RETURN TO HAYDON STREET INN HOME PAGE
Published: August 26, 2005 - NEW YORK TIMES - 36 Hours
Healdsburg, Calif.
Peter
DaSilva for The New York Times
Peek back into Healdsburg's agricultural history and town roots with a quick stop at the Healdsburg Museum.
By AMY GUNDERSON
HEALDSBURG, in the heart of Sonoma County, dates to the mid-1800's, when it was a stopping point on a heavily traveled route from San Francisco to the gold mines of Northern California. Healdsburg was a farming community and in many ways still is, though prunes, which dominated the fruit crop until the 1970's, have now been supplanted by grapes. In fact, it is just a short drive from the center of town to three Sonoma County wine locales, the Alexander Valley, the Dry Creek Valley and the Russian River Valley, that are filled with wineries but lack the weekend crowds of neighboring Napa. Mid-September marks the start of crush, the grape harvest, so fall visitors will see bustling vineyards and undoubtedly smell fermenting grape juice. But these days Healdsburg is about more than wine. Over the last few years, new shops and high-end boutique hotels have made it a destination for all things culinary.
The Healdsburg Farmers' Market takes over part of a parking lot a short walk from the town plaza at North and Vine Streets.
Friday 8 p.m. 1) Garden Grazing
Most winery tasting rooms close their doors around 5 p.m., so a lot of people dine early in Healdsburg. But Barndiva (231 Center Street, 707-431-0100) stays busy until after midnight. On weekend nights, tourists, locals and chefs just off their shifts gather in the spacious garden behind the big red barn that houses the restaurant. Join them and grab a drink. In a wine-centric town, Barndiva has a surprisingly playful cocktail list. "On the Beach with Fidel" is a passion fruit and lemon mélange with two types of rum ($12), and "Steamy Windows" marries cilantro, ginger, pineapple juice and vodka ($10). The dinner menu has many small plates meant to be shared. Split the tuna poke ($16), crispy duck salad served over watercress ($9) and seared scallops with couscous-and-tomato jam ($14), and don't forget to try one of the artisanal cheese platters (starting at $7) that can be ordered with assorted charcuterie (starting at $18).
Saturday 9:30 a.m. 2) Harvest Time
On Saturday mornings through November, the Healdsburg Farmers' Market (707-431-1956) takes over part of a parking lot a short walk from the town plaza at North and Vine Streets. The bounty will have you wishing you had access to a kitchen, but there are still plenty of treats you can pack to take home. Tierra Vegetables has been a staple at the market for 25 years, and in addition to its seasonal produce, sells several varieties of chili jam that can add punch to an appetizer of crackers and cream cheese. Dry Creek Peach & Produce has drip-down-your-chin white peaches that it also sells to local restaurants, including Cyrus (29 North Street, 707-433-3311), which is being praised as the French Laundry of Sonoma County. Sonoma Toffee Works' Hazelnut Delight with roasted hazelnuts and white chocolate ($8 for a small bag) makes a great gift - if you can keep yourself from eating it before you return home.
12:30 p.m. 3) Vine and Dine
Stop by the Oakville Grocery (124 Matheson Street, 707-433-3200), to pick up all the accouterments for lunch - made-to-order sandwiches, prepared salads, baguettes and cheeses. Then make the 10-minute drive to Dutcher Crossing Winery (8533 Dry Creek Road, 707-431-2700), a new arrival to the Dry Creek Valley. More than likely, one of the owners, Bruce Nevins or Jim Stevens (who together brought Perrier to North America in the late 70's), will be there to pour the chardonnay, sauvignon blanc, zinfandel and cabernet sauvignon ($5 to taste all wines) and then invite you to hang out at the picnic area. An open breezeway frames the rolling hills that stretch beyond the vineyard's property, and you can plant yourself at a picnic table right next to the vines to take in the view.
3:30 p.m. 4) A Vintage Look
Peek back into Healdsburg's agricultural history and town roots, with a quick stop at the Healdsburg Museum (221 Matheson Street, 707-431-3325). Pick up a "Historic Homes of Healdsburg" guide ($7.50) for your own walking tour of the Greek Revival homes that dot the town and late-19th-century Queen Annes, many with well-maintained gardens, that radiate off the plaza along Matheson Street.
5 p.m. 5) A Local Nip
With the wineries closing for the evening, the best place for a drink before dinner is the Russian River Wine Company (132 Plaza Street, 707-433-0490), a small but airy wine shop with a tasting bar and a few tables tucked to the side. It focuses on small producers, many of which lack their own tasting facilities. On Saturday afternoons, the tastings often feature area wine makers pouring their creations.
8 p.m. 6) Invader Zin
You know where your food is coming from at Zin Restaurant & Wine Bar (344 Center Street, 707-473-0946) since many purveyors' names dot the menu, and some of what you're eating has been pulled straight from the restaurant's own garden. Start with the beer-battered green beans ($7.25), a crispy mountain of vegetables you won't think you'll ever get through. (You will.) The grilled peach salad ($9.25) is served with a zinfandel vinaigrette and goat cheese from Laura Chenel (she was at the forefront of artisanal cheesemaking in the United States), and the juicy chicken breast with local honey mustard and an ancho chile glaze is served with wild rice pilaf and a squash (from Zin's garden) soufflé ($16.25).
10 p.m. 7) Get Your Hops On
After a day of wine tasting, a nice way to chill out is to sit on the covered deck of the Bear Republic Brewing Company (345 Healdsburg Avenue, 707-431-7258) with one of the local brewery's beers. Try a pint of Racer 5 India Pale Ale ($3.75) or go for a light Wine Country Wheat, a hefeweizen served with a lemon ($3.75).
