Napa Valley: Depressed Small Town America?

When I was growing up, our family literally took a trip every year to "the Boonies" - my grandparents lived in a ramshackle three-story home on the banks of the Missouri River in a town called, no joke, Boonville. It was a small town without a lot going on - there was a half-price theater showing only family-friendly fare, a five-and-dime store, a fabric shop that also sold cltohes, a pharmacy/ice cream shop, and at the end of the string of retail, the bridge over the river, which my brother and I would dare each other to walk out on for fun. Giant oak trees, many of them over a hundred, dominated the streets and yards. As the years went by, more and more of those mom-and-pop stores closed, and the town began feeling like a ghost of its former self. A few more years, and a huge flood wiped out a lot of the housing and retail.

Napa's downtown feels a little bit sad these days, with quickly-built condos and retail space sitting empty month after month, grand Copia sitting unused as its gardens, unmaintained, grow overrun with weeds. Right now the vines are still bare, and the spring has started showing up in scattered tulips in yards, a clump of daffodils here and there. The Mustard Festival went on last weekend, and we drove by the festivities without stopping, where a band played, a tiny few booths of restaurants and art exhibitors made the most of the sunny weather and plied their wares. We hoped it would help the frail local economy. It seems so incongruous that a place where the local resort hotels can charge upwards of $500 - and a facial at the local spa might cost $175 - that the locals might be struggling to keep their cupcake shops, their toy stores, or their bookstores open. The storefronts are plastered with "Everything On Sale!" signs. Where you can buy $150 bottles of wine at the grocery store, but most of the locals are clipping coupons and waiting for their milk or eggs to go on sale. Wealthy tourist numbers dwindle, and the impact is felt everywhere. Small towns, whether on the coast or in the midwest, feel the immediate pains of the recession sharply - maybe the margins aren't as good when there aren't as many people, maybe towns that have relied too heavily on one or two industries - a steel mill or the wine trade - are suffering disproportiately. I've become fond of Napa, though it seems steeped in a sad nostalgia for former glory.

Bottega - A Restaurant that Lives Up to the hype!

Yes, we finally ate - with a lunchtime reservation, no less - at a Napa Valley restaurant that actually lives up to its hype. The new-as-of-last-year Bottega, set in charming and starred-restaurant-full Yountville, had as splendid a repast as I have ever eaten. Bottega is a small restaurant in the middle of a large Inn setting and focuses, I believe, on mostly Northern Italian specialities. It was a lot of fun for husband G and I to dress up, as we hadn't been on a "date-date" in some time. We ate there at lunch because it's a tiny bit cheaper - and you can get away with not ordering wine and dessert without looking crazy. There were people dressed up in designer outfits and people in t-shirts and jeans. I was happy I'd worn a dress.
My husband G had a divine pasta dish topped with fresh ricotta and swimming in roasted rabbit and chanterelle mushrooms in a kind of red wine sauce. Really very good. However, my dish was so much better! It was perfect, perfect browned ricotta gnocchi with delicious juicy duck, roasted chestnuts and butternut squash. And the chef (Michael Chiarello) came up afterwards, not usual with a "celebrity chef" restaurant, and asked me how everything was, and I told him truthfully I'd just had the best gnocchi I'd ever eaten, and that includes trips to Italian restaurants in New York City and the south of France. The funniest part of the meal was that we were seated at a table between what appeared to be two aging blonde socialites discussing plastic surgery and what appeared to be a some sort of crime-syndicate couple (very Sopranos, but upscale!) So we spent a lot of time telling each other how delicious our food was, and also eavesdropping. And one of the socialites said to the other, "This place is expensive, but not expensive for Napa Valley!" Which I have to say, I agree with. My pasta was around $16 - and worth every freaking penny! Next time, though, I want to try the confit de canard with moutarda di fruitta. (I think I just mixed my French and very poor Italian spelling there.) I could only finish half of my pasta dish - I imagine I'll only be able to get through one quarter of an entree!
Here's a link to their dinner menu:
http://www.botteganapavalley.com/dinner.html
The service wasn't super attentive, except for a very friendly desk hostess and maitre-d - it was packed full when we were there, we couldn't get a drink refill, but maybe it's like that all the time? The waitress did know how to answer questions about the menu, and steered us accordingly to our delicious lunches, although she didn't visit us much during the lunch (see lack of drink refill opportunities.) Though it was cold outside (in the fifties) the restaurant was about a billion degrees - so dress accordingly!
Anyway, it gets two thumbs up from us! Finally, a place in Napa Valley that didn't make us long for (gulp) Seattle's dining scene!

California: Will It Drive Us Away?

So, you've probably heard that, for the last few years, California has had droves of people leaving. The two biggest problems my husband and I have had with the state, in the last fifteen months of living in Carlsbad and now in Napa, have been:
--gigantic taxes. Income taxes are high, sales taxes are high, even going to the DMV is expensive! And in return, you get crummy schools and crumbling roads. Good times.
--The health care here is abominable, compared to Ohio, Virginia, and Washington State. The ERs are overcrowded (not so much a problem here in Napa...) and the lack of primary care doctors looms large. The ER doc at Napa's Queen of the Valley hospital I saw when I sprained my ankle said it took him a long time to find a primary care doc who was even taking patients. The ones that are taking patients don't take insurance and require a $1500 payment up front before seeing you. It takes months to get routine tests, like an MRI, which might have taken me three days in the Seattle area. That's a problem throughout California; it must have to do with state laws and paperwork, because I had it at both ends of the state even when doctors agreed an MRI was neccessary.

