Central Market
42 Petaluma Blvd. North, Petaluma, CA
Sample menu: http://www.centralmarketpetaluma.com/pages/menu-summer.html 
Review date: August 2012

On our previous trip to Sonoma County in May 2012 we found Bistro 29/Santa Rosa and French Garden/Sebastopol to be 'best of the group' during that round of dining. We toyed with the idea of returning, but finally decided to try a couple of new restaurants on this trip. One of them is Central Market, in one of the classic old buildings in the downtown district. Converted from an actual butcher's market, it has the classic high ceiling with a transom of old narrow windows above the newer picture windows. The large square space is nicely punctuated by a big semi-circular bar and a well-spaced arrangement of booths (only three, sadly – we just missed getting one) and tables.

Chef owner Tony Najiola was formerly the chef at Ravenswood and opened Central Market in 2003. He purchased Mule Farms in 2011, which supplies the produce for the restaurant. The place has a disarmingly casual air to it, with less expensive building materials (retro plywood booths and strand-board floors) used to warm up the room.

The menu seems just the right length, neither too long nor too short. After such a heavy lunch at Stark's Steakhouse, the lighter dishes sounded just right. I started with the chevre-stuffed squash blossoms, while Carlos picked the Sweet Gems lettuce salad with bacon, egg, and Pt. Reyes blue. 

Our favorite version of stuffed squash blossoms comes from Artisan Bistro/Lafayette. Sadly, Central Market's offering sagged under a too-heavy batter that was greasy from the oil not being quite hot enough. The basil was a mild but too-familiar accent, and couldn't lift this dish to the ethereal heights it's capable of reaching in more careful hands. There was a sprig of deep-fried sage, which was a decorative and tasty touch.

The imbalance in Carlos' salad was disappointing. "Sweet Gem" lettuce is a trademarked hybrid of butter lettuce and romaine. But the lettuce used was too far past its prime – mature and dark green, all sweetness lost to old age. The bacon was good but the thick, very large dice, when eaten, overwhelmed everything else in the mouth. Carlos complained that when eating a piece of the bacon, he couldn't taste anything else that was with it. The dressing was lovely, with a little cream liquefying the excellent blue cheese and diced hard-boiled egg white. The amount used was exactly right, but it couldn't redeem too-old lettuce or overcome the too-large pieces of fatty bacon. 

Both of us chose the white corn chowder with shrimp-basil fritter. Very sweet but with good flavor from the corn 'milk', this benefited from a generous grinding of fresh black pepper from the waitress. Unfortunately the bay shrimp-basil fritter was simply greasy, and added nothing except slowly disintegrating pieces of soggy fried batter. White corn has been bred to be so sweet over the years that it's now a one-dimensional flavor when used by itself in cooking. There wasn't anything here to play off the sweetness.

I picked the spicy lamb cabbage rolls with preserved lemon, after being assured by the waitress that they were modest in size. There are four rolls about the length of my index finger and twice as wide, each cut in half. They're steamed with fresh diced tomato and shreds of preserved lemon...lots of preserved lemon.

Now, I like lemon – I have three mature Meyer lemon trees, so we'd better – but there was so much of it that it came near to overwhelming the cinnamon-heavy ras el hanout (Moroccan spice mix) in the cabbage filling. It's one of the rare times I've had to eat bread with a dish to keep the flavors balanced. The rolls themselves were spicy, delicious bitefuls. They deserved a more nuanced accompaniment to show them off.

Carlos ordered the scallops, which were four large browned scallops, not quite as fresh as they should be, but able to pass muster. They were placed around a crusty browned saffron risotto cake, with a smoked chile aioli underneath. The aioli was a big hit with Carlos, but the risotto cake again showed the kitchen's ineptness at deep-frying. It was as greasy as all the other deep-fried dishes.

The motto for this restaurant is "Slow Food, Good Served." Which sounds great...and better than the food actually is, at least when it comes to the deepfryer.

We don't want you to think it's bad food. It's not. But nor is it great food, unless you define great food as being whacked over the head with the obvious and over-aggressive. The ingredients are good, and the combinations are good ones. What's missing is consistent execution, and a more careful focus on balance.

One of the downsides of eating out so often is that we have a lot of bases for comparison, especially on dishes that are the current fad. Central Market made too many errors to be held equal to places like Five/Berkeley, Duck Club/Lafayette, and Sea Salt/Berkeley. 

As the saying goes, "you bet your money and you take your chances." This was an interesting meal for Carlos and I to discuss, but the food wasn't good enough to rate CM anything better than a 2.5 out a potential 5 stars.

Two people, dinner: four starters, two entrees, with tip was $92