked my schedule, it was, in fact, wine time. It was always wine time.
Few parts of the country have such a concentration of this nostalgic genre of fine dining: grand destination restaurants with big reputations, extravagant food and deep wine cellars. When Michelin released its 2019 guide to California dining in June, the tire company’s anonymous inspectors awarded three restaurants in the area three stars each, the highest rating, suggesting they were “worth a special journey.”
These restaurants — the French Laundry, the Restaurant at Meadowood and SingleThread — already formed a circuit for the Bay Area’s flush diners, as well as international business tourists and middle-aged couples away for the weekend. More than ever, the dining rooms of Napa and Sonoma Counties reflect the region’s growing corporate wealth.
It’s not so much the location — two hours north of San Francisco in a rural, scrubby landscape dotted with both sprawling vineyards and strip malls — that maintains their exclusivity. It’s also the cost: Dinner, which is likely to be a two- to three-hour-long tasting menu, starts at around $300 a person, before drinks. You pay for a temporary escape into pleasure, the assurance that, even if you’ve done nothing all day but spit wine and sunburn, you’ll be treated like a business tycoon who just closed a deal.
At times, overwhelmed by the opulence, I felt like a character in a sci-fi movie who had sneaked onto a spaceship for the 1 percent, now orbiting a burning planet.
The macaroni and cheese in the golden egg, served as part of the tasting menu at the French Laundry, was absurdly delicious. The short noodles, cut by hand, had a tender spring. They were bound in a light, melting cloud of Parmesan. The result was simple, built on the retro American dishes that the chef, Thomas Keller, once wittily reimagined as high culture and maxed out to total extravagance.
The meal was structured a little oddly, jumping from a dish of poached lobster directly to an English muffin with a pool of burrata, which seemed like a cheese course, then to the macaroni and cheese. But regardless of the sequence, the dishes, and the ways they were delivered, reminded me of what’s possible when both the kitchen and the wait staff are operating at the highest level: sustained indulgence in an atmosphere of total comfort.
The servers brought the gold-rimmed dish sets out and placed them down in unison. After lifting the egg tops and revealing the macaroni, they rained down a messy shower of black truffles, half on the food and half on the table, filling the air with perfume.
It was a stunning production. But the oversize golden egg on a series of gold plates did seem archaic — and not just because the French Laundry has used this presentation, for various dishes, for years. In the Trump era, gold seems a bit too eager to assert its value.
I found the most vivid moments at the French Laundry were more quiet and unexpected — a gleaming lump of sea urchin with a little spicy mango purée, served with no fanfare.
At the end of a meal, caught up in conversation with friends, I forgot about my espresso. A few minutes went by and maybe the coffee cooled, and the toffee-colored crema dissipated. Without asking or making a show of it, a server brought out a hot one to replace it. The staff exuded confidence and warmth, and their attentiveness was thorough (even after the check was paid) but never intrusive.
At the lush Meadowood Napa Valley resort in St. Helena, Christopher Kostow has been the restaurant’s chef since 2008.
If you’re not already staying on the premises, you go up a long, winding, tree-lined driveway to get to the restaurant, where the huge doors swing open and a person in a suit greets you, as if you were coming home to the manor after a long journey.
The dining room is dark and sleek, and the tasting menu’s series of presentations tends to be spare, focused and clean, with an occasional wink. What appeared to be a chunk of corn on the cob was in fact a sweet, tender replica made of corn custard, served with a quenelle of caviar, gleaming with pecan oil. A prawn-filled tamale, unwrapped and plated at the table, brought a sense of coziness to the service.
On one of my visits, that service was eager and energetic. On another, after a server accidentally knocked over my dining partner’s cane, which was leaning on the table, he didn’t place it back beside him and work around it. Instead, he offered to “hide it” in the back, presumably so it wouldn’t get in the way of the servers demonstrating their hospitality (which didn’t include working around a diner’s mobility device).
The restaurant had the vibe of a modernist country club — not only elite, but slightly wary of new members.
