Ca'Momi will be opening a full sit-down restaurant in downtown Napa, hopefully in 2015, called Ca’ Momi Napa Valley: 1141 First Street, Napa, in the former Naked Wines space. Enoteca Ca'Momi will remain at Oxbow Market. Inside Scoop article: http://insidescoopsf.sfgate.com/blog/2014/09/23/ca-momi-opening-full-service-italian-restaurant-in-downtown-napa/

Enoteca Ca'Momi @Oxbow Market, Napa, CA – update, dessert
Review date: August 2014

When Borgo Italia first opened in Oakland's Old Town, we fell in love with the bigne and ciambelle. Their Italian pastry chef was a genius, and we would stop by just to get his pastries for take-out. Unfortunately, the chef went back to Italy, and we were left in the throes of addiction, with no source for decent whipped cream desserts nearby. 

Last year we discovered Ca'Momi, having an excellent lunch and even better pastries. Ca'Momi adheres to the strictly regulated Ospitalitá Italiana standards, importing many ingredients from Italy. The menu has such delightful items as sweetbreads, liver, and salt cod, in addition to the desserts.

We finally have some wonderful regional Italian restaurants in Oakland...but still no pastries. Sigh. So when we visit Napa, we like to stop by Ca'Momi and buy pastries to bring home (ice and thermal chest necessary). 

The 2014 South Napa Quake in August did no structural damage to Oxbow Market, but created quite a mess that took a couple of days to clean up before Ca'Momi could reopen (it's a wine seller and even has wine bottled under its name). We came early for the best selection, and Oxbow was already fairly busy at the beginning of the Labor Day weekend. What is in the display case is all there is for the day.

We purchased our pastries and brought them home in good shape. The paté a choux dough does soften on standing, however, so they're best eaten fresh. Our personal favorites are the honey-vanilla, the espresso, and the strawberry.

We appreciate the low sugar and high quality. That was one of our few criticisms of the otherwise marvelous dinner at Etoile @Domaine Chandon on this trip – one of the gratis sweets brought to the table was a lovely beignet filled with whipped cream, but it was topped with a confectioner's sugar glaze that made it tooth-achingly sweet. 

Ca'Momi sells its bigne by weight, $29/lb. The ciambelle are $12 for the large, $6 for the small. They're also available if you're eating at the restaurant; the waiter will bring over whatever you order from the dessert case in the front of Ca'Momi's stall.

Enoteca Ca'Momi @Oxbow Market
610 First St., Napa, CA
http://www.camomienoteca.com/menus/
Review date: February 2014

Despite the tremendous hoopla about Napa, the truth is that Carlos and I wouldn't be upset to never go there again. We don't drink, bike, or play tennis; so honestly there is nothing for us to do here. There's no interesting hobby stores, museums, or even a bookstore with a decent sci-fi section. Even the side roads aren't as interesting as they are in Sonoma County.

We're not fond of crowds, meaning Napa is pretty much proscribed from mid-May through the end of October. The endless stream of tourists (including us) guarantees a lot of restaurants – but also the ennui that afflicts dining establishments where the Almighty Tourist Dollar starts to foster too much of a Fisherman's Wharf "get 'em in/get 'em out" attitude, and food/service descends into a cynical "we'll never see you again, and you probably can't tell the difference between good food and great food anyway."

Add in driving up and down Hwy 29...well, there are freeways I love to drive on, but 29 is not one of them.

The trip so far was pleasant, but not especially noteworthy. Brix has indeed suffered from the loss of Chris Jones, one of our favorite chefs. Solbar was good but we goofed by choosing the wrong entrée. Market was a little too over-the-top for us to give wholehearted approval. 

Meadowood Resort's Grill, which gets much less attention than the Michelin three-starred restaurant, was excellent but with a very slight miss in execution, although we would happily return, and indeed plan to add this to our next trip to go head-to-head against Etoile @Domaine Chandon and French Blue (the latter recommended by our Solbar waiter).

