February 19, 2014
The Grill @Meadowood Resort
900 Meadowood Lane, St. Helena, CA
http://www.meadowood.com/dining/the-grill (scroll all the way down!)
Review date: February 2014

As most foodies know, there are two Northern California restaurants that hold the coveted three stars from Michelin. They are not in SF, but in Napa: Thomas Keller's The French Laundry and Christopher Kostow's Meadowood Resort. Keller is a household name, whereas Kostow is scarcely that (at least, not yet). Keller has five restaurants and four bakeries in four U.S. cities, along with a line of olive oil and a new line of china. Kostow has the one restaurant and seems happy with it, although it is usually a "second choice" when one can't get a reservation for Keller's TFL.

Almost completely overshadowed is The Grill, Meadowood's breakfast/lunch/dinner "casual" restaurant. The Executive Chef is Victoria Gusman, also virtually unknown. I have never seen an article on her and even Googling doesn't pull anything up. 

Meadowood is an upscale resort and getting in requires a drive over narrow winding roads along with checking in at a guard's booth. The Grill is smaller, more relaxed although still white-tablecloth territory, and offers a full menu, unlike The Restaurant which offers only two tasting menus per night. Some people love this little restaurant...and some don't. But Meadowood's The Grill is a bargain only when compared to The Restaurant. No matter where you're dining in the Napa Valley, this is check-your-wallet, bring-your-largest-credit-line-chargecard territory. 

At The Restaurant, the "regular" tasting menu is $225/pp, with a "Chef's Counter" expanded menu at a mere $500/pp. One of the major criticisms of it, despite those Michelin stars, is that the food is overly precious and excessively "cute", the very idea of which offends Carlos on so many levels there's no chance I'll ever get him to agree to go. 

At The Grill, it's a mere $85 for four courses, and they're generously sized plates. So it was easy to pick the "casual" restaurant, albeit finding it in the dark took asking two staffpersons along the way. We certainly never saw anything so vulgar as signage, even on the door.

Everybody says The Grill is prettiest in the daytime, which is similar to Brix and Auberge in that aspect. At night there's nothing to see, and the awkward semi-circular layout indoors that's just a little too cramped, lacks any discernible charm, unlike the two competitors listed above (and a whole host of others). It's surprising Meadowood hasn't done a better job laying out The Grill, although they probably feel they deserve a rest after completely reworking The Restaurant's entire kitchen plus the catering kitchen in 2012.

On the good side, the service is very good and everybody's happy to see you, one of the great charms of visiting Napa in the off-season. They even have time to chat, which they often can't spare in high season. 

Unlike many restaurants, although the menu on the web was 95% accurate, the one given us in the restaurant was a bit larger, with one or two dishes added to each category. So be aware that if you're checking on-line to compare menus between restaurants, The Grill at Meadowood may be offering more choices than what you see on the website.

I wanted to order a four-course. Carlos was going to order a three-course, but the waiter successfully upsold him on a four-course as well. It's usually not difficult to get us to agree, LOL. Meadowood has expanded its gardens, but the drought has curtailed some of the more ambitious plans Kostow had. Still, as with many upscale restaurants these days, there's a good percentage of house-grown produce on the menu, whether you're dining at The Restaurant or The Grill.

I began with the house-grown fingerling potatoes with chive crème fraiche and california white sturgeon caviar. Although tasty, it wasn't that interesting a preparation: merely boiled and sliced potatoes topped with rather salty white sturgeon caviar with dabs of a chive crème fraiche on the plate. Good, but not even close to the sublime 62º poached egg with caviar, melted leeks, and blini that Etoile@Domaine Chandon produced for us last year in Yountville. 

Carlos won this round hands-down, with an amazing turnip soup with macadamia nuts and vegetable broth. Neither of us is fond of turnips, but these house-grown baby root veggies were phenomenal cooked in a rich vegetable broth and puréed with macadamia nuts. No cream was added or needed – macadamia nuts are extremely high in oil – and the subtle flavor of the nuts was perfect with the turnips, which had no trace of bitterness at all. A brilliant, creative surprise: exactly what one looks for when dining out.

His next course dipped down into the pedestrian: California squid with meyer lemon, meadowood garden dill, and a harissa aioli. What he received was a generous amount of plain battered-and-fried baby calamari rings. The greaseless rice flour coating was crisp and lovely, the aioli excellent, but in the end it was just deep-fried squid. After that amazing soup he had been expecting something a lot more creative, and told the waiter frankly he was disappointed in the ordinariness of the dish. It didn't help that he's anti-aioli, and preferred asking for more lemons to squeeze over the squid.