But, on the good side: it is supposed to be 60 degrees here today, while the rest of the USA is in deep freeze. Even now that the leaves have fallen off the vineyards, the green hills surrounding us are still beautiful. There are still more good restaurants than you can shake a stick at (though many of them not, sadly, in our price range. Yesterday during a stroll through Yountville we were pressing our noses against the charming glass at French Laundry, where we will never eat because it is too expensive unless Thomas Keller offers to have us in for free because he likes us. It could happen, right?)

In Seattle it rains nine months a year. But you can see a doctor whenever you want! Plus, no income tax! See my struggle?

Napa at Christmastime

In case you were curious about Napa's weather around Christmas: no, we probably won't get any snow. It was up around 60, though a chilly wind was blowing, yesterday, and the next couple of days it'll be in the fifties and raining. Not so different from the Pacific Northwest where I spent ten years, actually - maybe a little less rain...

We went to Sonoma square yesterday and looked at all the quaint shops and restaurants. I promised my husband (a super cook) a Chrismtas present from Sign of the Bear, a wonderful kitchen shop in the square that has everything from $7 sour cherry jam to $300 ceramic dutch ovens. It also has a dozen kind of honey dippers, butter holders, tablecloths, a wall of fancy knives, holistic kitchen products in scents like lavender and coriander, strawberry hullers and grapefruit spoons...) We came out with some new gadgets for the husband and some new tea for me (a mix of lemon balm, white tea, and lavender...mmmmm.)

We had also gone shopping in the mostly deserted shopping center in downtown Napa, not a lot of shoppers around and not even a lot of filled store fronts. I'm wondering what Napa city can do to revive its downtown. Of course, Annie's Chocolates (where we procured many holiday treats for our families back in the midwest) was still hopping.

Cracked tooth - Napa dentist recommendations?

Dear readers,
I have a cracked tooth that needs a crown, but am having a hard time finding a dentist in Napa Valley that anyone has anything good to say about.
If you have dentist recommendations for anywhere in Napa (I'm willing to drive up to an hour) please leave them in the comments section. Much appreciated!

Shopping Local

So, we had a lovely quiet Thanksgiving, with a duck breast and a bit of confit from The Fatted Calf, a delicata squash stuffed with cranberries, cornbread stuffing, grilled endive. We baked a pumpkin pie and husband G made ginger-flavored whipped cream for it.
We've decided to shop local for our midwestern families this Christmas, so we ventured out on Saturday after a bit of a small windstorm, only to discover that half the town - including the Oxbow market, half the shops downtown, the large Walmart, and most of the grocery stores were out of power. Crazy! I felt bad for the retailers, because you know how many lost sales that amounted to - and they were apparently out of power from 10 in the morning til 4 in the afternoon. Not since I'd lived on Bainbridge Island near Seattle had I seen so much power outage from such little wind!
So we tried again on Sunday, and this time were more successful. We got olive-oil lip balms made in Napa from California olives for the girls in the family, and olive tapenade (same.) We got merlot-flavored chocolates, merlot and port chocolate sauce and beer-flavored brittles for the guys from Annie's. We could ship wine but Ohio's wine laws for shipping are quite complicated and do not make it easy to ship wine there. What else is Napa famous for? We'll have to think up some more things to put in that basket.

Also, I did find a little park with a paved little walkway for our daily walks, called The Oxbow Preserve. They are still in the process of making it a park, but it has potential - river views, a little sign, a stroll through some large oak trees. It's no Central Park, but it's better than the other meagre offerings that Napa has to offer park-wise.

We have yet to stroll through the downtown lights, but Napa's little Christmas tree with its grape ornametns is up, I hear construction on Yountville's little library is finally finished, so hopefully we'll go out and up our Christmas spirits with a little Christmas-light viewing this week.

Happy Holidays!

November in Napa and Zuzu review

Finally got to visit another restaurant in Napa, this time the little tapas restaurant in downtown called Zuzu. We tried to call for reservations on a Thursday, but nobody answered the phone. So we arrived and waited around for twenty minutes in the very crowded and loud room before we finally got a table.
My dinner-friends had some kind of fried cheese with a spicy pequillo pepper sauce, and I had a spanish tortilla (very tasty) and some spaghetti squash with apple cider reduction, which I enjoyed as well. I heard the sangria was good if a bit watered down. The waitress we had was nice, although our experience was a bit marred by the drunk frat-boy types on one side and a very loud man at the bar with an obnoxious horsey laugh on the other. A good place to come with friends, but maybe try it when it's a bit less crowded?

I continue to be disgruntled with Napa's lack of walkable, attractive parks. Had to take my out of town guest out to Yountville and Sonoma to stroll around any parks to observe the beautiful color of the trees turning. Sonoma's main square has a beautiful park with amazing giant eucaplyptus trees and tiny baby ducklings.

What does Napa have? Bupkiss! This may cause me to look elsewhere when we rent next year. Also, what do you do when people come in from out of town but don't want to go to any wineries? How do you entertain them? Ideas welcome!