The Farmer and The Fox @Cairdean Winery
3111 St. Helena Hwy North, St. Helena, CA
http://www.cairdeanestate.com/The-Farmer--the-Fox
Review date: February 4, 2015

Joseph Humphrey is a chef who has received plaudits wherever he's gone. He was the original chef at Meadowood before Christopher Kostow brought them Modernist fame. Humphrey went to Cavallo Point Hotel's Murray Circle, and then opened Dixie in SF. Michael Bauer, the SF Chronicle food critic, is a fan of Humphrey and has given him positive reviews wherever he's cooked. Oddly, it never seems to work. Other restaurants get inundated when Bauer praises them; yet nobody ever seems to show up when Humphrey's in the kitchen no matter where it is.

We've never been able to catch up with this chef before. But he finally landed in a place more convenient to us. The Cairdean winery decided to include a retail food space, and Humphrey opened the Farmer and the Fox restaurant. A month later, the café/bakery Butterscots opened next door, with plenty of outdoor patio seating. In September 2014, the dinner restaurant was reviewed by Bauer: http://www.sfgate.com/Farmer-and-the-Fox-Winning-Wine-Country

This is a European-style gastropub in Napa Valley, outside the town of St. Helena on a rural-looking stretch of Hwy 29. Chef Joseph Humphrey’s seasonal menu is "a creative and locally-inspired ode to the classics dishes of Scottish and English pubs," per the website blurb. It just received a Bib Gourmand Award from the 2015 San Francisco Michelin Guide.

We managed to find The Farmer & The Fox on a pitch-black night - no streetlights on Hwy 29! - with the help of two very large signs that loudly proclaim "CAIRDEAN WINERY" about 100' apart, with the northernmost sign leading into the spacious L-shaped parking lot. 

We were surprised to find so many large buildings in a massive compound. As we were coming for dinner we just headed towards the buildings that were still lit up. This worked up to a point – there are three of them, one clearly marked "Tasting Room". But the other two bore no signs, despite the fact they've been open now for almost a year. Flanking a center courtyard, the furthest one was the first of their retail food business: Butterscots Bakery, which serves breakfast and lunch, offering deli items, coffee and espresso drinks, plus pastries both sweet and savory to go. It's surprisingly large, with an entire front of glass. There's also an outdoor patio with a gas fireplace.

The newer dinner restaurant is much less obvious. It's the building at right angles in-between the Tasting Room and Butterscots. There is a small sign on the rear of building which faces the parking lot, saying "The Farmer & The Fox" – and I do mean very small; a discreet metal plaque with the restaurant name in cursive script. But the sign isn't anywhere near the entrance, and indeed, from the parking lot you can't see an entrance to the building although there are two of them. Both those single doors are located as far away from the sign as one can get, making this just a little bit frustrating in the dark when one address serves for an entire compound.

Fortunately one of the waitstaff was glancing out the narrow glass door and saw a couple wandering around the patio area, looking puzzled. She swung the door open and invited us in.

One of the loveliest things about dining in the Valley is as soon as you get away from the small pricy downtown areas, there is a generous space allotment for winery restaurants. Dining is big business at the wineries, subsidized by a healthy wine consumption. So at these types of restaurants, tables tend to be reasonably sized, even generous; aisles are wide; occasionally one even finds comfortable chairs. 

Add in the gastropub menu/atmosphere, and The Farmer & The Fox offers an expanse of tabletop RE more like classic steakhouses than today's modern, cram-it-elbow-to-elbow seatings. Instead of a skimpy two-top where three dishes and two glasses make for serious crowding, there's a choice of good-sized window tables or short banquettes for parties of two. The larger four-tops are extra-long and spacious enough to take tote bags, coats and backpacks in addition to four diners.

They were empty enough that we were offered a four-top, so of course we took it. All the banquettes are upholstered Chesterfield-style, in an appreciative nod to the style of Ye Olde English Gentlemen's Club. They are as comfortable as they look. Add in classic Boomer rock, softly played despite an almost-empty dining room, and you have the kind of atmosphere conducive to both dining and conversation.

The menu is true gastropub, and our excellent waiter John answered all our questions. We reluctantly skipped the 'roast of the night', upon hearing they had run out of their first selection and were on their backup, a pork loin roast. Mind you, we love pork, but at a place like this the fat cap is firmly in place. Although I love this, Carlos doesn't, so we decided on a number of small plates instead. John asked if we wanted everything at once or to break it up into courses. We chose the latter, as we always do. We ordered:

Game Pie
Tonight's pie was a mixture of venison, wild boar, red deer, bison, and rabbit.  Nose-to-tail cooking requires using up all those little trimmings and scraps, and this was the traditional way to deal with them. All these meats are lean; Humphrey chooses to moisten them up with butter. Lard or suet is the usual alternative but butter is tastier. 

