NapaEats Blog

Ok. Time to dust off the site. *cough* *cough* In some token gesture towards working on the site some more, I did upgrade the guts of the site to Plone 4 though with the same gut-wrenching Googling as always.

Here’s the Ca’ Momi review. Ca’ Momi takes up where Folio died off (actually, I think Folio gave it a go with two different versions). Ca’ Momi’s claim to fame are the wood-fired pizzas. Here’s a picture of a Ca’ Momi pizza pie.

Overall, this is probably my second favorite place to get pizza in Napa although I think their dough could use some work. Oenotri still has the best pizza overall IMHO, but I think I like Ca’ Momi’s style a bit more than Azzurro. You should also definitely check out the benets and other desserts in the pasticceria.

For the first time in about two months, I updated the site to include the Fish Story review. For those who don’t know, Stephen Barber left the self-named BarbersQ to be the head chef at Fish Story. That’s not something you see everyday: red meat heavy chef going for sustainable seafood.

Actually, I was pleasantly surprised. The prices are a little high for the food, and there have been some service and food hiccups at the start, but if you’re really in the hankering for seafood and want some peace of mind that it’s sustainable, it’s not a bad choice.

Pan-roasted cod

Christopher Kostow at the Restaurant at the Meadowood became the 2nd Bay Area restaurant (outside of the French Laundry) to get 3 Michelin stars. It’s very well deserved. He’s an aggressive chef who pushes the envelope with his food, and when he’s on, the food is sublime. We always told people that we were puzzled why it wasn’t wildly successful. It’s nowhere near as difficult to get a reservation here as The French Laundry. In fact, I’d push people to go there when they asked me about the costs of the French Laundry or how to get a reservation. Now that Kostow has received his due from the Michelin Guide, hopefully the restaurant gets its due. Our loss with no longer getting the easy reservations, but Kostow deserves it.

I guess I’ve developed a lot of “content debt” on the site. We’re still eating large and still taking the occasional fuzzy picture. But I haven’t added new reviews to the site in two months. Actually, I haven’t even updated the current group of reviews that much which is a shame since we don’t view the restaurants as quite the same as when we first ate there. And when you wait a few months before you put up a review or images, you barely remember what was going on at the time which is why it’s always best to write these sort of things as close to the culinary encounter as possible. I should really get my arse in gear and start poking around again…

I work on NapaEats mostly to get some experience with what it’s like to run your own site. One thing I’ve always been curious about is how online communities form organically from pretty much nothing. How did those communities get started when there were only a handful (or zero) people there? What compels people to set up an account, post something, and then wait for a response when they could just go to some bigger community like Yelp or Chowhound and get instant gratification?

So, I set up a discussion board for NapaEats to see for myself. It runs on bbpress which is a light, simple bulletin board system from some of the creators of WordPress. The forums currently have like 3 members. So, if you’re curious about eating in the area and want a more interactive experience than just reading the review pages or this blog, stop in set up a account, and ask a question or share a story.

After a laughably half-assed installation of some Plone modules that I didn’t understand, I managed to break the site in two. Just for good measure, I accidentally erased my backup data file (woohoo!) But thanks to the folks at Webfaction, I was able to create a new site and get it restored surprisingly fast (well, for me: a few hours) with *their* backups. Actually, I managed to upgrade my Plone version to 3.3.5 while I was at it, and it was nowhere near as painful as upgrading from 2.x to 3.1.7.

A few weeks ago while driving up 29, we realized that we didn’t see the Napa Valley Grille. Sure enough, I did some digging, and they closed in Dec 2009. Shows you how attentive we are although in all fairness, the Napa Valley Grille was sort of in its own isolated area (it’s dark too!). Here’s the Napa Valley Register article talking about the closing. For the last few years (probably as soon as Bob Hurley left after getting bought up by the corporate crowd to start his own restaurant, Hurley’s, again), it was easily the weakest of the Yountville crowd so I’m not sure how many were sorry to see it go, but the company that owns the chain says they closed because of lease issues rather than business issues. *shrug* The restaurant itself had been in the area for 15 years, changing hands a few times, and, now it’s gone, leaving its Napa Valley roots (for now) to focus on bringing wine country to its remaining Westwood, CA, Paramus, NJ, and Bloomington, MN locations.

I’m sure that read as weird as it did to write.

One thing we’ve noticed while eating out is that it seems like there are a lot more tourists here in 2010 than in 2009. Of course, 2009 was the first tourist season after the global meltdown so that’s a really low bar to step over, but we’re still surprised at pick-up. In fact, it seems better than 2008 too. Maybe even 2007.

All the sexy places like Redd, Ad hoc, Bouchon, Morimoto, etc. are pretty packed during normal evening hours. Part of us is annoyed as it didn’t used to be this hard to get into places with just minimal advance reservation time even during tourist season. Now, it’s like we actually have to make reservations  a few days to a week in advance (yes, I know, the horror.) We’ll just have to wait until fall and winter before we can just sit around on a Wednesday night after work deciding which one of us is going to cook and then say “Meh. Let’s just to Redd.”

But hey tourist dollars are what brings these restaurants to the region so I can’t complain.  Without the tourists, we wouldn’t have all these great places to go to throughout the year.

I guess another reason I find this surge in Napa Valley business is that my view on the US economy has been fairly bearish throughout 2010 and will likely continue to be so in for much of 2011. Commercial real estate, housing, health of the banks, government debt at federal, state, and local levels, consumer spending, etc. they all have tough times ahead. But that’s not what I’m seeing at the local level, and since so much of the tourism is from out-of-region types, I wonder if it might be a proxy for more national trends.

For the record, I still think I’m right.