Glen Ellen Inn in Glen Ellen, CA – update, lunch
http://www.glenelleninn.com/menu.html 
Review date: Oct 24, 2014
(previous review appended below)

We first ate at the Glen Ellen Inn in May 2013. It's a pleasant restaurant, not as good as Depot Hotel down the road in the city of Sonoma, but worth a stop if you're already in the area and looking for a place to eat. 

A lot of locals eat here. The first time we ate here maybe three tables were occupied, but this afternoon – similar day of the week and time – people just kept arriving, one group after another. Despite this, the staff remained cheerful even as they picked up their pace, without making diners feel rushed.

Glen Ellen's dining area is split into three small rooms and three outdoor patios, so there is a lot of ground for the waitstaff to cover! They did a good job, however, and service is a real plus here.

As we were going to have a substantial German dinner in the evening, we wanted to keep our lunch on the lighter side. Carlos, however, got seduced into ordering one dish too many. He's a sucker for certain foods, but I figured this was our last day so what the heck. We ordered:

Beet and Poached Pear salad: Chevre, micro greens, pecans, blue cheese,  balsamic dressing. This was 90% fresh pickled beets, 5% poached pears, and 5% for everything else. It was very good, but both of us were surprised how big the plate was. 

Ginger Calamari: with grilled pineapple salsa, lemon aioli. This dish, GEI's most famous, has shrunk noticeably since we first tried it. But it is still an excellent dish, if not as remarkable as previous. They placed some slices of pink pickled ginger on top, but I would have preferred to have shreds of it incorporated into the crusty fried calamari, as before. It wowed us the first time, but this smaller version just didn't pack the same punch. The salsa wasn't as spicy, there were no additional sliced jalapenos, and not having the ginger shredded and incorporated into the dish made a negative difference.

Carlos got a cup of the soup du jour, which was quail curry. We're not fond of quail, but it was very good in this soup. It was very tasty but light; the yellow curry was broth-based without any cream.

Baked Brie: with poached pear, garlic crostini, microgreens, spicy nuts. Fortunately this wasn't a large dish, because this was the one dish too many. It was nicely handled, with a drizzle of sweet balsamic over the melted wedge of cheese. The garlic crostini were very good, the pear sweet and soft. Carlos liked the microgreens, while I was indifferent to them. The spicy nuts were okay but best on their own; otherwise there were too many flavors competing with the mild Brie.

Crispy Fried Oysters, three, with Tabasco butter. Our final starter was a double order of this dish, another encore for us here. The Tabasco butter is unique to Glen Ellen Inn, and a clever invention. When the plates came we discovered they have changed the presentation for the more practical. Instead of the coral-red butter in a ramekin, they pipe it on each fried oyster. A scattering of radish micro-greens completes a tasty and attractive dish. 

We skipped coffee, as we were going to stop by a café in Penngrove in mid-afternoon. Glen Ellen Inn doesn't make very good coffee.

Although lunch was pleasant, Glen Ellen Inn's food isn't that much out of the ordinary any longer that it's worth our returning again. The once-amazing calamari salad is a shadow – a robust shadow, but not quite as good – as it was two years ago. For the money we could have gotten a much better lunch at Depot Hotel or French Garden, and for one-third the price we could have gone to Hole In The Wall. 

If you're here in Glen Ellen, you could do worse. But reasonably nearby, you could also do a lot better. Plan to drive a little further, and you'll eat better for the same cost or less.

Two people, lunch: six starters, one beverage, with tip was $89.

Glen Ellen Inn Oyster Bar & Restaurant
13670 Arnold Drive, Glen Ellen, CA
http://www.glenelleninn.com/menu.html 
Review date: May 2013

For our last restaurant, we chose this lesser-known restaurant on the northern end of Sonoma Valley. A combination of weekend traffic, various county events, and our reluctance to wait in line for any restaurant, drove us to take a chance and reserve a table for lunch here. It is a bit further north than Docelunas in Kenwood, where we ate on March 2011. 

After checking out of our hotel in Windsor, we had a pleasant hour's drive eastwards on lovely back roads. The hills are dry already but the vineyards are almost all leafed out. May is a windy month in both Napa and Sonoma, so the temps are usually comfortable even when it hits the mid-80's.  

We took seats at a table out on their enclosed patio room. There's a super-tiny open-air outdoor patio, but we preferred the patio room. With the glass windows lowered all the way down, it's almost as good and also more private. This isn't a large restaurant, but it has a good-looking, comfortable space. It feels casual and yet just a little upscale, being up on the second floor overlooking the main drag. There's a modest parking lot that restaurant guests can park in, should there be any spaces available. Otherwise, it's street parking, which is reasonably plentiful in this small town.

