Mustards
7399 St. Helena Hwy, Napa, CA
http://www.mustardsgrill.com/menus/main 
Review date: November 2011

Cindy Pawclyn, who currently owns and runs Mustards Grill, Go Fish, and Cindy’s Backstreet Kitchen, left San Francisco two decades ago, selling off her interest in Fog City Diner. She has also been involved with Tra Vigne, Buckeye Roadhouse, and Cindy's Backstreet Diner, but wanted to concentrate on a Napa-based mini-empire.

Mustards is the most famous, an updated 'roadside diner' concept. Despite it being a good-sized restaurant and a mid-week lunch, the place filled up within half an hour and there were people waiting outside who hadn't made reservations.

Why people do this, I have no idea. It boggles my mind that people make plans to come to a major tourist destination that is one of the most expensive in the world….but they can't plan when to have the one meal of the day that almost everyone has at the exact same time. I mean, c'mon, you can always cancel a reservation if you don't want to use it, but why wait 45 minutes if you don't have to?

I don't remember Fog City Diner in SF with the same fondness I had for Joyce Goldstein's Square One. It wasn't a bad place, but it was more standard meat-and-potatoes instead of inspired creativity. Goldstein was the Bay Area's pioneer in lighter, clean-tasting, high-quality Mediterranean cuisine, almost single-handedly wresting us away from thinking that Italian restaurant food meant doughy raviolis and fat heavy pizzas dripping with cheap pepperoni glued down with a thick layer of melted commercial mozzarella. 

Square One was the first restaurant to introduce thin-crust, artisanal individual pizzas. I had never had such a wonderful, stunningly simple pizza. Despite the fact her restaurant was a good hike from my office as well as three times the cost of a cheap pizza  slice downtown, I'd go to Square One at least once a month for lunch. 

Pawclyn was always more a diner-style chef, liking the hearty and occasionally showy. There's nothing wrong with that, of course, as long as the ingredients are good and the execution is too.

Unfortunately.....that's the issue with Mustards. It's almost there, very close, but they go a little too far overboard. I bring up Goldstein for a reason, because Mustards could use a good dose of her restraint.

I started with the three-lettuce bleu cheese salad. This was by far the highlight of the meal. The greens were baby endive, butter lettuce, and baby arugula, and they were so fresh they must have been picked literally just hours previous. They had a sweet clean flavor that would have been wonderful with any kind of dressing, but the Maytag bleu cheese dressing was superb. Sprinkled with chopped pistachios and a good amount of crumbled bleu cheese, there was no additional salt added to the dressing and the rich flavor of the cheese really highlighted the greens. Even Carlos was impressed with this salad.

The entrees, though, showed a heavy-handedness that just didn't please us. Mustards is famed for their Mongolian pork chop, which Carlos asked the waiter to explain since Mongolia has no pigs. The name comes from the glaze, which is riffed off the Chinese Mongolian lamb with hoisin and black bean sauce. The sides were sweet-sour red cabbage and mashed potatoes with onion, along with a mustard sauce.

Unfortunately it didn't occur to us to request the pork chop medium-rare, and in a tourist area this is not going to work. The chop came medium, making it a bit dry. At home I always brine pork chops (using a low-salt brine), because the meat is so lean nowadays. So Carlos is accustomed to pork that is juicier than what one gets when the chop is cooked to the medium stage. 

This would have been fine if the kitchen had continued with the glaze concept and made a similar/complementary sauce. But using a heavy mustard cream sauce negated everything – Carlos complained it was all he could taste, and since the chop was lying in a pool of sauce, scraping it away only helped a little.

This was a shame, because the mashed potatoes were excellent. The onion puree was only a modest amount and lightened the texture of the potatoes nicely. The cabbage was outstanding. The sweet and sour was based on soy sauce, an inventive idea that worked beautifully. He likes red cabbage anyway, and said this was the best version of pickled red cabbage he'd ever had.

I ordered the smoked duck legs, which was a mistake on a couple of counts. First, it was a lot larger than I thought it was going to be – the legs were good-sized and included about half the thigh meat, boned out. Second, somebody thought the saltiness of the smoked duck would be enhanced by tossing some beautiful braised Swiss chard with an extraordinarily salty, thick sauce of butter, garlic and soy sauce. By contrast, the grilled slices of sweet potato weren't seasoned at all and were also barely sweet, a relief to the palate on all counts. 

The duck was lovely, but that sauce on the chard was far too heavy-handed and essentially ruined a potentially good dish. Great ingredients, good concept, but if the execution was accurate then someone needs to have their salt-shaker taken away from them immediately.

We mentioned the salt and the mustard sauce to the waiter when he brought the bill. The manager came over a few minutes later to discuss our comments, and offered to modify the bill. We thanked him but said we didn't need the bill discounted, so in return he gave us a copy of the Mustards cookbook, a nice gesture.

The problem, we think, is that really fine ingredients need simplicity, not the proverbial kitchen sink. The salad, for instance, stood above many others we've had by the sheer superiority of freshness that shone through, combined with a few other ingredients that contrasted just enough but didn't overwhelm. There was a lot of dressing, but it didn't taste like too much dressing, a sin I'm quick to complain about. This would only work with really perfect lettuces – any commercial mix, no matter how 'fresh', couldn't compete. The leaves were coated with dressing, I took my time eating the salad, yet the greens never got limp, even at the very end. 

This wasn't a cheap lunch, especially in light of our subsequent dinner at Oenotri in downtown Napa. 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.

Two people: one starter, two entrees, two beverages, with tip $93.