Hole In The Wall in Sebastopol, CA – update, lunch
http://www.holeinthewallsebastopol.com/menu
Review date: May 2014
(previous review appended below)

We ate at Hole In The Wall in May 2013 and were wowed by this simple little café's excellent food: great ingredients cooked with care and passion by chef/owner Adam Beers since 2011. Despite its obscure location – hidden in an anonymous strip mall off the Gravenstein Highway, just outside downtown Sebastopol – it does a thriving business with locals and foodies who search it out. 

It's a measure of how much we like HinW that we were eager to return despite the "no reservations" policy, something we seldom approve of. However, it's understandable here, as this is truly a very small restaurant. It runs lean, and just wouldn't be worth signing up with even a low-cost reservation service. If chef Beers reserved half his tables for walk-ins, he'd only be able to offer five tables for reservations. As it is, the cheerful young waitresses are on the run during peak times, and those happen three times a day. HinW is open for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Nobody has the time to be answering the phone or checking on-line to maintain reservations.

We met our friends Gil and Sara for lunch. This was their first time here although they'd heard about it before. All of us decided on lunch items, although breakfast was still available. 

Carlos chose a cup of the borscht. His stepfather George used to make an English-style borscht, which is heavy on the beef and uses the beets as more of a sweet counterpoint. HinW's version is beefy enough to please him, with big slices of red and gold beets. I thought it was a little salty, but he was very happy with it.

For his entrée he chose the lamb burger with pepper jack cheese and caramelized onions. He loved the rich lamb flavor (I had the lamb burger on our first visit) although he said next time he'd leave off the onions. They were good, but he felt the sweetness distracted from the lamb. More and more, Carlos is focusing on the taste of the meat or seafood itself, and is becoming less fond of too many side flavors. 

I chose the duck burger and fontina cheese, but I goofed in specifying a medium doneness. I should have opted for medium-rare instead. There was also an excess of pesto aioli on the bread. It was tasty stuff but with the bread roll ended up overwhelming the flavor of the duck. The duck meat was in good-sized hand-chopped shreds. The side of fries was thin-cut and very good.

Sara also got the lamb burger, but with the side of salad instead of fries. Gil ordered the short rib sandwich with fries. All of us had coffee; HinW has excellent quality coffee in both decaf and regular.

HinW is the kind of café we enjoy. The quality and execution are so much cleaner-tasting and straightforward than a place like Fremont Diner. We would rather have less of a good salad than a lot of an indifferent one...not to mention there was probably less oil in all four of our entrées combined than there was on that single plate of Nashville Fried Chicken from Fremont.

Hole In The Wall remains on our list of "A" places for Sonoma Cty. It should be noted that the menu doesn't change between lunch and dinner, so as long as you come outside peak times, you'll see the same menu whether afternoon or evening.

Four people, lunch: four sandwiches, one soda, four coffees, with tip was $83.

Hole in the Wall
972 Gravenstein Hwy. South, Sebastopol, CA
http://www.holeinthewallsebastopol.com/menu/ 
Review date: May 2013

Our trip began with a single day in Petaluma in Sonoma Cty., before heading up to Mendocino tomorrow. It's surprising how hard it is to find a good lunch on a Monday in a suburban city. A number of restaurants use this as their sole day of rest – not that we begrudge them the time off, mind you. But it does make scheduling something of a challenge. 

Then I remembered the Chowhounders were enthused about Hole in the Wall, which opened in mid-2011 in southern Sebastopol. It's only a 20 minute additional leg from Petaluma where our first hotel was, so we plugged it into our GPS and were off.

This restaurant is not only small, it's hidden deep inside a bohemian version of a mini-mall. Plus, the whole shebang is set back from the road with hedges hiding the parking lot, so it's easy to miss the mall entirely. The signboard is not easily seen if you're traveling north on the Gravenstein Hwy – which, of course, we were. 

And the restaurant isn't listed on the mall sign anyway. The most noticeable store listed is Subway Sandwiches, and the first store you actually see is a Starbucks Coffee. Hole/Wall is diagonally behind the Starbucks, across a little courtyard in the back of the mall. Even the yoga sign next door to the restaurant is more obvious.

The best way to find it, no matter which way you're traveling on Hwy 116, is to look for the Foster's Freeze. The mall is directly opposite. 

There was only one waitress (and no busboy). The chef and owner, Adam Beers, left the kitchen a few times to pitch in and help serve as the place filled up. The lunch menu is the same as the dinner menu, with a selection of salads, soups, sandwiches and crepes.

Lest you think this sounds like ten thousand other cafes you've encountered, Hole/Wall really is different, and in a better way. It's very CA, meaning locavore, high-quality, low-salt and vegetarian/low-gluten friendly. 

