Cox: Happy place in St. Helena

Archetype, the breakfast-lunch-dinner restaurant on Main Street in St. Helena that used to be French Blue, dangles some bargains before its patrons, but you have to know how to take advantage of them.

First, be aware that Happy Hour is from 5 to 7 p.m. Full dinners start at 5:30, but if you’re bargain hunting, it’s the Happy Hour menu you’re after. A cocktail is $5, a glass of beer or wine is also $5, but you can avoid even these modest charges if you bring a bottle of wine, because corkage is free on your first bottle ($10 for each bottle thereafter).

The Happy Hour menu lists seven food items called “drinking buddies,” and each one is also $5. Among the choices are Five West Coast Oysters ($5 ???? ). These plump, perfectly fresh miyagis are grown in Tomales Bay, sweet with their new supply of autumn glycogen, served on a bed of cracked ice with a lemon wedge and a pot of mignonette sauce.

Another worthy menu choice is a large bowl of Kennebec Fries ($5 ??? ) served with an aioli dip made with the juice of a grilled lemon. Kennebec potatoes are considered tops in quality for making French fries, and these crispy beauties, fresh from their swim in super-hot canola oil, proved it. They were salted a little too heavily, though.

And two Thunder Ridge Sliders ($5 ??? ) were hearty little sandwiches, with a thick inch-and-a-half diameter ground-meat patty, topped with a smoosh of barbecue sauce, bacon and onion compote, and a small round piece of cheddar cheese piled up on little brown buns.

Honestly, this was enough food for a light but very tasty meal, and if you bring your own wine as your beverage, you can get all this for just $15. And that’s in St. Helena in the Napa Valley, where the livin’ may be easy but it’s usually not cheap.

Once past the Happy Hour menu, prices get back to what’s normal for up-valley restaurants.

Like French Blue before it, Archetype is a generously proportioned comfy room with lots of cushions and pillows and a large glassed-in porch outside the main dining room. Service is pleasant and swift. The chief culinary feature of the place is the large wood-fired oven at the back of the kitchen.

Among eight entrées cooked in the wood oven is Niman Ranch Leg of Lamb ($28 ?? ½). The waiter will ask how you want it cooked, and my order came medium-rare as requested. The menu said the lamb came with spiced meatballs, but it was more like a tomato concasse that fought with the lamb rather than enhanced it. Couscous, sumac-roasted baby carrots, and golden raisins whispered conspiratorially of street food on the back streets of Morocco.

Oven-Roasted Petaluma Chicken ($24 ?? ½) was a boneless, skinless breast splayed open and cooked hard in that fiery-hot wood oven so it acquired a crispy golden crust while the interior white meat remained juicy.

The accompaniments to the entrées created by Chef Ryder Zetts and executed by his kitchen crew can be more interesting than the featured meat, such as the two slices of grilled eggplant topped with good, garlicky hummus, paired with a sweet and tangy tomato chutney that complemented the chicken, and a strange, saffron-scented egg. The white had been par-poached in water dusted with saffron and the yolk remained liquid. I’m guessing that the idea is to break the yolk, mix it with some saffron white, and dip a piece of chicken into it.

That seemed a little weird, so I just avoided the egg altogether.

Boneless Baby Back Ribs ($25 ??? ) were barbecued in the wood oven, then the bones removed. But isn’t gnawing at the bones half the fun of ribs? They were marvelously tasty and came with Anson Mills grits, Gravenstein apple butter, and a cool, crunchy slaw made with kohlrabi and dry mustard.

For dessert, Huckleberry Gateau Basque ($9 ??? ), a moist cake rich with huckleberries, candied ginger, and lemon crème, made a seriously sweet ending to the meal.

To sum up: A very comfortable spot for breakfast, lunch, or dinner, with a killer Happy Hour.

Jeff Cox writes a weekly restaurant review for the Sonoma Living section. He can be reached at jeffcox@sonic.net.