Restaurant at Meadowood - Napa

I was in Dean and Deluca the other day with my mom, buying some cheese and salami. While I was standing in front of the display case, looking at various pig products, a rather rotund gentleman standing next to me commented in a heavy Southern drawl that the Iberico ham in the case was $10 an ounce. I said, "That'd be an expensive ham sandwich". We started talking and it turns out he owns a couple of restaurants in Memphis and is good friends with Allan Benton, the ham purveyor made somewhat famous by David Chang of Momofuku. We talked about pigs and ham for a while, then I asked him about his trip to Napa and he said he comes up here often, mostly to eat. He proceed to tell me the best meal he'd had on this particular trip was at the restaurant at Meadowood. In his opinion, it was as good as the French Laundry, at half the price. Well, he looked like he'd had his fair share of meals and probably knew something about food, plus, he was staring at cured pork products, just like I was, so I figured he might know what he was talking about. Well, I had dinner there last night with my wife and I have to say I thought the whole experience was spectacular. It's a beautiful room, the service is flawless, and the food was thoughtful, fun, and well executed. I highly
recommend it and I'm seriously thinking about going there again while I'm here, I liked it that much. They also had this ridiculous decanter, I forget what model it was, by Riedel, looked like a huge bong and must have been four feet high, coiled at the base. The waiter had to swirl the wine up into one of the top coils to pour it. Said it came with an instructional DVD. That shite would last about two days in my house before my one year old turned it to lead powder. Anyway, we had the 91 Montelena and while it's a great wine, this was not a great bottle. It had this strange sourness to it that the other bottles we've had recently lacked.

ETA: one other thing. There are three options: three courses, four courses, or a seasonal tasting menu. Unlike alot of higher end restaurants, you can mix and match however you like, with no restrictions. I had two starter courses, an entree, and my dessert came from the seasonal tasting menu.


The meal:
A crispy pillow of pastry filled with herbed fromage blanc
Chickpea and squid fritter

carrots and radishes with wasabi creme fraiche, and tomato water snow

Baked potato parfait. This sounds kind of gross, but it was fantastic. A small cup, with a round of baked potato on the bottom, chive and something else gelee, crispy potatoes, potato spuma, which has a consistency somewhere between a foam and heavy cream, and a quenelle of caviar. Wonderful and just like the baked potato at Golden Corral.

Pea and yogurt soup with pea greens served over pea stock gelee.

Foie gras torchon with foie gras mousse, wrapped in crispy black bread, with pickled apricots, apricot gastrique, bacon, and chocolate ganache.

Suckling pig: shoulder, confit, boudin blanc, bacon wrapped loin, pickled cherries, seaweed (which I pushed aside, as any sensible diner would).

Chocolate almond fudge with olive oil ice cream, black olive puree, tomato gelee

mignardises: coconut macaroons, white chocolate bon bons filled with salted caramel.

We followed this up with drinks at Auberge which was cut short when two absolutely insufferable counts sat at the table next to us and proceeded to bombard us with more vapid "like" and "you know" conversation than we could stand.