Unlike many CA places, these high-quality dishes are...well, hearty. Not humongous, mind you. But the plates and bowls are very well filled, and nobody short of a lumberjack is going to leave this place hungry. It was a good thing we missed breakfast this morning. I don't think we could have finished our lunch if we'd had anything more substantial than a glass of milk and coffee.

Carlos debated over the gumbo or the borscht soup, as he loves both. Finally he decided on the gumbo, and was dissuaded from also ordering a crepe by the young waitress, who advised him "that's a lot of food!" 

He received a large bowl of gumbo with rice and two very long slices of toasted baguette. The rice was a bit hard, and the gumbo needed a little salt to bring out some depth. It was definitely spicy, made with a dark roux and a strongly smoke-flavored andouille. But that hard rice didn't please us; we're soft rice lovers. Carlos doesn't care for the flavor of smoke, so he downgraded this gumbo a half level. I like dark roux and smoke, so I think I liked it more than he did. The gumbo is well filled with chicken, sausage, and some crayfish, which he approved of. If I ordered this for myself, I'd spring for the shrimp, which are extra. Despite the rice and smoke, he said this was a very high-quality gumbo with good flavors, one of the better ones he's tried.

The soup of the day was carrot-curry. Crepes and sandwiches come with diner's choice of fries, salad, or soup of the day. I thought the carrot-curry would go great with the lamb burger I wanted to try...and it did. The soup was very mild; one could hardly taste any curry. It was just a faint edge of spice aroma to the slightly sweet carrot purée. It was thick but not rich, ideal with a hearty burger.

There's several ways to judge a good burger. Do you want size? Quality? Thickness? Seasoning? 

But if you're going for all-around balance, Hole/Wall's lamb burger has to be right up there with the top contenders. This is lamb the way it should taste. Neither too mild, nor too gamy. This is richly flavorful ground lamb: ground just right (not too coarse, not too fine), salted in the grinding and cooked to a flawless medium-rare. It wasn't so thick that it couldn't be cooked properly all the way through. Nor was it so thin that all the juices would run out. 

The lamb is so delicious, it needs very little to enhance it. It was perfect with just that great bread, a slightly spicy mayo spiked with harissa and some very good early tomato slices, and a single leaf of curly lettuce. 

But the waitress suggested I add cheese, so I chose pepper Jack, which really zipped up the chile heat! Carlos and I loved this addition, but if you're not into heat they offer four other types of cheese to choose from.

This was a square patty on a square bun. Both of us object to sandwiches that are overly bready. But although this bun was good-sized, it wasn't overly thick, so I didn't feel as if I was eating an overload of carbs. It was tender in texture and held together beautifully. The patty was so juicy when I picked up my burger, the bottom bun was wet with lamb juices – yet it remained intact without being overly chewy. This was just the right size to satisfy a hearty appetite yet not satiate to make one feel bloated. 

Normally I'm a "wet" sandwich lover and Carlos is a "dry" sandwich fan. His one exception is a burger. Hole/Wall spreads that mayo on both top and bottom bun. Carlos got a bite of my burger and said he wished he'd gotten that instead of the gumbo. He liked his gumbo, but he loved my burger! He thought it was the best lamb burger ever, equal to or even slightly better than the outstanding lamb burger Brix gave me last year.

Although we seldom ask about provenance, we were so impressed by my burger that we got more details. The lamb is Colorado lamb, but raised in CA (not sure how they accomplish that feat). The bread roll is from Franco-American Bakery in Santa Rosa, one of the oldest continuing bakeries in Northern CA (Yelpers love 'em: http://www.yelp.com/biz/franco-american-bakery-santa-rosa#query:franco%20american).

Coffee is good but not great. It has some nutty overtones, but a fair amount of acid. It's not a premium blend and was only acceptable because it was fresh.

Summary: I don't always agree with the Chowhounders, but they're right to love Hole In The Wall. Carlos and I would be happy to go back, and thought their breakfast menu looked pretty darn interesting too. The quality is high, the portions are generous without being ridiculous, and most important, the conception and execution are first-rate. 

This is the kind of neighborhood cafe everybody wishes was in their own neighborhood – and if you are in the area any time, this is a bargain stop that ranks up there with some of the most expensive restaurants in the Bay Area. But they don't take reservations (although they do take credit cards), so try to hit them on a weekday, or get there early before the crowds hit. Since the menu is the same for both lunch and dinner, pick the time you think you can get a seat without a long wait.

Two people, lunch: one entrée soup, one sandwich (with a free cup of soup), two beverages, with tip was $33.