SingleThread is about 30 miles west of Meadowood in Healdsburg, Sonoma County, even farther from the buses of bachelorette parties and the tasting tours in Napa. Kyle and Katina Connaughton opened the restaurant in 2016, modeling the meal’s structure and many of the techniques on those of a traditional Japanese kitchen.
Unlike the French Laundry, where many of the restaurant’s greatest hits stay in constant rotation, and Meadowood, where a few dishes remained on the menu from spring to summer, there were no repeats at SingleThread, with the exception of a couple of wagashi, the Japanese-style sweets that came after dessert.
It was as if this younger restaurant was more restless, less comfortable with its reputation than the others, and still felt it had something to prove.
“The hens have been laying blue eggs lately,” said a server, setting down a froth-filled egg in a nest of lacy, dried leaves. This twee detail was my cue to admire the tiny blue egg on the table, and I did. It was beautiful.
Everything at SingleThread was assembled in a way that drew you to its natural, ephemeral beauty. In the spring, a spot prawn in cool dashi made me weepy. A slippery bowl of seaweed and raw amberjack evoked a tide pool, teeming with life, the kind you squat over as a kid, watching in awe.
The restaurant served a few glasses from local wineries as part of a wine pairing, including a mellow, herbaceous 1998 cabernet sauvignon from Heitz Cellar, but pairings at all three of these restaurants tend to lean more international.
When diners arrive at their tables at SingleThread, each one is set like a wedding banquet for magical woodland creatures — a feast of miniature dishes arranged on a long slab of moss and flowers and slate, served in shells or small pieces of pottery. There are slivers of fish, ripe fruit, custards and jellies.
This setup means there’s no wait for a menu, or a server, or a speech, unless you arrive a few minutes early (in which case you might stand by the door and wait, and wonder why you are waiting). The dishes vary by the season, but the results are the same: a sense of abundance and a straight line to the restaurant’s own farm, about seven miles away.
Each restaurant has its own approach to showing off its products, of reminding you that the spaceship launched from farm country.
Before dinner starts at Meadowood, a cook presents a basket of herbs, flowers and vegetables being used in the kitchen that night, annotating as he goes, sharing a few details about the restaurant’s farm nearby. Two hours into your meal, you’re likely to notice him at another table, cheerfully performing the same routine.
A garden across the road from the French Laundry grows tomatoes and other vegetables, and diners are sent home with a book about its high-profile purveyors, including many from California.
But trophy ingredients in wine country are often flown in from elsewhere: sea urchin and Wagyu beef from Japan, winter truffles from Australia.
On my drive home to Los Angeles, I thought about how measuring restaurants based on their travel-worthiness, on how far diners should drive for the food, was a holdover from Michelin’s days as a handy little guide for chauffeurs in the French countryside — century-old branded content.
A three-star restaurant in Michelin’s guide is the only kind deemed “worth a special journey.” But considering whether the food is worth a drive (and if so, how long a drive, and in what kind of traffic, and if in traffic, with who else in the car) is in many ways a distinctly Californian notion. Since moving here last fall, I negotiate it every day.
I know people who have driven hours for a bowl of fresh rice noodles, for two loaves of sourdough, for a particular crop of peaches, for a fried birria taco that leaves the fingertips slick with grease. These journeys are devotional, too.
Built into any great culinary affection is the precise, intimate knowledge of how far you would go, completely out of your way, to get it again. It’s not scientific. The calculations are too numerous to list and too emotional to spreadsheet. But in a second, you run the numbers and you know.
And what I knew about Napa was that it was someone else’s exorbitant fantasyland — yawny and pampering. It could be perfect, but in the way that falling asleep during a massage is perfect, and I had no plans to make a special journey back.
The French Laundry 6640 Washington Street, Yountville; thomaskeller.com/tfl
The Restaurant at Meadowood 900 Meadowood Lane, St. Helena; therestaurantatmeadowood.com
SingleThread 131 North Street, Healdsburg; singlethreadfarms.com
