Michael Warring
8300 Bennington Court, Vallejo, CA
Phone for reservations: 707.655.4808. Reservations are taken Wednesday - Sunday from 10 am to 4 pm; dinners served on the hour starting @5:30p
Menus change daily: http://www.michaelwarring.com/#pages/menus/food
Review date: February 6, 2015

In an area where it's de rigueur to be able to list, off the top of one's head and without prompting, at least a dozen chefs by name without having to necessarily reference their restaurants, Michael Warring is perhaps the least-known, least-reviewed Modernist chef around. 

Vallejo? Who the heck eats a Modernist tasting menu in Vallejo?

Like most people I have a love/hate affair with popular review sites like Yelp and Chowhound. Chowhound is especially protective of their populist favs, such as Redd, Ad Hoc and Bistro Jeanty in Yountville. They sniff at Yank Sing "unless you must eat in downtown SF", preferring Koi Palace "where the Chinese eat." They engage in endless discussions of "is Saison better than Coi or Benu or Atelier Crenn or Manresa? Anything except French Laundry, please!"

Still, both have their uses. Without them, I doubt Michael Warring would have managed to remain in existence. The restaurant is right off the freeway on the way to Napa, but it's in a golfing community called Hiddenbrooke, where you go through a guard station (not manned, but camera-secured) and end up in a medium-sized upscale middle-class development. Set in a vale amidst (currently) green hills, it's clear there's nothing else around it but protected space.

To say there is no foot traffic – let alone a signboard – is understating the case. When you go to the website, write down his directions. Otherwise, your GPS may do what ours did, which is to send us on an endless loop of Bennington Drive, which curves in a horseshoe-shape but never connects with Bennington Ct.

In a tiny commercial plaza, at the first right past the guardbox, are four or five mini-stores. One is an Ace Hardware, one is a convenience store that sells lottery tickets. Opposite is a simple, small, glass-walled space that was once an ice cream shop. 

You will not see a big sign anywhere announcing this is now a restaurant. Warring's name is stenciled in a simple font on the glass door, nothing more. It has tastefully been remodeled by Warring and his SO Ali into a lovely, peaceful, almost Zen-like dining room. Shaped in a half-circle, the tables flank an open kitchen with a counter that doubles the seating to a modest 22 seats or so.

The most thorough review of Warring is the only professional one I could find, from Harvey Steiman of Robert Parker's Wine Spectator, back in 2013: http://www.winespectator.com/blogs/show/id/48933. 

The tasting menu has grown to six courses, with a modest price increase to $69/pp. Wine pairings are $33 or you can do a beer pairing for $21. Seatings are taken for 5:30, 6:30, 7:30 and 8:30 p.m., Wed-Sun. A credit card is required to hold your reservation.

Warring grew up in nearby Benicia, and received his culinary training at the Culinary Institute of America in New York. He's worked at restaurants such as Auberge du Soleil in Napa Valley and Bouchon Beverly Hills, but was anxious to strike out on his own. 

As we were pretty much the only customers at 5:30 p.m., we had the chance to talk to him for a few minutes. He's been open for three years, and says he just signed an extension for another three years. The rent is modest, not surprisingly, and it's nice to hear he's doing well enough to be confident about the future.

The menu changes daily; sometimes quite a bit, sometimes just a little – there was significant difference between the Wednesday menu and Thursday menu, but not so much between Thursday's and Friday's. Ali serves the food and wine with enthusiasm and charm, and we agree with Mr. Steiman – you really do feel like you're in someone's home.

Our menu for February 6, 2015 was as follows:

Fermented Asian pear: puffed sushi rice, wood sorrel, pear yeast, mesquite
I'm not a fan of Modernist and neither is Carlos. Still, the whole 'mesquite smoke in a glass canning jar' had an actual presence here. The pear purée was sweet without any depth, but the sorrel micro-greens were in sufficient quantity to give a nice lemony flavor, and the smoke was intense enough to flavor both. The few puffs were a nice crunch. 

Hamachi: Fuji apple, black kale micro-greens, Meyer lemon curd
This one didn't rate high with us. The hamachi was fresh but not that flavorful (it's Carlos' favorite sashimi choice), although I liked the tiny sprinkle of Meyer lemon zest on each slice. It was three good-sized slices; I gave one of mine to Carlos as I'm not overly fond of sashimi. But the big spoonful of Meyer lemon curd was exactly like a dessert tart filling. The flavors of sweet citrus curd and raw fish did nothing for one another. Neither of us could understand what was the point of this combination. The black kale micros are beautiful, though: black on top with a red underleaf. 

Agnolotti: polenta, hens yolk, black truffle, dashi
This was a lovely dish. The pasta was filled with polenta, and both were properly salted – just enough to flavor, not overwhelm. The dashi was high-quality but in very limited amount as it was intended as a sauce flavoring, not a soup broth. The yolk was thick when broken; it had either been sous-vided or cured (my betting is on the latter). A generous amount of finely shredded black truffle sat on top of each bowl. Although we are not big truffle fans, there are some dishes I think work well with them, and this was one of them.

Muscovy duck: hedgehog mushroom, Russian kale, duck sauce
All through this trip we had some issues with over-salting. Both Carlos and I found the duck tasty but salty. The shredded duck meat was from a confit, rinsed but still with a slight saltiness. Pressed into a loaf pan and cut into shallow slices, the thinnest of crispy duck skin held the meat together. It was unnecessary to salt the slices – I picked out several very large crystals of sea salt. The duck sauce wasn't salted at all, but had been stiffened into a paste. A little more of it would have smoothed out the excess salt.