But still, we hadn't hit the jackpot yet on this trip. True, we are being severe on Meadowood Grill, who when they were good, were sensational. But when you go to a "casual" restaurant that costs $100/pp without wine, and it shares a kitchen with the restaurant rated one of the best in Northern CA, said Grill is in rarefied territory and has to be judged as such. We are not talking "casual like Gott's Roadside Diner", here.

We first visited Oxbow in 2011 before everything was fully open. At the time Ca'Momi was just a few cramped seats with a pizza oven. It remains to this day a fairly uncomfortable, noisy space, although fine if you're just grabbing some Roman-style pizza. You can people-watch and figure out which food vendors you want to hit before getting back in your car.

They now have their back patio open, complete with gas heaters (needed; even during our lunch there was a bit of a cool breeze). The tables are bigger: all four- or six-tops, making it a lot more expansive for multi-course meals and much more comfortable than balancing a number of dishes and bottles on the tiny two-tops indoors.

Those bottles include not only the water bottle, but also the iced tea bottle (the Elisir di Rocchetta Green Tea with jasmine from Italy; green tea with lemon and jasmine, which was excellent) but also two big bottles of EVOO, one of which was super-duper hot – a good 8/10 – worthy of any Thai, Mexican, or Korean restaurant at its most authentic.

In lieu of a breadbasket, Ca'Momi brings you a small waxed paper bag of crackerbread, a subtle reminder that they are also a wine shop, pastry counter, and take-out food vendor. The cracker bread was spread with a mix of the standard EVOO and the super-chile EVOO, then sprinkled with really superior Parmigiano-Reggiano. It was delightful, and we finished all of it.

I'm not an ardent fan of Roman-style pizza, which is floppy and intended to be folded over. Much more interesting to us was the listing of baccala and animelle on the Antipasti menu. Carlos being Portuguese-Chinese, he adores salt cod and has passed on that love to me. I was intrigued by the use of polenta crostini with the baccala, as I love polenta. I've had it used as crostini twice before in restaurants but not really executed well, and I've always felt it would be ideal in certain recipes if properly done.

And of course, any mention of sweetbreads gets our attention immediately!

The baccala was the creamy whipped version, and it was the best version of this prep we've had, much better than the salted cod fritters from Bouchon/Yountville. The polenta crostini won rare praise from Carlos, who said they were even tastier than using good bread for the baccala as is the usual. I agreed; the texture and frying of the crostini was precisely on-point to accompany the baccala.

The crackerbread was also very fine with the baccala, although we'd give the edge to the polenta crostini. With the latter, we'd even give this dish the edge over La Salette's/Sonoma outstanding bacalhao fritters.

We have often railed against CA chefs who batter and deep-fry sweetbreads. They invariably come overcooked and heavy with a batter that overwhelms their delicate flavor. But now we have to take it all back, at least for Ca'Momi. Their sweetbreads were battered by a thorough flouring, deep-fried – and divine. The light batter and flawless quick deep-frying thoroughly rebuked other versions we've had elsewhere. Ca'Momi's sweetbreads were still pink and oozing juice in the middle. 

These were absolutely flawless, like the very best chicken nuggets you could make...only better! It took serious willpower not to order another plate of this. Trying to figure out how they did this, all I can think of is that the sweetbreads are trimmed, cut, and then very well chilled. There's no other way to keep them so juicy when they're floating around in 350º oil for 3-4 minutes; sweetbreads have no internal fat and will dry out as fast as liver when heated past an internal 124 degrees.

I ordered the antipasto misto for my entrée. Normally a shared starter plate, it's the "chef selection" of three breads, salume and cheese. We received three types of focaccia – olive, mushroom, and onion, but the only one we liked was the onion. I'm not sure why we didn't care for the focaccia. We've had others we've liked, and at Brix the focaccia was so excellent we didn't even ask for any butter or EVOO to go with it. But this focaccia was somehow uninteresting, a disappointment after that great crackerbread. We left most of it alone.

