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Where to eat in Napa? Well, here's where we've eaten...

About the NapaEats, the restaurant reviews, and other ramblings.

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Napa Valley restaurant reviews from 2 townies in the making

We moved to Napa a few years ago (well, okay 6...), and since Napa Valley is known all over for its fine wine and food, we decided to track all the tasty places that we ate at. And we know one day, we will have to move so we'd like to have the memories (sob).

So, just like all good netizens, we're posting our experiences to let others get a look at one couple's view of the restaurants in the Napa Valley area. We'll post reviews on our favorite places to eat, both high-end and normal, everyday places so you can get an idea of what your choices are. Sometimes you want fine dining. Sometimes you don't. And we'll try to post links from other sites that have good material on these restaurants so you can get other points of view. Since we live in the city of Napa, the reviews will probably slant more towards what's around us.

It will take some time for us to post all of our experiences up here. So check back occasionally to see what we've added.

 

Things to keep in mind while reading the reviews

No aspirations of culinary genius or good taste; we just like to eat.

You're in the wrong place if you think this will bring you to new levels of culinary enlightenment. We're not going to pretend that we're experts. This isn't a Zagat's Guide or Michelin Guide. We just like to eat, and so just think of this as two residents' take on things. No aspirations of being a professionally written periodical either. Expect lots of typos, formatting weirdness, and so on.

Sometimes, people use reviews to show off how smart they are by lifting their targets to heavenly heights or tittering at the restaurant's pathetic attempts to please. Personally, I think cooking a decent meal is fairly tough. Never mind doing it at a high level for a lot of people. This isn't to say that some restaurants aren't better than others or that they're all great, but running a restaurant is bloody hard work. Given my own culinary ineptitude, I'm not going to beat up some restaurant just because they're not better than the best ones in the area.

We're not great with wines.

We like food a lot more than we like wine. We know what we like and what we don't with respect to wines. But we never seem to remember the darn labels. Yes, we're hicks.

We'll try places multiple times.

I've never understood how people can say that "restaurant A sucks because the one time I went there, X happened." I think part of this is because these people don't live here and are understandably upset that one of their few meals here didn't go well. But we do live here. We'll go to a restaurant a few times even if the first meeting didn't work out that well. Everybody makes mistakes, and if you want uber high consistency, go to McDonalds. If I think the restaurant overall is giving an honest effort, we'll go a few times to take a broader view.

Actually, we have to. We generally eat at these places 1-2 times a week which means even if we have favorites, we have to spread the love to keep things interesting after a few years. Did I mention that we've put on weight since we've moved here?

Yes, our pictures suck.

Sometimes, I'll just use my lousy cell phone camera as I don't want to break out a camera every time we go somewhere. Sometimes, we will have a nicer camera, but since we tend to have dinners, the lighting tends to suck (or rather my digital photography skills suck. Too dark, too bright, too blurry...). Even then, we sometimes won't bust out the camera if there are a lot of other people around us as the flash will distract some from their meals, etc. I will try to point some links to other sites that do have nicer pictures though.

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