The Oyster Bar offered us a breadbasket of focaccia, which was puffy, coarsely textured, a little salty and uninteresting. But there were also three small scone wedges, served warm, which were slightly sweet and so good we scarfed them up with plenty of sweet butter. These were cream scones, always our favorite. Carlos was disappointed, however, that the restaurant had absolutely no jam on hand to accompany the scones (Oyster Bar doesn't serve breakfast, just lunch and dinner).

Carlos got a cup of the soup of the day, which was a shrimp-tomato chowder with a tiny gougere floating on top. It had well-balanced, clean flavors. He thought it was very good, although nothing remarkable.

I chose the fried oysters, which comes with a Tabasco butter. I asked if I could get the lemon garlic butter instead, and the waitress said she would bring some on the side. The three oysters were jumbo sized, bigger than I was expecting, with a fine breadcrumb crust that was crispy without being hard, a perfect greaseless golden brown.

Interestingly, the softened Tabasco butter was brilliant with the oysters. Using a butter instead of a salsa or watery dip ensured that the crust remained perfect. The lemon garlic butter worked nicely with the Tabasco butter, but not by itself. These weren't cheap oysters, but they were really good, and I thoroughly enjoyed them. Unlike Carlos, I like my oysters cooked, LOL.

We shared the Ginger Calamari, an intriguing version of the ubiquitous fried calamari starter. This came with a grilled pineapple salsa, lemon aioli and the same pink pickled ginger the sushi restaurants give you. The salsa used the more tart pineapple (e.g, not the Hawaiian Golds which are very low acid). This gave a wonderful acid balance with only a little green onion and finely chopped fresh jalapeno chile needed for some zing. 

Although the lightly battered calamari wasn't the most greaseless frying we've ever encountered, the calamari weren't overdone, which was more important. The salsa, a drizzle of mild runny lemon aioli, and pickled ginger were a wonderful combination that made this dish a hit with both of us. Carlos, in fact, kept the rest of the salsa to add to his entrée.

That entrée was the French Onion Bacon Burger, a tasty burger that wasn't well-conceived. It was one of those examples of someone taking a good idea and going overboard. The burger wasn't very thick but had great beefy flavor and tenderness. It was definitely griddle-cooked, not grilled; and came medium-rare, slightly more to the rare side, the way Carlos prefers it.

But the bun was too heavy and thick. The onions were great, but the bacon was thick-sliced instead of thin, and way overcooked. When thick bacon is cooked hard, it gets chewy, and in this case there was just too much of it, with multiple slices criss-crossing over the top. Thin-sliced bacon that would have become crispy instead of chewy, would have worked so much better. As it was, when you took a bite, your teeth went through everything except the bacon slices, where you then had to chew like a squirrel to get through the double-thick layers. Verdict: good taste, good quality, but not well thought-out.

After two sizable starters I chose the Salmon Niçoise salad. Unfortunately, like Carlos' burger it was skewed out of balance. Someone was very fond of lots of sourness. Everything else – the fresh beet quarter, the green and black olives, the halved cherry tomatoes, the diced potatoes (slightly underdone), the green beans, the pickled onion shreds – was in small little portions arranged over the lettuce. 

But not the artichoke hearts, unfortunately.

I love artichoke hearts. I love them fresh, frozen, marinated, even canned. But marinated in too much acidic red wine vinegar....well, not so much. And two generous spoonfuls of those very tart artichoke hearts with their sour vinaigrette added as salad dressing, along with the pickled onions and salty olives – was just too much to overcome. The modest piece of grilled salmon and chopped young romaine couldn't hold their own. 

Even picking around the onions and hearts, and leaving the olives (which I normally love), the overwhelming taste of this salad was more like the sauerkraut at Café Europe the previous night, instead of a brightly balanced mix of greens, veggies and grilled fish.

We ended our lunch with cappuccinos, which were very well done. The service was very good, although it would have been nice to have the table wiped down at some point. 

Overall, Glen Ellen came as close as some of the other restaurants did – Bistro 29, Depot Hotel and Café Europe. The food was good but a little flawed, yet at all of these places (except for the two quickie snacks), there were just enough well-executed dishes that we didn't feel we'd had a truly bad meal anywhere on this trip. The quality of ingredients and the cooking overall is so much better than it was even ten or fifteen years ago at the average restaurant, that the bar for four- and five-star eating is stratospherically higher than it used to be.

Glen Ellen Inn Oyster Bar isn't a great restaurant, but it is a pretty good one. A comfortable dining room, well-trained waitstaff, and a location reachable from a wide part of Northern Sonoma County, make it worth a stop if you need a place to eat in this area. This end of the Sonoma Valley is much less crowded than the area around Sonoma Square, and there are really beautiful back roads one can take to avoid the backlogged traffic along Hwy 12.

Two people, lunch: three starters, two entrées, three beverages, with tip was $90.