The kale and radishes were just a small tasty garnish, but the hedgehog mushrooms had real presence. Simmered with white wine, they were a lovely taste combination with the duck. This was a small plate, but came very close to five stars.

Cheese cart. 
We were wondering if we were going to go away hungry until we started working on the cheese. A lovely cheeseboard held a thick slice of perfect Texas toast from a light pan de mie, with three cheeses. One was half a small round of a semi-hard Spanish goat cheese, whose name we didn't get but that was absolutely luscious. Another was the Hook 10-year aged orange cheddar from Wisconsin. The third was the delightfully named "Barely Buzzed" from Beehive Cheese in Uintah UT, because it's rolled in crushed coffee beans (https://www.beehivecheese.com/cheese), which are sourced from the cheesemaker's brother, who is in the coffee roasting business.

For each cheeseboard, Michael came out to squeeze little soft dots of the Hook cheddar melted in Bechamel sauce and enlivened with jalapenos. Then he spooned out some red wine/balsamic onion jam. Unlike many of these which are one-dimensionally sweet, he used a regular balsamic which gave a nice sweet-sour tang that went well with all three cheeses. 

The cheese plate more than filled us up; in fact I ended up taking half my goat cheese home, where it melted deliciously on toast. Unlike many European chevres, this was a surprisingly mild goat cheese, even though it had the traditional mold crust on it. I especially enjoyed trying the Hook, which I've heard about for a long time. It's a terrific melted cheese, with a deeper flavor undertone that cheddars usually lack.

Brown butter chiffon cake: marshmallow fluff, nitro anglaise, vanilla bean ice cream, coffee cardamom soil
Neither of us were too thrilled by the chiffon cake – I'm more an angel cake fan, and Carlos finds the firm-yet-bouncy texture of both types of cake a little strange. But the yummy flavor of brown butter was there, skillfully accented with a salty caramel sauce and the "soil" of crunchy cardamon coffee beans.

The nitro anglaise was one of the few Modernist techniques I enjoy. Unlike freeze-drying where the moisture is removed, nitrogen freezing is so fast that you can break a sauce into dry-looking lumps, but the moment they hit moisture; e.g., your tongue, they melt back into a sauce. It was lovely with the other ingredients, a deft interplay of tastes and textures. I did leave the marshmallow fluff, which was a decorative torched brown smear across one end of the plate; it was too sweet for me. 

Mignardises
In what's become the usual final finish of an additional sweet after a tasting menu, Ali brought two La Foret chocolates. We're familiar with La Foret, who supplies The French Laundry and other restaurants with their chocolates – in fact, going to La Foret was how we first found the pleasant Browns Valley Market just west of Napa's downtown. Her chocolates are very high quality and distinctive: they are salty with an extremely short finish. These were pistachio nougat enrobed in bittersweet, a nice ending to a very good meal.

We both drank iced tea during the meal. Ali made it fresh, a nice touch and emblematic of this just-like-home endeavor. Carlos had coffee with dessert, which was very good.

We have to say that other reviewers seem to have gotten more interesting menus from Michael Warring than we did. This is the curse of the daily tasting menu, of course. Make a reservation on a specific day, but it's taking the chance that you may or may not like the menu when it comes. 

Our first two courses were pretty much a loss overall – interesting but gimmicky. But the last four courses were excellent, well above average and a stunning bargain for the price. The food is beautifully presented, high quality, and creative. 

Is it perfect? No. We'd skip it for La Folie or Auberge in a heartbeat. But both La Folie and Auberge cost noticeably more. And good as their service staff are, Michael Warring has the ineffable charm of that personal touch. He and Ali are all the staff there is, and they care very much that their customers are enjoying their meal.

Despite its emptiness when we were there (one other couple came in at 6:30 p.m.), they said it fills up quickly for the 7:30 and 8:30 p.m. slots.

When you consider this restaurant is conveniently located halfway between Napa and Oakland/Berkeley, it makes a compelling argument for scheduling a dinner here on the way home from a day or two of wine-tasting. 

Although tasting menus are not, and never will be, our favorite way to dine, it's been a generally good experience and makes comparisons an exercise in balancing 'apples vs oranges.' 

I enjoyed Michael Warring more than I enjoyed Commis/Oakland, if only because I loathed Commis' pretentious and intrusive service. But in style of cuisine Warring more closely resembles Aubergine/Carmel, if one can imagine Aubergine's executive chef Justin Cogley starting his own tiny restaurant with a single helper instead of a staff of four dozen people. 

I asked Carlos which would he prefer, in comparing the two (Aubergine was the first restaurant where he said he finally "got" what a tasting menu was all about). 

He replied that although Aubergine's food is more complex, as befits a Relais & Chateau property, he enjoyed the casual and "personal home" feeling of Michael Warring so much, he'd come back here first. He said with the loss of Etoile @Domaine Chandon, Warring's food, service and atmosphere rank almost equal to our current Napa first choice, Auberge du Soleil. 

There are a lot of restaurants in the Napa Valley. A fair number of them are good places to eat. But none of them offer a Modernist 6-course tasting menu for $69. This is a stunning bargain, and something almost unique in the Bay Area.

With beverages and tax it came to $159.68 for the two of us. We threw in an extra-large tip for a total of $200.