Madrona Manor (dinner)
1001 Westside Rd., Healdsburg
www.madronamanor.com
Review date:  May 2010

Madrona Manor is a compound of elaborate Victorian buildings forming a luxury B&B. As we couldn't get into Cyrus, this was our choice for the 'name' restaurant in this area. I've been to Cyrus - it's probably my family's favorite restaurant - but Carlos hasn't tried it yet so it remains on our list of places to try when available.
Carlos picked seven of the ala carte items. I had the tasting menu. I'll cover each as best I can, separately.
Carlos' selections were:
l Scallop Sashimi: uni, cabbage flower, Meyer lemon, fresh wasabi
This was okay, but neither of us is thrilled with scallops as sashimi. Shrimp, lobster, oysters, any fish is fine raw, but scallops we prefer cooked. It's probably just us.
l Lobster "Cuit Sous Vide": carrot, fennel, fava, coriander
Very delicate, with an equally subtle sauce. Carlos had a hard time tasting anything particular in the sauce; it was almost too subtle for him.
l Potato Gnocchi: peas, mint, pistachios, creme fraiche
This was a little odd. The gnocchi were large and had a slightly gluey texture, as though they had beaten the potatoes with a Hobart mixer instead of ricing them. Carlos did not like the pistachios in the sauce.
l Spotted Skate Wing: hearts of palm, Meyer lemon, asparagus, brown butter
Lovely piece of fish! Two long shavings of asparagus were delicious in the lemon-butter sauce. Hearts of palm don't thrill either of us.
l Northern Halibut: peas, ramps, pancetta, aioli
Halibut was as good as the skate - crisply browned in a skillful sear/roasting yet still moist. Again, the sauce ended up being very, very delicate. There were three dabs of balsamic vinegar on the plate, so tiny it was difficult to taste it or mix it into the lovely aioli - so why even bother putting it there?
l Veal Tenderloin: green garlic soubise, parsley root, pea leaves, maitake
A beautiful piece of meat with adequate but not exciting accompaniments. Stunningly tender, juicy, and actually much better than the strip loin in my tasting menu.
l Pistachio souffle with candied pistachios and chocolate sauce
Loved the size (small) but sadly, even nuts as good as pistachios just don't make a great souffle. 
My tasting menu consisted of:
l Kindai Toro Crudo: enoki, shiso, ponzu, mountain potato
A great piece of sashimi (and I'm not a sashimi fan, normally). Loved the ponzu, loathed the too-cute miniature dice of raw mountain potato as it added nothing but a starchy crunch.
l Onion Veloute: banyuls vinegar, coddled egg, Parmigiano-Reggiano foam
Basically a white onion soup. It was marvelous, served so hot when I broke the egg it cooked the yolk in nice streams as I stirred it in. This was the first use of foam I've approved of - it allowed the cheese to emulsify nicely through the soup, giving it the taste of cheese without overpowering the other elements.
l King Salmon: shiitake mushrooms, carrot, foie
Another lovely example that the kitchen can produce beautiful, creative dishes when they stop trying to be overly cute. Small sweet shiitakes cushioned a lovely sous vide piece of salmon, with a really amazing carrot and foie gras pureed sauce over it.
l Liberty Farms duck: roasted breast and crispy confit, rhubarb, fiddlehead fern, spring onion
The breast meat was lovely, but the confit was a round about the size of my thumbnail and no more than 1/2" tall. Where was the rest of it? The fiddleheads were strangely pickled while the rhubarb and spring onion were pureed into stiff pasty curls.
l Grilled Prime Striploin: hassleback potato, estate chard, buttered radish, red wine essence:
Oddly, this steak was tougher and less flavorful than the $10 steak sandwich we had in Mendocino at Ft. Bragg Steakhouse. Go figure! The potato was a sauteed slice, utterly plain. The chard was sour with vinegar. Radishes are just...radishes, cooked or not. The sauce was lovely, though. Carlos got his veal the same time I got my beef, and there was no comparison, his veal was vastly superior to my beef.
l Cheese course: This was the best of all. Madrona was very nice about letting us split my cheese course between the two of us, BTW, at no extra charge.
l Tropical composition: banana, pineapple, coconut
This was a banana tart with a candied fresh banana slice; two small pieces of pineapple that had been macerated in something but still tasted just like plain pineapple with alternating dabs of creme fraiche; and lastly the one good dessert - a fresh coconut ice that you sipped - a fabulous coconut smoothie, truly yummy.