There was a pretty little slaw of raw carrots and jicama in slender strips on the side. A crème fraiche delicately flavored with mustard and fresh horseradish was on the other. The game pie was a modest 5" across, 2" high, with a thin firm burger-like filling that was so flavorful it could convert a vegetarian into a carnivore. 

The crux of a real gastropub is how it handles the pastry crust. This is not the place for the healthy but heavy monounsaturated oil with whole wheat flour. It is traditionally one of the ways a cook used up lard, which (as anyone who loves the Chinese custard pastries, dan tat, can attest) makes the flakiest, lightest pastry. Butter, however, gives a better flavor, so most good bakers use a combination of butter and lard. 

This is, btw, not the cheapo lard you find in foil-wrapped blocks in today's supermarkets. You want really pure, rendered lard, with all the 'porky' flavor eliminated. The best is leaf lard, but also the hardest to find. 

An English meat pie is one of the ancestors of the English-speaking world's love for hot sandwiches. The filling can be ground meat, as it is here, or chunked/shredded meat with a little gravy as typified by the Canadian tourtière. Either way it is hot and juicy, so the pastry dough must soak up all these juices and remain intact. It's softer than the dough used for empanadas, less flaky than pie crust, not as stiff as quiche pastry. Ideally the dough adds its own good flavor, the way really good bread does. It should require no cheese or ketchup to choke down. 

This was a proper short pastry, made by someone who loves baking. Cooking is an art, but baking is chemistry. The subtleties of three ingredients blending together – flour, fat, salt – was sublime. This was a dough that was tender but strong, sturdy and absorbent without being gummy, to create the perfect simple wrapping. Delightful as was the crème fraiche, it wasn't really necessary.

Like most people, we eat a fair amount of pastry dough, one way or another, in its various forms. It can be the paper-thin wrapper of a Chinese shu mai or Italian ravioli; the sweet crust of an apple pie or the savory crust of an empanada or a quiche. Chef Humphrey's shortcrust pastry wins raves from us. This is not a one-recipe-fits-all dough; it is designed for a specific purpose, which it fulfills perfectly. It's so easy to make a bad pastry, so rare to find a good one. 

Marinated beet salad, applesauce, hazelnuts.
This was an unusual combination of familiar foods. The beets were marinated and sweet-tart. The applesauce was sweet and smooth. The hazelnuts were finely chopped, with the surprise of flaky oat granola sprinkled in. Carlos liked it, but it took me a few bites before I got used to the surprise of textures and unexpected flavors. 

As we finished these first two dishes, Carlos and I agreed they were excellent. One was simple in concept and one was complex, but both were precisely executed. There were no unnecessary garnishes or flourishes, nothing extraneous or excessive. 

Our second course had three dishes:

Black pudding, fried oyster, kale salad.
The 'black pudding' was a pork blood sausage, the English equivalent of a French boudin noir or German leberwurst. Similar sausages exist in almost every cuisine, from Asia to Latin America, Scandinavia to Africa. Blood is too precious a source of protein, minerals and salts to waste in countries where famine and starvation remain personal memories. 

This had a tougher beef intestine casing than the French sausages (they prefer using tender sheep casings for the boudins), giving it a definite 'snap' when bitten. It was a small, tangy sausage, cut into three lengths. Like most fresh blood sausages it has a soft, tender texture to the filling. Three small, very fresh batter-fried oysters alternated with the sausage, on a small pond of sauce. Each sausage cylinder was topped with a leaf of baby kale, just a garnish.

On its own the sausage was good but not exciting. But eaten together in one mouthful with an oyster and a bit of sauce, they were sublime. The sauce was cream with just a hint of oyster juices in it. We wouldn't normally think of eating a blood sausage and an oyster together, but like Spoonbar's recent surprise of fried chicken in a sauce of chopped snails, this was an amazing combination. A French boudin noir would not have worked. This sausage was spiced precisely to complement, with the sauce softening the tang of the sausage and the metallic brine of the oyster into two complementary partners.

Quail and barley stew.
Another surprising dish. The coarsely milled barley was stewed into a rich broth from roasted bones, flavored with a good mirepoix and slightly thickened by the grain's mucilaginous quality. The two batter-fried quail quarters were boneless, and adhered to the rim of the soup bowl by being placed atop an almost hidden mound of light, savory, delectable liver mousse.

