NAPA’S NEWEST APPEALS

Until I went up to the Napa Valley recently, I had forgotten just how beautiful spring is in this verdant slice of California wine country. After three days, I wasn’t ready to leave. After four, I didn’t want to leave. Ever.

The weather was mercurial--showers followed by gold-spangled sunshine and skies with fat clouds scudding across. The landscape was a palette of rich greens, and while the vines hadn’t yet emerged from their winter slumber, drifts of brassy yellow mustard grew at their feet, while lone wild plum trees burst into blossom and color.

Of course, visiting the Napa Valley is all about eating and drinking.

The entire valley is your wine cellar. And you won’t have far to drive home. Whenever I head north, I try to fit in a lunch or dinner at the French Laundry. I’ve had some ravishing meals there, and there’s nowhere else I’d rather eat. I’m convinced Thomas Keller’s Yountville restaurant is not only the best in California, it may also be the best in the country. It’s not an experience for everyone, though. It demands a focus and concentration on food that not every potential diner is interested in giving. And it’s notoriously difficult to get a reservation.

Two other personal favorites are Mustards, a roadhouse right beside the St. Helena Highway, and Terra, a pretty stone building with French windows on one of St. Helena’s side streets. Mustards has been a valley institution for 16 years. One of the half-dozen Bay Area restaurants (Fog City Diner, Buckeye Roadhouse, etc.) founded by chef Cindy Pawclyn and partners, it’s a casual grill with a lively scene. Terra is owned by Hiro Sone and Lissa Doumani, both Spago alumni, with a strong focus on local wines and food with Asian influences.

This year brings a welcome new crop of restaurants to try, and some are very, very good. Most of the activity has been in the south end of the valley. That may be because Yountville and St. Helena are close enough to the Bay Area that even if you’re not staying in the Napa Valley, you can easily drive up from San Francisco or the East Bay.

The biggest success story is Philippe Jeanty’s Bistro Jeanty. I haven’t found one person who hasn’t fallen completely in love with this charming Yountville bistro. Jeanty was the chef at the Domaine Chandon winery’s formal French restaurant just outside Yountville for many years, until he left to open this place last year. With its ochre walls, old French posters and a blackboard chalked with the day’s specials, it feels incredibly authentic. And also very personal. The walls are hung with photos of Jeanty as a young boy at cooking school, in the kitchens of some of the first restaurants he worked at in France and at Domaine Chandon.

The chef himself is rarely to be seen, preferring to spend his time in the kitchen, where he’s turning out soulful, French country food. Tasting the marvelous lamb tongue salad--chunks of tender pink lamb’s tongue tossed with fingerling potatoes, tiny green lentils and herbs in a sharp, mustardy dressing--I know I’m in the hands of someone who understands bistro cooking in his bones. I’m still dreaming of the pickled pigs’ feet smothered in chopped onion and parsley, and the chilled salad of ripe pears and endive in a perfect vinaigrette. Oh, and his sumptuous coq au vin, chicken cooked in red wine with tiny pearl onions and mushrooms, tastes as if the sauce has been developing for days. There’s a graceful rabbit ragout, too, with nuggets of custardy sweetbreads perfumed with garlic, and sometimes a special of beef daube, the well-marbled beef as dark as chocolate, scattered with spring vegetables and served with good mashed potatoes.

Dessert includes a fabulous chocolate mousse creme bru^lee, a perfect rendition of the rich, ivory-colored custard topped with a layer of fine chocolate mousse and caramelized sugar. I have to confess I had more than my share of the creamy rice pudding garnished with golden raisins plumped in Armagnac.

The shame is that I couldn’t eat more. I can’t wait to come back for the cassoulet and skate in lemon caper butter and whatever else Jeanty feels like cooking.

Debuting shortly after Bistro Jeanty (it’s just up the street, in fact) is Thomas Keller’s Bouchon, the casual adjunct to the French Laundry owned by Keller and his brother Joseph. The difference between the two bistros is telling. Keller hired Adam Tihany, the country’s foremost restaurant designer, and he’s created a polished city bistro with tall red shutters opening onto a small terrace shaded by a handsome awning. Regulars linger at the picture-perfect zinc bar, where a waiter deftly opens oysters and arranges chilled seafood on platters of ice. At the entrance, blood red gladioli are bundled into a stockpot. And as you leave, you can make your own card for the restaurant in a machine that embosses the name and phone number on a piece of yellow paper.

Once you actually secure a table, you’ll find the paper menu folded around the napkin. It’s surprisingly small, which would be a good thing if everything on the menu were terrific. That’s not the case. And the cooking certainly isn’t what you’d expect from a perfectionist like Keller. He’s such a consummate talent, though, I’m confident he’ll work out the kinks. But he can’t be in the kitchen every minute. The former Bouley Bakery chef he hired to open the restaurant was gone after only a couple of months.

Whoever is in the kitchen now doesn’t seem to understand bistro food. It’s all concept, no soul. The oysters, of course, are splendid. Onion soup is nice, bubbling over the sides of the bowl, furnished with lots of melting, stringy cheese, a meal in itself. Codfish balls are bready, and bibb lettuce salad is drowned in vinaigrette. The best dish we had on my one meal there was a simple roast lamb, rosy pink at the center, served with good flageolet beans. But the roast chicken was flaccid, and the sauteed wild mushrooms oily. And it seems a misstep to serve rich boudin noir (blood sausage) with mashed potatoes that are every bit as rich as retired three-star Paris chef Joel Robuchon’s fabled recipe that calls for as much butter as potatoes. It’s entirely overkill. Even the tarte Tatin is nothing extraordinary. Profiteroles, however, are excellent, especially if you pour lots of the dark chocolate sauce over them.