We also received quite a few amuse-bouches, more so than usual:
l Radish quarters with salt and butter, and parmesan deep fried puffs: The radishes were actually quite good this way, noticeably sweeter than others I've tried. The parmesan puffs were cute and tasty, if nothing remarkable.
l Pea vichyssoise and a mini-ravioli stuffed with ricotta and served with brown butter: Carlos doesn't normally like cold soups or peas, but he admitted this was extremely good. The mini-ravioli was okay; he adored the straight drowned-in-butter sauce although I find such sauces boring.
l Compressed mango (guess squeezing the fruit is all the thing these days - can't they just macerate it like normal people?): extremely tiny dice of what tasted like plain mango with cilantro on it. Very strange and no point to it, unless it was to say, Look at how many courses you actually get for your money!
l Tangerine and late harvest Viognier granité: Good but sweet. A proper granité served between courses should be refreshing, not identical to a dessert.
l Vanilla creme brulee: Tiny little individual creme brulees, with really good vanilla. Delicious, but even Lalime's/Berkeley has offered more interesting desserts than this tired warhorse. Aziza's pastry chef Melissa Chou wipes this place off the map.
l Meringues, cookies, salted caramels, chocolate ganache squares; all tiny and just too precious for words. Loathe meringue, salted caramels can be found everywhere, although the chocolate was good. How could it not be, in the Bay Area? Again, looks pretty and overwhelms with quantity, but is really superfluous to a fine dining experience.
You can no doubt tell that we weren't really impressed with Madrona Manor. It has definite skill and magnificent ingredients, of that there is no doubt. But the vision in the kitchen is clouded with pretentious flourishes and unnecessary additions that take away the true soul, the love of good food that a great meal should have. The service is attentive, expert, and friendly...but there are so many people in each of the small dining rooms, they are literally tripping over one another, especially trying to maneuver specialty carts over to a table.
Ah yes, the carts. Remember that I've been eating in good restaurants for some forty years, and Carlos went through hotel & restaurant training with emphasis on the front of the house. If you don't often eat out, or have only eaten in the bistros in the last decade or so, you might find it impressive to have a cart come out to prepare coffee for you. First they tout the specialty beans they use. Then they use a hand-grinder. Then they let you sniff the ground beans. Then they use a French press and promise to come back to pour when it's ready.
Then they forget about you, while the dessert stares you in the face, daring you to eat it without the revivifying bitterness of coffee to contrast with it. And you wait. 
And wait some more. And then you notice the coffee cart come out for another table, and the server remembers to come back in 2 minutes to pour the coffee. Then you realize, aha, you have inadvertently caused select amnesia to occur in said server, and so you press your coffee yourself and pour it out. It's strong (after having sat around for 8 minutes, it should be - which is fine and how we like it anyway) but in the end, it's just a nice strong cup of French roasted beans, an average experience for any Peet's, Blue Bottle, or Flying Goat devotee.
The most popular dessert at Madrona is the tableside ice cream sundae, which in itself tells you something. A couple in our dining room chose it, and the waiter banged the cart through the room, then went into the whole song-and-dance routine of how he was going to beat the custard mix as the nitrogen froze it, yadda yadda yadda. 
Like Aqua under Laurent Manrique, all of this is show around ordinary, relatively uninteresting things. To make a huge production of making coffee or ice cream is something you do for dumb tourists who drink Folger's instant and buy Breyer's ice cream. When you eat at a really fine restaurant where the front of the house is valued and given as much authority as the chef, the service is more than attentive and friendly. It is professional, inobtrusive, smooth and relaxing. The busboy does not keep dropping silverware, the staff doesn't jostle one another in the doorways, the carts do not keep bumping into the tables because they can’t easily negotiate the aisles, and those who have responsibility for special items do not forget who's supposed to get what even if there are separate dining rooms.
The portions are very, very tiny. This is not a problem when one is having multiple courses, but at Madrona they are so small as to qualify as miniscule, with too many separate little things cluttering the plate, all unconnected with one another. On some of the tiny portions there was a slight excess of salt, because it's all too easy to oversalt something the size of your fingernail clippings. All the desserts were too sweet, again more a Middle America leaning than the smooth elegance of a Michael Recchiuti truffle made in the Bay Area.
The comparison with Cyrus is inevitable. They are both in the same town and both expensive; both well-known names, hard to get a reservation. But Cyrus' Douglas Keane wants you to love his food as much as he does. The food at Cyrus shows a passion that is lacking in Madrona's contrived presentations. Madrona seems like a 1990's kitchen, when excess was where it's at, because 'too much is not enough'. It feels like they don’t really care, like a fancy name clothes designer who licenses his name onto polyester wear at Wal-Mart. 
Dinner, no wine, with tip was $271. The cost wasn’t the issue, but we felt cheated. This was not fine dining, nor was it fine service. It was all show and tell, without substance or soul.