La Toque, Chef Ken Frank’s restaurant in the Westin Verasa Napa hotel, is super fancy. How fancy?
Well, consider the four-part amuse bouche. On a tray are arranged a curl of crisped chicken skin, a little lump of creamy burrata, a small cylinder of orange Luna di Napoli winter squash drizzled with a sweet gastrique and one tiny potato topped with a smidgeon of lardo.
Lardo is a Tuscan salumi made of fatback cured with rosemary and other herbs and spices.
It’s been made in the marble-mining area of northern Italy since the days of the Roman Empire.
This quartet of treats, served gratis of course, seems to be the chef’s way of paying homage to Italy before he proceeds with his take on modern French cooking.
Some things to know about La Toque before you go: Portions are small.
If you want to stuff yourself, go to a diner instead. Dinner consists of four-course, five-course, vegetable tasting or chef’s table tasting menus.
The four-course is any three savory items and dessert, and the five-course is any four savories plus dessert.
The chef’s table tasting menu is nine courses, the vegetable tasting is six, and both of these must be ordered for the whole table.
You pay for the quality, and you pay a lot. The vegetable tasting menu is $85 per person plus $75 if you pair its six courses with wines.
The four-course menu is $80 per person, plus $52 if you pair wines with the savories, plus $14 if you have a dessert wine. The five-course is $98 per person, plus $68 for wines with the savories, plus $14 for a dessert wine.
The chef’s table menu is $195 per person, plus $95 for wine pairings.
There is a wine-by-the-glass list with prices from $14 to $35 a glass, and there’s the full wine list with a couple of thousand wines at all kind of prices.
To stick with pricing for a moment (surprises are not good), an 18 percent service charge will be added to your bill.
So there’s no obligation to tip unless you’re feeling particularly generous, and of course tax where required will be added. Figure roughly $150 per person with a couple of glasses of wine each.
So what do you get for all this money?
Very fine ingredients with whispers and traces of scents and flavors that are used with such restraint it’s hard to pin down exactly what they are.
They haunt the dishes rather than suffuse them. They are intriguing, even beguiling, and they speak of the chef’s well-thought-out approach to cooking.
For instance, the Chef’s Green Salad (???? ) was dressed with a pumpkin-seed vinaigrette that gave the winter greens like radicchio and Batavia lettuce a pleasant earthiness. Matsutake Congee (???? ) is an Asian rice porridge mixed with aromatic-spicy pine mushroom, a lump or two of Dungeness crab, a coin of red radish and minuscule hints of Thai basil, ginger, and soy sauce.
The shy flavor of tender little Nantucket Bay Scallops (??? ½) was enhanced with a sweet and lemony butter sauce and - wonderful idea - grilled slices of cauliflower florets.
A breast and leg of Dry-Aged Squab (?? ½) was juicy enough, but it needed something to wake up its flavor. A light snow of very finely grated chestnut didn’t do it.
Some cracking fresh greens didn’t do it. Small mushrooms promised to bring the squab to life, but they didn’t do it. Maybe cornbread pain perdue would help, but it just tasted of salt.
The dish wasn’t a total failure, but it also wasn’t exciting.
House-Made Ravioli (??? ), on the other hand, were superb. They were filled with pureed winter squash and paired with kidney-shaped shelling beans. A few scraps of chanterelles were a tease, while a portion of kale had an ineffable flavor. Saffron?
Maybe. Chef Frank is a truffle aficionado and had some white Italian truffles in the kitchen, which he would grate over your ravioli for a supplement of $48.
A small piece of Niman Ranch Ribeye (??? ½) seemed oddly paired with pearly tapioca in a red wine sauce. Dessert was a tiny cone of Baked Alaska (?? ) with vanilla ice cream inside a lemony meringue topped with lingonberries. It was too insubstantial to be consequential.
To sum up: La Toque deserves its Michelin star.
Jeff Cox writes a weekly restaurant review for the Sonoma Living section. He can be reached at jeffcox@sonic.net.
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