Come fine weather, that terrace out front will be crowded with beautiful people in sunglasses. If Keller can just find someone with the right sensibility, Bouchon will fulfill its role as a place to park everyone who can’t get into the French Laundry, and as a lively hangout for locals.

In September, Ken Frank left Fenix at the Argyle in West Hollywood, where he’d been cooking for the past couple of years, to fulfill a longtime dream of opening a restaurant in Napa Valley. La Toque (the same name as the French restaurant he had on the Sunset Strip for 14 years) debuted at Rutherford’s Rancho Caymus Inn last fall.

The opening chef at Michael’s in Santa Monica, Frank was a star at 21, had his own restaurant only a few years later and has never looked back since he fell in love with French cuisine as a teenager visiting France with his parents. “This is the restaurant I always dreamed of having,” Frank says. “In the six months we’ve been open, I’ve only gotten a request for sauce on the side three times--in L.A. it happened every 30 minutes.”

Wherever he’s cooked, he’s always prided himself on his tasting menus, devising special truffle, wild mushroom or game menus, as well as his “chef’s fantasy menus.” His idea here is to offer only a tasting menu--no a la carte at all--but with several choices in each of the courses. (Note: He’s now offering a sampling of to-order dishes in La Toque’s Wine Bar.) A meal here is meant to be savored over a couple of hours, so La Toque would not be the choice for a casual meal out on the spur of the moment.

When we arrived for a Sunday lunch, a smiling young sous-chef in his whites and clogs opened the door for us. We peeked into the bar with its comfy sofas before being seated in the dining room. It’s a spare, simple room with lofty ceilings and a huge stone fireplace that opens onto the terrace outside where a handful of tables are set up in summer. Frank’s menu is very much in the graceful, light style he’s been cooking for years. The disappointment is that it doesn’t offer much that’s new for anyone already familiar with his cooking. A pleasant lunch in late March began with seared Sonoma foie gras with currants and sultana raisins, and sharp pickled onions in a balsamic and Port sauce, followed by Maine scallops in a silky pea curry sauce, or a fragile asparagus flan surrounded by musky morels and fava beans. My favorite course was the roasted squab, a beautiful red wine dish with a perfect reduction and wonderful parsnip puree. (For vegetarians, he offered a little tart of leeks and teleme cheese.) To finish your bottle of red, you can order a supplemental cheese course. And for dessert, there’s La Toque’s Gateau Concorde au chocolat, a towering construction of chocolate meringue and ganache.

The serenity of the setting, solicitousness of the staff (many of whom followed Frank up from L.A.) and pace of the menu make this a particularly relaxing meal.

When L.A. chef Joachim Splichal opened Pinot Blanc in St. Helena, the fourth of his Pinot restaurants (Pinot Las Vegas is slated to open soon), the restaurant had a rough six months. Napa Valley doesn’t take to outsiders easily. The room was ostentatious, the food sometimes too heavy for Valley tastes. But once Splichal brought in Sean Knight, who worked with him at Patina, as chef, things began to turn around. And now, after redoing the dining room in lighthearted yellows, cream and lettuce green, and retooling the menu to allow Knight more leeway with the specials, Pinot Blanc is coming into its own. In fact, my lunch in late March was some of the best cooking I’ve had at any of the Pinots.

We started with three kinds of oysters from Hog Island in Tomales Bay, presented on the traditional metal stand and at $1.50 apiece one of the best buys in the restaurant world, terrific with a crisp Sauvignon Blanc. I loved two starters, both specials: delicate sweetbreads sauteed in olive oil, brilliantly paired with fat white asparagus from Holland, and delicious monkfish cheeks with fresh spring peas, fava beans and sliced white asparagus. A cardoon soup sounded interesting, but didn’t taste enough of the intriguingly bitter vegetable. Braised veal cheeks with baby artichokes is a great match with red wine. For dessert, try the Breton crepes filled with buttery apples, their sweetness moderated by creme fraiche ice cream. In the evening, you have the option of ordering Knight’s five-course tasting menu, a relative bargain at $49. Now a partner in Pinot Blanc, Knight is no longer the new guy in town, but an integral part of the Napa Valley dining scene.

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GUIDEBOOK

Vine Dining

Bistro Jeanty, 6510 Washington St., Yountville; telephone (707) 944-0103. Lunch and dinner daily. $10.50-$16.50.

Bouchon, 6534 Washington St., Yountville; tel. (707) 944-8037. Lunch and dinner daily. $12-$17.

La Toque, 1140 Rutherford Cross Road, Rutherford; tel. (707) 963-9770. Tasting menu $65. Dinner Wed.-Sat., from 1 p.m. Sun.

Mustards, 7399 St. Helena Hwy., a mile north of Yountville on Hwy. 29, Napa; tel. (707) 944-2424. Lunch and dinner daily. Main courses $9-$29.

Pinot Blanc, 641 Main St., St. Helena; tel. (707) 963-6191. Closed Mondays in winter. Main courses $14-$22, tasting menu $49.

Terra, 1345 Railroad Ave., St. Helena; tel. (707) 963- 8931. Dinner Wed.-Mon. Main courses $18-$26.

The French Laundry, Washington and Creek streets, Yountville; tel. (707) 944-2380. Dinner Wed.-Sun., lunch Fri.-Sun. Tasting menus $80 and $95.