Unlike Shakewell/Oakland's timid version, this liver mousse was precisely what it should be, with the Modernist foaming cutting the rich heaviness but not obscuring the distinctive flavor. It was okay with the fried quail...lovely by itself...but absolutely brilliant with the barley. Its umami gave the grain stew a wonderful depth, similar to the idea of using anchovy paste in non-fish dishes. 

Quail is not one of my favorite meats, but it was a perfect contrast to the mousse-enriched barley. This was an amazing dish, and few chefs could have conceived or executed it with such deftness.

Portobello pommes Anna, Kentucky Ham, parsley.
This was the weakest dish. The Portobello was sliced thin and failed to contribute any flavor. We're not as fond of potatoes Anna as we are of an au gratin prep. It's just butter, no cheese, but so much was used it tasted greasy. There were nice crisp edges, but somebody had too-generously sprinkled them with sea salt. Carlos has a higher tolerance for salt than I do, but even he thought it was too much butter and salt. 

The ham was thinly sliced, more like prosciutto, and didn't really add any flavor as it was merely draped on top. There were two parsley sauces on the plate. One was a thick chimichurri type, with parsley subbed for cilantro, adding capers and balsamic for a nice jolt of tanginess. The other was a parsley-cream purée. Both sauces went well together. Had the potatoes been a little less greasy and flavored better with ham instead of salt, this would have been much better. As it was, this was a miss. Not a big one, but compared to its companion dishes, not worth ordering again.

This was fairly rich food, so getting the small plates proved ideal (we could have skipped getting the potatoes and still would have had enough food to satisfy). We decided to order dessert, getting two different ones. Carlos ordered coffee, which comes in Small or Large presspots. A small holds two cups; the large holds four cups. It's Highwire Roasters/Oakland, one of my favorites.

Meyer lemon poundcake, ice cream, winter citrus compote.
Carlos ordered this. He was disappointed in the poundcake, as it was cut into two thick logs that were toasted by oven-baking. This made them dry and hard, which is exactly the opposite of the style he prefers. He made the pointed remark that the only poundcake he does like is the one I make from an old Sunset magazine recipe, which uses confectioner's sugar for a fine delicate crumb. 

There were two compotes, one of ruby grapefruit and one of orange. The one saving grace on this plate was the ice cream. This wasn't your usual vanilla. It was a custard ice cream, as rare as the proverbial hen's teeth these days, and far superior to the usual  frozen/flavored dairy.

Ginger-porter cake, pears, caramelized honey ice cream.
This was superior in concept to the poundcake. This was a gingerbread-colored, tender, fresh-baked little cake with pears baked inside. There were unnecessary shreds of raw pear for garnish. Although the ice cream had a nice sweetness to cut through the slight bitterness from the porter, both desserts were improved by switching the cakes. The custard ice cream complemented the tender porter cake beautifully, while the honey ice cream melted better to moisten the very dense poundcake sticks. Both of us agreed the porter cake was exceptional.

Summary: We were wowed by The Farmer and The Fox. It turned out to be the highlight of this trip, edging out Michael Warring's Modernist tasting menu and far outstripping the sloppy food/clumsy service at Thomas Keller's Ad Lib pop-up. 

We loved the décor, the service, the music, the comfort and spaciousness, and most of all, F&F's food. This was brilliant food by a chef with discipline and flair. Nothing was oversalted or oversugared; nothing was too sour, goopily sauced or pretentiously showy. If somewhat on the substantial side, it is winter, and a gastropub. What chef Joseph Humphrey will do in summer when it heats up, should be interesting to experience. We saw few complaints about his food at Caravello Point and Dixie, no matter what the weather, so we're hopeful.

We've lost Etoile (although we hope Perry Hoffman surfaces again somewhere in the Bay Area) but gained F&F. Not quite an even trade, but we'll take a couple of game pies to go, please, and another plate of that blood sausage with fried oysters, too. Yum!

All the plates we ordered were precisely sized for two people to share. This is a disciplined touch that too many restaurants overlook. The small plates concept is a deservedly popular one, but almost all restaurants we've been to are determining size of portion by price. This leads to an assortment of small plates whose sizes are all over the place. Even a good waiter can't really guide you in this area; how is he to know precisely how much your group of diners normally eat? 

At F&F, when you look at the small plates dishes, it's easier to figure out how many dishes to order for the number of diners. The only issue will be how rich a given dish might be. Some of the food, like the so-so potato dish, goes high on the butterfat scale.

We splurged on a bottle of Voss sparkling water through dinner, with a couple of lemon slices added. The Farmer and The Fox does have three hard ciders available, but I wasn't up to trying any that evening. Like most places, you have to buy a whole bottle, varying in size from 16 oz. to a full fifth size.

Two people, dinner: five small plates, two desserts, two beverages, with tip was a bargain at $132.