Restaurants

Napa Valley – What’s Happening in Downtown Napa, Visitor Center Battle Brews

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On a Wednesday morning we are off to the Napa Valley for a quick overnight stay in Napa. Traveling mid-week gives us the option of booking a hotel or B&B at the last minute in hopes of getting a great price. We have been yearning to try the Oenotri Restaurant in Napa, and directly across from Oenotri is the Avia Hotel. A quick check of the travel websites and we find that we can get a room at the Avia on Kayak for $151. That’s a great price, so we book the room and head on out.

We spend most of the day in the Napa Valley visiting and touring the Somerston Ranch off Sage Canyon Road and then a quick trip to the Clif Family Winery’s new tasting room, Vino Velo. We check into the hotel around 4 pm and begin exploring downtown Napa. We stroll the Town Center and have a look around. Boy, this place is void of people. We did find something the might become the “Battle of Visitor Centers.” The Legendary Napa Valley folks pulled up shop at the Town Center last month and moved the Visitor Center to the posh and chic Riverfront Properties. This created quite a stir for the Town Center because it took away much-needed visitor foot traffic. Now the owners of the Town Center are fighting back. They are remodeling the old visitor center and will open soon, according to the owner who I talked to as she was closing the door. “We will be back and better than ever” she says with great conviction. Stay tuned for the battle.

At Riverfront Properties the newly opened Visitor Center for the Napa Valley

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“Kitchen Nightmares” on the Restaurant Prowl in the Napa Valley

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What was your experience the last time you visited one of your favorite Napa Valley restaurants? If you were disappointed with your dining experience, you may want to suggest to that restaurant that they apply for a makeover by chef Gordon Ramsay. Gordon Ramsay is the very fiery-tempered chef featured on the reality television show Kitchen Nightmares. This FOX TV show is presently searching for restaurants for its upcoming 5th season and hoping to find one or more in the prestigious Napa Valley.

Chef Ramsay is Mr. Fixit when it comes to restaurants. He is a restaurant consultant and restaurateur who has created many successful Michelin-starred restaurants. On Kitchen Nightmares, Chef Ramsay spends a week with a struggling restaurant using his skills to turn it around into a successful business. If you have seen the show, you know that Chef Ramsay holds nothing back. He takes a bold approach and does what is needed to get the restaurant back on track. I went to the Kitchen Nightmares website and viewed several clips from past seasons. It is quite an astonishing show. It is funny and embarrassing, and it is amazing for the audience to discover what goes on behind the kitchen doors. Although Chef Ramsay is quite arrogant and abrupt, it is apparent that he can do wonders to fix a fledgling restaurant and bring it back to profitability.

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Discover Mount Veeder – Great Day Trip to the Napa Valley

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From both the San Francisco Golden Gate and the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridges, Mount Veeder AVA is about one hour and 15 minutes driving time. It is the perfect quick wine country getaway for folks visiting San Francisco who want to get a quick glimpse of the Napa Valley. We say visit Hendry Winery, Yates Family Vineyard, and Hess Collection Winery and then go to the town of Napa for a late afternoon lunch.

Mount Veeder is a beautiful and lovely mountain, one of the highest in the Mayacamus Range and was once a blistering volcano. The area is very rugged and the soil and climate vary widely as the mountain elevates to a height of 2600 feet. The first stop on this quick getaway is the Hendry Winery at the base of Mount Veeder. Here you can kill two birds with one stone, because the Yates Family Vineyards uses a portion of the Hendry Winery to make and showcase their wines. To get to Hendry, take Redwood Road off Highway 29 in Napa and head west. On Redwood Road, go to the left when the road splits (about one mile). Continue another 1.5 miles. Watch on the right for the tiny sign indicating the entrance to Hendry Winery at 3104 Redwood Road. If you are not looking carefully and alertly, you will surely miss it. Both Hendry and Yates are open by appointment only, so be sure to call ahead.

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Restaurant Surge in Napa

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If new restaurants are any gauge of how the economy is doing, then it must be doing just fine in the town of Napa. Since January, there have been three new restaurants that have opened, one at the Oxbow Public Market, two in the downtown area. In the summer, three more restaurants are slated to open in the Riverfront Residences development. That feels like a lot of competition for restaurant owners, but one would think that investors have reason to believe these restaurants will make it as the economy recovers.

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Napa Valley wine prices in 1970 why not roll them back!

