Farmstead at Long Meadow Ranch
738 Main St., St. Helena, CA
http://www.longmeadowranch.com/Farmstead/Restaurant
Review date: February 4, 2015

We have heard much about this restaurant, one of the farm-to-table types where the restaurant is associated with an actual ranch (located just down the highway), although not all of the meats are from LMR. It is a Chowhounder favorite, although we haven't always found our tastes and the CH majority's preferences mesh.

Tourism is still not quite where it was before the 2014 South Napa Quake, but it is very close to previous levels. On a cool Wednesday lunch, the restaurant was mostly full with another dozen sitting outside and almost all the bar counter seats taken. When we left at 2 p.m. there were still people trickling in. Boomers are beginning retirement, so they can come to the Wine Country mid-week rather than wait for the ever-crowded weekends.

Farmstead is a handsome restaurant of urban rustic decor, with comfortable-looking banquettes and tables generously spaced in distance from one another. Although the bar is right next to the dining room, the noise was energetic but not deafening. The music alternates between country & western twanging and down-home Mississippi blues, neither of which is a particular favorite of ours. Fortunately the sound level is discreet in the dining room, although it's piped at an annoyingly loud level outside; e.g., the parking lot in front and the restrooms in the back building.

The menu leans slightly towards the South, with several BBQ meats interspersed with the requisite CA salads, small plates, and the mandatory kale salad. Carlos was tempted by both the crab Louie and the BBQ ribs, but he was also eager to try the ham sandwiches listed under "For the Table". He adores ham sandwiches of almost any type. He settled for the Louie as his entrée, while I chose the local trout.

Service seemed pleasant and willing, yet somewhat discombobulated. We had to wait for the hostess to appear, something that occurred to several other parties coming in (I was seated facing her station). One person took our drink order, but another waitperson took our food order. I went to the restroom, and when I came back Carlos told me that yet a third waitperson was introduced as our actual waiter. He did a reasonably good job, with a good sense of timing.

Mini La Quercia ham sandwiches with pepper jelly: We asked for a description of this starter, and learned it's three small sandwiches. When it arrived, it turned out to be a variant of the classic Southern ham sandwich – thinly sliced ham generously layered between a split biscuit. In this case it was a cheese biscuit, one of the more difficult types to pull off. 

Too many chefs try to put too much cheese into the batter, which weighs it down. Great biscuits require soft flour, not hard, so they don't have the gluten to remain light under an excess of melted cheese. These were flawless, good enough that it made us regret we didn't have room for a full side order of the cheese biscuits with honey butter. The biscuits were warm, tender but not crumbly. The ham was delicious, the perfect amount with the biscuit but not overwhelmingly salty. The thin slick of pepper jelly could have had more peppery zip, but the sweetness tied everything together.

Unlike Carlos I'm not a sandwich lover, but I agreed with him that this is a destination-worthy dish. They are light, savory, and downright scrumptious. If these aren't permanently on the menu, they deserve to be! 

The waiter claimed this was ham, not prosciutto. He wasn't correct, as prosciutto is ham - it's just not smoked. La Quercia makes several different types of prosciutto, but Farmstead doesn't specify which one is used. My guess is it’s the Americano, their most popular which is more widely available/reasonably priced than their heirloom prosciuttos. 

As often happens, the starter dish segued into a letdown with the entrées. They weren't bad, but like Shakewell/Oakland last night, they weren't well balanced, either. The ingredients were high quality – these days that's pretty much a given – but the concept was undisciplined.

We've eaten Louie salads for decades, which are named for the dressing, although you wouldn't know that by the overwhelming number of Thousand Island-dressed lettuces that abound everywhere. We don't mind Thousand Island, but it pales in comparison to a well-made Louie dressing. You will not find a proper Louie dressing at Farmstead.

Nor do we espouse an abundance of it gluing the seafood together so it can be piled high atop whole quarters of tightly-leafed romaine lettuces, complete with bottom stem holding the leaves together. Carlos needed his steakknife, which is fortunately standard tableware at Farmstead. 

He loves cornichons too...but not whole, scattered around the Louie and swimming in the excess dressing glopped on the plate. There were also red pickled onions, tasty although with the chopped pickles in the Thousand Island and half-a-dozen floating cornichons, completely superfluous. Buried in this unsuccessful variant were small cubes of ripe avocado, helplessly overwhelmed by too many pickles and too much dressing.

My entrée was a CA rainbow trout, with mushrooms, fennel, almonds and a bacon vinaigrette. I received an overcooked, unsalted boned filet, whose skin had softened to a soggy silver, buried under no less than two inches of piled-high half-cooked fennel shreds, mushrooms, and enough almonds to fill a Skippy jar full of nut butter, slicked with bacon grease but not enough balsamic to pull these disparate ingredients together.

I love trout, but farmed trout needs salt. It's much blander than wild trout. Committing the double sin of overcooking the flesh but allowing the thin, crisped skin to wilt in a vinaigrette was an injustice to a fine little fish that deserves kinder treatment than CA chefs seem to be capable of. 

One of the greatest dishes of French cooking is truit aux amandes: a whole trout pan-fried in brown butter with a scattering of sliced toasted almonds. It's the perfect marriage of simple flavors, easy but precise technique, and high quality ingredients. This is the third time in the last five years I've had a clumsy, heavy-handed variant that isn't worth the effort that went into it.

Fennel is a wonderful vegetable, but it should either be raw or cooked. A halfway stage does it no favors. The mushrooms were a delightful mix of different types, but they had absorbed so much bacon grease it was hard to distinguish the enoki from the trumpet and the yellow foot varieties. The almonds were well-toasted, but no dish needs chopped almonds plus whole almonds in so much quantity that every bite was crunchy. There was too much bacon grease, not enough acid to cut through it, and no actual bacon in evidence.

If a chef can't come up with something noticeably better than the original, then maybe said chef should think about going back to the beginning to remember the basics.

We shared a chocolate cream pie, which both of us were "meh" about. It was competent and good quality, but not noteworthy. Coffee was decent, but better with cream and sugar than black.

We absolutely would return for the ham biscuits, and it may well be that some of the other menu items are worth ordering. But for now, we can't give Farmstead any higher a score than we gave Shakewell/Oakland last night. Those ham biscuits are 5-star, but the entrées barely made it past a 2. 

So on average, roughly a 2.5 star. Those biscuits get them above the general Napa Valley crowd, such as Redd, Brix, Don Giovanni, Mustards, Oenotri, and Goose & Gander. But on our entrees, Farmstead lands slightly below Lucy @Bardessono Resort and almost a full level below Market Restaurant and Angele. 

The food at Farmstead is like its service: all the right elements are there, but instead of a well-oiled machine, it tends to jerk and stumble. Pick right, and you'll be enthused...but like too many restaurants, it's a minefield out there.

Two people, lunch: one starter, two entrées, one dessert, two beverages, with tip was $115.