Market Restaurant
1347 Main St., St. Helena, CA
http://www.marketsthelena.com/menus.html  
Review date: February 2014

This very popular restaurant resides smack in the middle of St. Helena's Main St. (which is otherwise Hwy 29). St. Helena has a small, genuinely historic downtown. The buildings in St. Helena are charmingly old-fashioned instead of Yountville's chic pastiche. But what was good for carriages is a nightmare with cars and tour buses. These days it's a shame that the freeway runs smack through it, rather than set a half-mile away as Yountville's main drag is set up. In high season, traffic here slows to a crawl when it's crowded with tourists, so the 25 mph limit isn't even close to being reached.

However, this was dinner on a Tuesday evening, well before high season. Driving in from Napa was easy; driving back to the hotel was even easier. Carlos and I made the choice to sit in one of the two window seats. The downside is that one is a bit out-of-the-way for the waitstaff; with the upside that it's noticeably less noisy than being seated in the back or opposite the bar.

Market specializes in updated comfort food, a category that is wide-ranging in California. There's not just fried chicken and fish 'n' chips, but also cornbread, Louie salad, and Dungeness crab cakes. 

Learning that the soup of the day was lobster bisque, Carlos immediately chose a bowl of it for his starter. I picked the crabcake, which was listed as coming with corn, pasilla peppers, and a coriander-lime butter. The lobster bisque tasted more like a gumbo than a French bisque. It was surprisingly spicy, and Carlos enjoyed it.

The crabcake was massive, far bigger than I expected – twice as large, in fact – and was served over Mexican-style corn with a sea of rich butter sauce. The crabcake had hardly any filler, and was formed into a large triangular log. It had been skillfully breadcrumbed and deep fried. If the butter sauce hadn't been so overwhelming, it would have been a great dish. Experiencing this, I regretted my entrée choice, but it was too late to change.

For my entrée I had chosen the porcini mushroom ravioli, which came with peas, baby carrots, pea shoots, and a white-wine-sage-butter sauce. Another massive plate arrived, with at least six very large ravioli. Fortunately the butter sauce was lighter than the one I received with the crabcake starter, but I still wished I had opted for something else.

The generous filling had the strong flavor of shiitake, Chinese black mushrooms, instead of porcini, and an excessive tanginess that just didn't match up well with the fungi. I'm not sure if it was from red wine or balsamic, but it overpowered the mushrooms and made the dish less than successful. I love Chinese black mushrooms, but I've never found they go especially well with wine or sour flavors. I gave one to Carlos, who grimaced and pronounced it "weird".

Carlos picked the Crab Louie, with a side order of the cheddar jalapeno cornbread. Although it looked like a more generous version of the Louie I enjoyed at Brasserie S&P/SF in December 2013, this was quite different from that pure, clean-flavored salad. Carlos said the crab had been heavily mixed with the housemade Thousand Island dressing, which as many of these do, suffered from an excess of raw chopped shallots. 

The crabmeat was formed into a high cone, which looked spectacular sitting on a bed of butter lettuce leaves with hard-boiled egg quarters encircling the plate, clock-style. But Carlos prefers his shellfish as unadorned as possible, so although he appreciated the sizable amount of crabmeat, he disliked the overwhelming taste of the dressing intruding upon its natural sweetness. He also really hated the pea shoots which had been mixed into the crabmeat, giving it a grassy taste. He rated this as good but flawed, and wouldn't be inclined to order it again.

I had also been thinking of ordering the cornbread, but when we received the plate I was glad I had forgotten to put in my own separate order. Unlike most restaurants which price cornbread by the piece, Market gives you three good-sized squares. Despite the Cheddar-jalapeno designation, however, the cornbread was neither cheese-y nor spicy. Nor was it sweetened at all, making it a Southern-style cornbread. They did bring us honey upon request, but Carlos admitted he prefers Northern-style sweet cornbread. We probably wouldn't bother ordering this again.

We skipped dessert; Carlos had a cup of coffee to finish.

We can understand Market's popularity. It's very similar to Mustards/Napa, Cindy Pawlcyn's flagship restaurant, where we ate on November 2011. Despite excellent quality ingredients, we didn't like Mustards and never went back. This was my summary of Mustards, and everything in it applies equally to Market Restaurant:

"… Mustards is famous for its large portions, and certainly all the dishes were good sized although thankfully not oversized. They came very close to being great, but the overall impression was one of overdone excess, not merely an occasional error. It's that one step over the line that you can't take back, and you need to have the discipline not to yield to the impulse in the first place." 

You'll receive a lot of good-quality food at Market, for what is a modest price in the Napa Valley. If you've got a group, you could feed them generously here with fewer dishes than almost anywhere else we've been. 

But despite that popularity, this isn't a great restaurant. It is a good restaurant, and we are thinking of returning to try the fried chicken and fish 'n' chips, two dishes we're always fond of. We would probably relegate Market for a lunch rather than dinner, however. There is just something about its conception and execution of dishes that fails to inspire us.

We would rank Market Restaurant higher than Mustards, Don Giovanni, Redd, or Oenotri. It is about even with Lucy@Bardessono Resort, but a lot less expensive. But it's well below some of the others we've tried up here: Etoile and Auberge, Ca'Momi and The Grill @Meadowood. 

All four of those are more expensive, however. They certainly don't give you as much food; we easily could have fed another person with what we had (I didn't finish either of my two dishes). As the saying goes, "you pay your money and you take your choice."

Two people, dinner: two starters, two mains, one side, one beverage, with tip was $103.