Napa

I’ve never been a fan of Napa. It always struck me as over-manicured and staged—kinda like Disneyland for middle-aged (upper) middle-class white women: the wine train, the flower boxes, the sprawling flagging-stone tasting patios overlooking the valley, the bakeries with their reclaimed barnwood siding and wine-barrel planters, the boutiques full of fedoras and handkerchief skirts…. Demographically speaking, I should be all over this stuff, but truth be told I’m a lot more comfortable two valleys over in Russian River, in tasting rooms where you have to watch where you step so you don’t back into a crate of bottles or a cat, and the winemaker has just stomped up from some drainage project he’s doing to pour you a drink. I like stopping by the side of the road to scrounge marionberries, thrifting in Sebastopol. I like and get the grouchy sideways looks at the local in Guerneville. Napa, I neither really like nor really get.

And yet, as I just had a really delightful weekend there, I thought I should be fair to Napa and say so. I met my friends Eric & Vicky in Yountville for her birthday, and after a smooth drive out (and the obligatory stop at Chando’s tacos), we enjoyed a fun and light early dinner on the patio at Regiis Ova, where we got to sample a couple of different grades of caviar as toppings on yummy appetizers like salmon sashimi and French onion dip, along with a nice, juicy natural champagne. I don’t know a whole lot about caviar, but I really enjoyed trying it and would definitely go back if I had another great cause for celebration.

The next morning I got up and did a chill (and chilly! It was low 40s) trail run along the Napa River before heading to Model Bakery for their famous English muffin breakfast sandwiches. They were really good: I would put the muffins closer to a light, spongey muffuletta bread than to a traditional English muffin—with a nice sourness to them. After checking out of my hotel (lodging in Napa is ridiculously expensive, but the Napa Winery Inn had the most affordable rooms I could find, and mine was clean, spacious, and comfortable) I moseyed back home—with a couple of stops in Sacramento.

It’s worth a note about those stops because the first was at the storied Ranch 99 Asian grocery store, which lived up to the hype IMHO. I went down EVERY aisle and bought way too much (globe amaranth tea and almond crush Pocky, anyone?), finishing up with a nice, chewy boba milk tea from their in-house tea counter. Then, in the process of looking up good sushi in the area—because that was what I was craving for lunch—I ended up over on Freeport at Oto’s Marketplace, an absolutely fantastic Japanese grocery with its own sushi and lunch counters (the plate of the day was tonkatsu, and the line was looong). I snapped up a rainbow roll (with very nice quality sashimi), ogled the matsutake mushrooms that are just coming into season, and then popped across the parking lot to Mahoroba bakery for an anpan (sweet red-bean-pasted-filled bun—like a Japanese filled doughnut but baked, not fried) for dessert. Yee-um. On my way back to the highway, I passed a number of other good-looking restaurants and cute shops and bakeries. I’ll definitely be visiting the Freeport neighborhood again—maybe on my next trip to Napa…. Nah, who am I kidding? It’ll be Russian River or Lodi….