What’s new in Sonoma County restaurants
In the ever-frenetic world of modern restaurants, a chef is only as good as his last dish. Fickle diners get bored, and food trends move so quickly from fried chicken to kale that, increasingly, chefs are pushing limits to keep a buzz around their kitchen.
It has become such a daily thought in menu planning that these days, even wacky works. Adventure, it seems, stokes appetites.
Few in food-centric Wine Country know that better than David Blomster, owner of Dick Blomster’s Korean Restaurant in Guerneville. Operated as an evening pop-up in the ramshackle circa-1945 Pat’s diner on Main Street, Dick’s has been clobbering the culinary envelope since it debuted in 2012, with hard-to-explain dishes like braised chrysanthemum leaves tossed with hot chiles, maitake mushrooms and black bean sauce, or a humble hot dog chow mein.
“Dino kale and Pop Rocks did not work,” Blomster said, reflecting on an opening month salad of crispy Dinosaur kale and flying lotus root chips sprinkled in Pop Rocks candy. “But surprisingly, cheese, rice and peanut butter works pretty well together.”
Just as surprisingly, perhaps, customers are eating the crazy stuff up. On weekends, his cozy 78-seat café serves up to 700 diners a night, and so Blomster is opening a second location later this month as a pop-up in Don Taylor’s Omelette Express in downtown Santa Rosa. On the menu: a fried PB&J sandwich coated in pancake batter and topped in vanilla ice cream and Pop Rocks, plus a rice bowl with KFC (Korean fried crack) - soy-ginger chicken, egg, seaweed and gochujang fermented chile paste.
It is still the time of quinoa, anything artisanal, fried eggs or gourmet beans on absolutely everything, plus kale-kale-kale everywhere, as it has been for several years.
But now, alongside trendy small plates, open kitchens, communal tables and everything organic, we want Sonoma County seaweed (kombu) in our chicken noodle soups, kimchee in our burgers and milk whey in our cocktails. The more unusual the eats, the better.
It’s not just for fancy restaurants, either. Avant-garde is nothing new for upscale restaurants - the French Laundry’s red chile-spiked coconut milk tapioca atop mango sorbet, anyone?
Roma de tigres
Yet now, the out-there combinations are de rigueur at even the most casual places.
At Casino in Bodega, for example, the tiny kitchen behind the dark bar and beer-perfumed pool tables sends out nightly changing dishes that include a lofty mixed roast of Berkshire pork loin, cheek and rib decorated with Spanish roja garlic, roma de tigres and anise hyssop.
Roma de tigres are striped red and orange tomatoes he found at a local farmers’ market, explained Casino chef Mark Malicki. “The Latin American lady called them ‘tiger tomatoes’ in Spanish, and I thought it was cool,” he said.
“I like to put things on the menu people might not recognize, because it helps start a dialogue with their server and creates kind of a bond.”
Kimchee latkes
At Santa Rosa’s new bistro-style Bird & Bottle, which opened at the end of September, chef Mark Stark sends out curious inventions like kimchee latkes and pickled gulf shrimp served with Korean chile buttered southern Saltine crackers. And for brunch service rolling out in a few weeks, he’s playing with a pork belly monkey bread.
“It’s always been my philosophy to pair the unusual with the usual,” said Stark. “There are certainly adventurous diners, but I also feel that a chef can grow a guest’s trust level by delivering consistently good food.”
Chef Dustin Valette is such a proponent of that philosophy that at his new Valette Restaurant, which opened in Healdsburg in March, he has a “Trust Me” section of the menu.
Here, diners throw caution to the wind and let him create whatever dishes he fancies, in a minimum of four courses.
That has resulted in unique bites such as squid ink-painted puff pastry with steamed scallops in a Champagne beurre blanc, alongside already creative menu listing options like deconstructed Nicoise salad of ahi, olives, cucumber, chive, 64-degree egg and olive oil “snow.”
The snow is extra virgin olive oil mixed with cold refined tapioca starch, for a delicate powder that tastes like oil without the heaviness.
“Dining out isn’t just calorie consumption,” said Valette.
“I want to create things people can’t make at home. All chefs are trying to stand out from the crowd, and I do it with new techniques and uncommon ingredients. From bottom restaurants - even Burger King is doing a black bun (tinted with A.1. sauce) for Halloween - to top tier chefs, we don’t have to follow the rules anymore.”
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