Carneros (lunch)
1325 Broadway, Sonoma
www.carnerosbistro.com 
Review date:  May 2010

Well, there's always got to be one disappointment. This place was it, at our halfway point. Carneros Bistro is located in the fairly costly Lodge at Sonoma hotel, on Broadway about a mile off the Square. Again, we weren't terribly hungry, which turned out to be a good thing because the food here was a letdown after our meals elsewhere.

For the first time up here the bread was mediocre - going stale, coarse and chewy. The butter had unidentifiable herbs in it, although there was no discernible taste to them. Carlos and I split the crab-bacon dip with flatbread. The flatbread was great, almost shatteringly thin but not overtoasted, glistening with an EVOO wash and generously sprinkled with melted Parmesan. The dip, however, was soup-like in consistency, and with all the bacon and cheese you could hardly taste the crab. It was tasty, but bacon-cheese tasty, not crab-tasty.

The cream of asparagus soup - which was actually a puree, not a classic cream soup - had asparagus, cream, and a lot of salt, period. There was a delicious swirl of lemon cream in it, but the cream had an oddly solid texture that didn't dissolve into the very hot soup, which seemed a little strange. And it was so salty that Carlos, who likes salt, complained that all he could taste was salt first and asparagus second. There didn't seem to be any fresh herbs or complexity to the soup, which is odd for a restaurant that trumpets its outdoor vegetable garden - all the diners stare out the windows at the raised veggie beds.

We both ordered salads - Carlos the Caesar, mine mixed greens. His was less successful - the romaine leaves were fairly young and a good quality, but the dressing was heavy-handed on the salt and the anchovies (standard canned salted ones) were very strangely deep-fried and placed on top of the romaine. Instead of croutons there was a cheese-topped croustade, which he left as we had stuffed ourselves with the much tastier flatbread.
 
My mixed green salad came with roasted beets and two slices of bleu cheese. I'm not overly fond of bleu cheese but this was actually a good one, salty but not overpoweringly so. Trouble was, the vinaigrette was loaded with crunchy sea salt, so it was hard to eat the greens and cheese together on the same plate. The beets were thankfully not vinegared, nice and sweet.

Carlos ordered the Wagyu tri-tip open face panini. He was of the mistaken idea that no one can really ruin a tri-tip. HA! You can indeed take a lovely hunk of beef, grill it perfectly rare, and then ruin it by slicing it in straight (instead of slanted) too-thick slices, making it so ridiculously chewy you can't eat it without sawing the slices into smaller bite-size pieces first, then piling them back on the overtoasted slice of that mediocre chewy bread.

Oh, but first you smear too much of that softened bleu cheese over the bread slice, then pile it with inedibly stringy grilled green onions - what IS it about this area that they are so in love with grilling green onions in long chewy pieces? - and then adding the piece d'resistance underneath the chewy beef.

Pickled roasted red bell pepper chunks, unskinned.

Hmm....salt, in copious amounts in a variety of ingredients. Pickles where they're not expected. Could it be the pernicious influence of George Morrone making itself known? It certainly felt as if the chef here is channeling Morrone's spirit. Bleh.

We just wanted to read the dessert menu, but there was a dessert listed that was so strange, we had to order it just to try it. Three strawberry desserts (they're in season and already there are roadside vendors selling boxes of them) come on a long plate. They are sized the way we like them - really just a few bites each. 

We wanted to order this dish because the menu read: 
"Strawberry Bites - Brown butter biscuit, Grand Marnier compressed strawberries, strawberry-rhubarb crisp, strawberry mascarpone pudding"

We were dying to know what compressed strawberries were - our waitress, BTW, had left work at this point and asked the bartender to finish up with us, which was yet another strange thing if you're conversant with how restaurants should be run, as there was another waitress working the floor at the same time.

Anyway, it was a real shame this dessert was nothing to write home about. One was a parfait, which tasted like nothing more than whipped cream and sugar although you could see layers to it. One was a super-sweet cookie with the supposedly compressed berries on it, which turned out to be thin slices of strawberry marinated in Grand Marnier and balsamic vinegar, so that you couldn't really taste much strawberry flavor. And the rhubarb-strawberry crisp, in a tiny tartlet pan with a miniature scoop of ice cream, had a soggy crumb crust and again, was very sweet. The sizes were ideal, but the desserts themselves had all the interest of a Creamsicle.

Everything here, from the decor of the dining room (which wasn't unpleasant, but isn't remarkable either) to the service, to the conception and execution of the food, felt alarmingly half-hearted. Carlos remarked that it was as if whoever was running the kitchen created the combinations without ever actually tasting the dish to see if everything worked together. It was formulaic trendy and quite unsatisfying.

The big surprise, not a pleasant one, was how much this travesty of a meal cost us. One starter, a cup and a bowl of soup, two salads, one sandwich, one dessert, two beverages - the regular coffee wasn't bad, and they gave us an entire pot which pleased Carlos, who loathes having to constantly ask for refills - with tip was $102.