The salume was very good, however. A really excellent mortadella, a good prosciutto, and a slightly peppery salami. Some pickled artichoke hearts were appreciated by me (Carlos doesn't care for artichokes). The cheeses weren't as successful: a Parmigiano-Reggiano that should have been kept for grating; an aged sheep's cheese whose name I didn't catch but that had a crumbly texture and a slight sweetness to the aftertaste that was pleasant; and a run-of-the-mill Taleggio. 

Carlos was intrigued by the Rigatoni con coda all vaccinara, rigatoni with stewed oxtail. Ca'Momi is proud of its designation by the Ospitalitá Italiana as an authentic high-quality Italian restaurant, so Carlos knew he wasn't going to get his beloved mushy pasta even if he begged.

Ca'Momi's pasta is rigidly correct al dente, but the classic al dente is actually a little less hard than some of the abominable versions we've gotten in various restaurants, where it's barely past the audible crunch! sound. The serving was generous – so much for Borgo Italia's/Oakland miniscule servings of barely sauced pasta – with a lovely tomato-based braise of oxtails. 

In fact, it tasted a lot like the oxtail stew I make at home. He was very pleased with it, although we had to bring half of it home. If he'd finished it, he wouldn't have been able to have dessert.

And dessert was the real reason we were here. We had fallen in love with Borgo Italia's magnificent bigne and ciambellina, and were inconsolable when the pastry chef had to return to Italy, leaving the pastry display case empty. We had heard people rave about Ca'Momi's pizza, to which we shrugged. But hearing raves about their bigne – well, that was another matter entirely! We made sure to travel with two foam ice chests and collect two bags of ice cubes from the hotel before we checked out, so we were prepared.

I went back inside the restaurant to check out the pastry display. It isn't a large case, and what they show is all they have for the day. They had both chocolate and vanilla versions of the ciambelle/ciambellina, and eight different flavors of bigne not counting the gluten-free version. Bigne are small cream puffs, exactly one bite-sized. There were two different types of cannoli, which we don't care for; and a mini-eclair made with Tcho of SF chocolate. 

There is also tiramisu, caramel custard, and a chocolate chip pudding. Carlos remained in the restaurant, ordering an eclair and a tiramisu for us along with cappuccinos (his a double shot; mine a single shot), while I picked out the ciambellina and bigne. I asked them to be packed up and added to our restaurant bill, which they were happy to do. 

The tiramisu was very good. We loved Venezia's/Berkeley unauthentic but wildly boozy version, which has, alas, passed into oblivion with the closure of the restaurant. This had a good coffee-chocolate balance, and the mascarpone/whipped cream filling was generous and sublimely satisfying – albeit lacking any alcohol.

The eclair was good, but after we came home (over the next few days) and tried the bigne and the ciambellina, the latter two are much better. To quote the Austrians, the only way to better mit schlag (with whipped cream) is by adding more schlag!

Carlos liked all the flavors of the bigne. I was especially impressed by four of them: the "milk & honey", the strawberry (great berry flavor), the espresso (super-duper espresso flavor!), and the almond (flavored with an almond liqueur).

The bigne are sold by the pound at $29/lb. 16 bigne equaled about 3/4 lb. The ciambellina minis – the regular ciambelle are large enough to be shared by two people – are a rather high $6/each; I didn't check what the price was on the regular size.

The double-shot espressos are definitely the way to go for coffee lovers; the singles are acceptable only as lattes. The service was excellent, in fact all the service in Napa was very good this time. But it's only February, after all; still a couple of months before the big service crunch hits for the summer.

Once again we were fortunate to end our trip on a high note. We enjoyed Enoteca Ca'Momi even more than Meadowood Grill. It's honest, interesting, beautifully executed food, albeit in mostly uncomfortable surroundings. Maybe someday it will move to a good-looking, comfortable space that will show off the food even better...but until then, make a reservation through OpenTable, avoid the most crowded times/dates, and remember to bring that ice chest!

Two people, lunch: two starters, two mains, one dessert (the waiter comped us the eclair because he forgot to get it for us right away, bringing it after we finished the tiramisu), three beverages, with generous tip was approximately $127 without the pastries, and $174 with them.