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I was digging through some of my old wine books and came across two items of interest from 1969-70. In those days I kept very meager notes of the wines I purchased, this of course was well before computers and spreadsheets. I scanned one of the pieces of notepaper so you can take a look at what I paid for these wines back then. The second item I found was a wine list from Orsi’s Restaurant in San Francisco. I scanned one page that listed the Claret wines from the Napa Valley. Take a look at the prices, very interesting!

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Cathy Corison the Queen of Cabernet

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Cathy Corison is one of Napa Valley’s first women winemakers and is well recognized by her colleagues as one of the more influential winemakers in the entire Valley. Her Corison Cabernet wines have long been noted for their quality and character. We visited with Cathy at her wonderful winery and vineyards in St. Helena.

We have long been admirers of the barn that houses the Corison Winery. The best view is during Mustard season. The vibrant colors set against the grey siding and the green roof make for an awesome view and a photographer’s delight. The barn is set back from Highway 29 and easy to miss. As one drives along Highway 29, by the time you catch a glimpse and are intrigued by the building it is too late; you have driven past the entrance. By all means turn back at the next chance and pay a visit to Corison Winery. It is traditional Napa Valley.

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Restaurants — When The Wine List & Corkage Are Overpriced

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We dined at a restaurant that recently opened in our neighborhood in Burlingame. We’d heard good things about the restaurant so a group of us decided to celebrate a birthday and an anniversary there. The food was delicious but the wine list was marked up too high and the corkage fee was over the top at $25. Why gouge customers on wine; don’t you want us to return again and again?

Any good wine list should be well thought out and include good wines priced for all pocket books. At the low end there should be some decent tasting and enjoyable wines priced at $30 or under. At this restaurant there were no red wines to be had under $40 and the lowest priced white wine was $38. Worst of all, the markup was huge. Get this: I can buy a bottle of Robert Hall Cabernet Sauvignon at Trader Joe’s for $13. The price for this same wine was $40 on the wine list, a markup of almost three times retail. If you want wine loving-customers to keep coming back, a reasonable markup of 1.5 is just about right for the consumer.

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Bottega in Yountville – Recession Proof Restaurant

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We had a wonderful dinner at Bottega Restaurant this last Tuesday night. What recession, we thought as we entered the restaurant. Bottega has been open since last December 5 and I doubt it has been anything but a full house since. Part of the reason for the popularity of this restaurant is the star power of celebrity chef Michael Chiarello. He is TV chef on the Food Network, winery owner, cookbook author, and proprietor of the Napa Style store. It also helps when Bottega gets great reviews from food critics like Michael Bauer of the San Francisco Chronicle or inclusion in the Chronicles’s Top 100 Bay Area Restaurants. Michael Chiarello seems so natural as he roams the restaurant from the kitchen to the dining room greeting diners. We were seated at the bar waiting for our table when suddenly there is Michael to introduce himself to us and learn a little bit about ourselves. It is a very nice touch and one that brings back the customers.

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Blackbird Inn, a Four Sisters B&B in Napa + Two Good Restaurants to Try

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Although the town of Napa may not be as chic as Yountville, lodging in downtown Napa offers the wine country visitor many options for activities and choices of restaurants. There are enough things to do in the downtown area to keep visitors busy for several days.

We booked two nights at the Blackbird Inn, a Four Sisters B&B. The Blackbird Inn is located on First Street and Jefferson in Napa. The B&B happens to be directly across the street from the very cool Craftsman home of the Wine Spectator’s Napa office. We supposedly got a winter/Internet special rate, if you stay two nights you get one free. Our tab came to $280 with tax for our two-night stay.

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Wine Traveler & Friends at One Market Restaurant

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Each year, the Saturday following Thanksgiving, we gather with a group of our long-time friends for an overnight stay in the great city of San Francisco. We walk, shop, eat, nap, eat again, and drink lots of really good wine and most importantly have loads of fun. This year, our leader has made a dinner reservation at One Market Restaurant at the corner of Market Street and Embarcadero and booked a room for each couple directly across the street at the Hyatt Regency Embarcadero. This means a five-minute stroll to and from dinner, and no cab fare, no designated drivers.

We have reserved a table for the five couples at One Market and each of us, as is our custom, brings in a bottle of one of our treasured wines. Corkage fee at One Market is $20 but if you purchase a bottle of wine, the corkage fee is waived. With that in mind, we start off the dinner’s festivities by ordering two bottles of 2007 Merry Edwards Sauvignon Blanc. It’s a little pricey at $65, but no worries for us, we are here to have fun and forget about our tanking retirement funds.

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