Back in the Northern California Wine Country

Napa and Sonoma counties, the northern California wine country, is an area that we come back to again and again. The first time Dan and I visited here as a couple was in 1989, we spent part of our honeymoon in Napa and have been here several times since, the last time in fall of 2007. So we were eager to come back to "our" Doubletree hotel in Rohnert Park, Sonoma county, and find some wineries and restaurants new to us.

I used Open Table to find dinner reservations for the four nights we are here; it is unbelievably easy to see open times for restaurants you are considering as well as the dress code (if any), type of food and links to the menus. Then if you find what you want, one click gets you that reservation....

We left Palmdale about 11:00 this morning and drove up the 5, not a scenic route, but pretty fast; we had a 5:45 reservation at Bouchon, Thomas Keller's more relaxed restaurant (compared to his flagship French Laundry). Since he has consistently ranked among America's top chefs, I definitely wanted to eat at one of his restaurants.

We made great time, about 6 hours portal to portal, so were about 1/2 hour early for dinner. We wandered around Washington Street in Yountville, looking to see what had changed since we had been here last and taking a sneak peak at the menu posted outside Bistro Jeanty, right down the street from Bouchon, where we are eating dinner tomorrow night.

The beautiful flowers are in front of the Villagio, which is a huge complex of buildings on Washington Street -- I'm not sure if it is a hotel or condominiums.....

...but the grounds are beautiful! Love the combo of bright yellow and orange tulips with the blue and white to cool down the color scheme a bit....

Back to dinner: We started with bibb and butter lettuce salads with a vinaigrette dressing, the leaves piled artistically on the plate rather than being torn up and tossed. Then Dan had a sirloin steak and I had arctic char, which I had heard was a lot like salmon but had never tried, garnished with lobster pieces, leeks and other yummy things. For dessert, Dan went with the two kinds of sorbet, strawberry and mango, while I went straight for the calorie bomb: petite brownies with vanilla ice cream, chocolate sauce, a foam that tasted like whipped cream but lighter, and some sort of coffee ingredient.

Yes, we bought the cookbook!

It's about an hour drive from the restaurant to our hotel and the sky was spectacular with an interesting cloud formation that seemed to split the sky in two. Earlier there were sunset colors mixed in with this formation, but I just couldn't seem to get a picture!

We have several wineries and a quilt shop in Napa that we are planning to visit tomorrow (as well as another great dinner); on Tuesday, we'll most likely concentrate on Sonoma and then the Healdsburg area on Wednesday. We're pretty flexible, so we'll see....you know, the best laid plans of mice and men and all that......