Jackson's Bar and Oven in Railroad Square has become the place to meet, greet, and eat in Santa Rosa, and has been such since Nov. 27, 2009, the day it opened. It is phenomenally popular, and thereon hangs a tale.
A block away is Syrah, a popular Santa Rosa bistro. Syrah is a white tablecloth kind of place, a destination for dining. The chef is Josh Silvers, and he and his wife Regina co-own the place. A few years ago, they had a son, whom they named Jackson. And Silvers dreamed a dream of a restaurant that would serve good food, the kind of food that chefs want to eat on their day off. A place to eat instead of a place to dine.
When the space that was once Mixx, at the corner of Fourth and Davis streets in the Railroad Square district, became available early last year, Silvers decided that it was the right spot, and he rented it. With a cooperative landlord, a talented designer in Neva Freeman of Neva B. Designs in Santa Rosa, and with contractor Dave Bailey, they set to work transforming the tired old space into something special.
It took about a year to bring their vision to fruition: a long, sinuously curving bar, an open kitchen featuring a large, wood-burning oven and an upstairs balcony with tables that overlook the ground floor. Light is given by Art Deco-looking wall sconces and small lamps that glow pleasantly as they hang at the ends of long extensions. The room is long and narrow, and the curvy bar was exactly the right touch for adding some organic naturalness to all the blocky angles.
And of course Jackson, the Silvers' son, is the only kid around who has the town's most popular spot named after him.
While the food can be called "eats" rather than fine dining, that doesn't mean it's not fine. Take The Burger ($11.50 ?), for instance. The beef patty is so big that it's hard to finish. In addition, the bun is house made, as are the pickles. Even the mustard is house made. The kitchen starts with whole dried mustard seeds, soaks them in vinegar, and purees them with a little sugar into mustard as we know it. The burger is served with the usual salad toppings and with "fresh fried" potatoes that bear a striking resemblance to French fries.
From a balcony table, you can watch the place fill with people around 6 to 8 p.m. most nights. What's remarkable is the heterogeneity of the crowd. Older folks with white hair, middle-aged people, families with young kids, young women in cute outfits with their boyfriends in tow, dopey guys who don't know enough to take their hats off in a restaurant, and suave guys watching polished ladies enjoy their drinks and the attention at the full bar.
The drinks are enjoyable. Some have cute or tricky names, such as the Ginger Not Mary Ann, Belushi's Breakfast, Vesperella (with a wasp-like sting from both gin and vodka in the same drink), and Cottontail (think of the Duke Ellington classic while you drink it). Others are straightforward, like a Cranberry Margarita. My favorite is the Grapefruit Gimlet ($9 ), a simple combination of Charbay Ruby Red Grapefruit Vodka and fresh lime juice.
The wine list runs to 68 bottles, but what bottles they are! Here's a sampling: 2006 Provenance Merlot for $32, 2005 Buena Vista Syrah for $38, 2007 A. Rafanelli Zinfandel for $65, and 2007 Lutea Pinot Noir for $45. Plus more expensive bottles if you're in a spending mood. Corkage is $15.
Given the crush of the crowd, you might expect service to hit major slow patches, but the servers stayed right on top of things through the dinner hours, and so did the bar and kitchen in keeping things flowing smoothly despite the workload.
The menu includes small bites, salads, pizzas, sandwiches, noodles and a few larger plates. Only dense, heavy, hot-burning almond wood is used in the wood-burning oven to make pizzas and they are wonderful. The oven turns out between 80 and 90 pizzas on an average day. The House-Made Italian Sausage Pizza ($15 ?) is topped with tomato sauce, sprinkled with olives, given the house-made sausage and roasted fennel, and then mozzarella and fontina cheeses. It emerges irresistible. If you're in a vegetable frame of mind, try the Ratatouille Calzone ($14 ), a large pouch of pizza dough enclosing roasted eggplant, zucchini, red bell peppers, tomato sauce, and ricotta cheese, each bite a gooey gob of goodness.
There will be specials. On a recent night they included a white bean soup for $5, a white pizza with caramelized onions and piquillo peppers for $15 and rock cod fish and chips for $18. Do prices seem a little steep? Sure, but when you go to lengths like making your own mustard, and when you get lots of atmosphere and fun for free, it's worth it. The atmosphere includes a shameless plug for Silvers' and Jeff Mall's (of Zin restaurant in Healdsburg) collaborative cookbook, "Down Home Downtown," where they each give their own unique recipes using the same ingredients. If you like the food served at Syrah and Zin, you'll like this cookbook.
Chili-Cumin Fresh Fried Potatoes ($6 ) were served with a cilantro aioli. Strangely, it was hard to pick up the flavor of chilies, cumin or cilantro, possibly due to the extra heavy salting the fries were given. Two eight-inch Whole Sardines ($12 ?) had the slightly pickle-y flavor of pickled herring, in addition to flavors of garlic, oregano and preserved lemon. Carefully lifting out the backbones and ribs still left bothersome little bones in the flesh, but that's to be expected with big, delicious sardines.
Finally someone knows how to spell Reuben ($10 ), the sandwich. It's not piled mile-high like in New York Jewish delis, but at least it's on the menu and tastes great. The rye bread is house made. There's plenty of corned beef, Swiss cheese, sauerkraut, and a little Russian dressing. Accompanying crosscut chips are house made. And there's even a New York egg cream on the menu for $3 so you can wash it down with the traditional drink - no eggs, no cream in an egg cream, but it's good anyway.
House Made Cheesy Spaetzle ($9 ) seemed out of place as a stand-alone, gratineed side dish. Spaetzle are tiny dumplings just made for soaking up rich brown German meat sauces, and they lose purpose served by themselves. For a large plate, we tried the Idaho Red Trout ($19 ), two lovely filets of tender young trout paired with Swiss chard, an excellent potato croquette and lemon-thyme butter.
Please put S'mores back on the dessert menu. They are a rare treat, made the rarer because they seldom appear. Order them if you spot them. Otherwise, try Scott's Beignets ($8 ?), long, tapering donuts dusted with powdered sugar, or Chocolate Malt Layer Cake ($8 ?), where four layers of cake join layers of filling, are topped with four malt balls, and are finished with a scoop of chocolate chip mint ice cream. Yum.
To sum up: A comfy and cozy spot for meeting up and chowing down on comfort food made with great ingredients.
Jeff Cox writes a weekly restaurant review column for the Sonoma Living section. You can reach him at jeffcox@sonic.net.
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