I won this round with the asparagus flatbread with smoked bacon, rhubarb, crescenza cheese (a soft mild cow's milk cheese with a very low melting point), and chopped parsley. We are not big fans of flatbreads, but we both agreed this was as fine a creation as the turnip soup. The bacon was in just the right quantity to add a perfumed smokiness and kiss of salt to the melted cheese, which had been lightly sprinkled with chopped parsley leaves. The flatbread was topped with thin ribbon-like shreds of uncooked, unsugared rhubarb; then with chopped pencil-thin asparagus.

The rhubarb was a brilliant touch. It added a wonderful tartness without any acidity. It brought all the flavors together and lifted this into the "I would like to have one of these every week" category.

Next were our main courses. Carlos chose the Pacific Black Cod, one of his favorite fishes. The fact that it came with melted leeks was a bonus, as his attitude towards leeks and butter can best be described as highly covetous. There were also fingerling potatoes and a sauce described as "little neck clam nage" (pronounced nahj). The nage combined with the leeks and butter very well, and Carlos pushed the potatoes aside when he discovered that Meadowood's excellent French bread was a far better starch to mop up the sauce with. He's a bread and pasta person; potatoes are dead last on his starch list unless jazzed up in a gratin or smashed up with butter.

Oh, and the cod – beautifully cooked, utterly fresh. I found it the tiniest bit salty, however; not ocean salt, but a "too big pinch" of salt.

I picked the Maple Leaf Farms Muscovy duck breast, which was tender but with a crisp (and too salty) skin. The mascarpone polenta wasn't overly rich, and as it had almost no salt, helped ameliorate the salty duck skin. The maitakes were roasted, also without salt, and a cranberry duck au jus, again unsalted, finished the plate nicely. I would have preferred less salt on the duck skin and a little of it into the au jus, as the lack of salt made it somewhat flat tasting, not bringing out either the fruit of the cranberry nor the flavor of the duck stock. Still, this was a nicely done plate, if not much different than a number of other restaurants have produced for us. 

It's worth mentioning again the serving sizes here are generous; the cod was especially so, two big squares instead of the usual single piece.

We ended with dessert but halfway through we switched plates, as each of us liked the other choice better. I began with the Lemon Sponge Cake with candied kumquats, lemon meringue, and kumquat sorbet. This was a boring (to me) sponge cake rolled jelly-roll style with an even more boring lemon cream filling that wasn't creamy or very lemony. The meringue was in small little kisses. But the kumquat sorbet was superb, almost single-handedly redeeming the plate. It was tart but just enough sugar to take off the edge, yet it didn't taste sweet. Carlos, who loves the sponge cake rolls that all Chinese bakeries sell, was happy to take this off my hands.

I ended up with his Chocolate Mousse, accompanied by a hazelnut caramel sauce, praline candy/chocolate bar, and a ball of shaved chocolate. The mousse was formed in a rectangle, with a praline candy bottom and topped with a thin dark chocolate bar. The caramel sauce was flavored with noisette, a hazelnut liqueur (Frangelico is the most recognizable brand, but there are many). The shaved chocolate added yet a third chocolate flavor. Eating everything together created an interesting layering of different chocolate varietal flavors. Still, it was more a chemistry experiment than a dessert one would want to repeat often – but at least it was a successful one, which many are not!

Both of us had coffee: Carlos regular coffee, decaf for me. Again, the coffee was fresh and very good. I have no idea why the coffee was so spectacularly bad almost everywhere on our 2011 trip, but Napa has redeemed itself on our last two visits.

Summary: We can't say that The Grill @Meadowood is a "must do" when in Napa. It's very good, and we really enjoyed our dinner. But the dining room can only be charitably described as nondescript, and nights are just not worth the schlep out here when there's nothing to see out the windows except your own reflection. 

OTOH, with the decline of Brix, we think lunch here would be worth trying – and it would certainly be easier driving through that really narrow old bridge in the daytime!

After disappointing meals at Solbar (but we shouldn't have chosen the Lucky Pig entrée; the starters were fine), Market, and Brix, The Grill restored our faith in Napa Valley dining. Much as we love certain restaurants here, there's little for us to do since we don't drink wine (well, I occasionally do but I'm driving 99% of the time). We spend most of our time planning to avoid crowds, which isn't that easy even in the off-season. Sonoma County is so big it's a lot easier to avoid crowds even in summer, and I find the roads a lot prettier to explore. 

Still, much as we love Sonoma County and Monterey, Napa is the easiest for us to reach…so next time, we'll plan on staying an extra night so we can have dinner at Etoile, which so far was our hands-down favorite from our last trip in 2013.

Two people, dinner: two four-course dinners, with tip $203.