Sunday
9 a.m. 8) Creamery Creations
A visit to Healdsburg isn't complete without a visit to the Downtown Bakery & Creamery (308A Center Street, 707-431-2719) which has been a community staple since 1987 and is noted for using all-local dairy products and organic flour. You'll be tempted by the fresh-baked croissants and scones, but you won't be sorry if you choose the extraordinarily sweet sticky bun ($1.75).
Some of what you're eating at Zin Restaurant & Wine Bar has been pulled straight from the restaurant's own garden.
Peter DaSilva for The New York Times
The Plaza Arts Center features the work of local artists.
10:30 a.m. 9) Tasting Time
Plaza Farms (106 Matheson Street, 707-433-2345) opened in June featuring the best of locally produced olive oil, cheeses, teas, chocolate, produce and wine, all of it available for tasting. Try the extra-virgin olive oil made by DaVero, a Healdsburg company, and pick up a bottle of Meyer Lemon Olive Oil ($24). Ask for samples of Bellwether Farms' sheep's-milk cheeses, and you can finish them off with a touch of bittersweet chocolate from Scharffen Berger Chocolate Maker.
11:30 a.m. 10) Art Walk
There are 14 art galleries within two blocks of the Healdsburg Plaza. The Plaza Arts Center (130 Plaza Street, 707-431-1970) features the work of local artists. There is a mix of paintings, sculptures and photographs, including infrared black-and-white landscape shots by Matthew Piper that have an almost surreal feel. Levin & Company (306 Center Street, 707-433-1118) is a small bookstore with an artist-owned gallery upstairs - called Upstairs Art Gallery - where the person working the desk is one of the creative minds behind the art adorning the walls. Even in the heart of wine country, it isn't just about the grapes.
Visiting Healdsburg
Healdsburg is 70 miles north of San Francisco. Oakland's airport is more convenient than San Francisco's. Take Highway 101 North and exit at Central Healdsburg.
Les Mars Hotel (27 North Street, 877-431-1700) opened in March and has 16 rooms decorated with 18th- and 19th-century European antiques. Rates are $495 to $995 a night. The hotel's restaurant, Cyrus, is winning great reviews.
Hotel Healdsburg (25 Matheson Street, 707-431-2800) has a swimming pool, gardens, a spa and a noted restaurant, the Dry Creek Kitchen. Its 55 rooms, many of which have balconies, are $260 to $790.
The Haydon Street Inn (321 Haydon Street, 800-528-3703) is a bed-and-breakfast with eight rooms at $130 to $220 a night.
Published: August 3, 2005 - Not Far From Napa, and Closing In
Jim Wilson/The New York Times
Bacon-crusted oysters at Willi's Seafood and Raw Bar in town.
By FRANK J. PRIAL
HEALDSBURG, Calif.
BACK in 1924, during the heyday of small-town boosterism in America, the Chamber of Commerce here held a contest to come up with an official town slogan. Winning the first prize of $100 was "Healdsburg - the Buckle of the Prune Belt."
A
Dirty Town No More
It was a good time for prunes. Prohibition was four years old and showed no signs of weakening. Wine grapes, which had flourished in the area for almost a century, didn't seem to have a future. But Prohibition ended in 1933, and in short order the grapes returned.
Healdsburg today is at the confluence of three booming wine regions - Alexander Valley, Dry Creek Valley and Russian River Valley - as well as of two important subappellations, Chalk Hill and Green Valley. There are more than a hundred wineries in a 20-mile radius, and more are opening regularly. No one talks about prunes anymore.
When grapes appear in the wine country, birds and tourists soon follow. Well into the 1980's, Healdsburg was a dusty little country town known to the old-timers as a welcome relief from the countrified gloss of the Napa Valley. It is still a country town, but less so: it is almost as popular on the wine circuit as the Napa Valley towns of Yountville, St. Helena and Calistoga and the town of Sonoma itself, back down the road to San Francisco.
The feed stores are gone from downtown Healdsburg, along with the fellows who sell farm implements, hardware and cheap haircuts. There seems to be a pottery maker or an antiques dealer on every corner now, and the hotel newsstand sells The New York Review of Books. Coffee shops have become coffee bars pushing grand latte and, on their walls, the earnest efforts of local artists. Wine-tasting rooms abound, and restaurants, some surprisingly good, seem to pop open overnight. ("Hey, was that sushi joint there yesterday?")
Every endeavor has its defining moments. In wine there was the opening of the Robert Mondavi Winery in the Napa Valley in 1966, and in wine country restaurants the moment when Thomas Keller took over the French Laundry in Yountville in 1994.
It's a safe bet that one day Healdsburg's defining moment will be said to date from 2001, the year Charlie Palmer, of New York's highly regarded Aureole restaurant, reopened the Hotel Healdsburg with a brand-new restaurant, Dry Creek Kitchen.
It might seem that the appearance of another Charlie Palmer restaurant is hardly breaking news. In addition to Aureole, Mr. Palmer has four more restaurants in New York, two in Las Vegas and one in Washington, as well as a catering business in Los Angeles. More compelling, perhaps, is his commitment to Sonoma County. He has moved to Healdsburg - permanently, he says - with his wife, Lisa, and their four sons, settling on a 30-acre tract not 10 minutes from his hotel and restaurant. "What a change, from Madison Avenue and 68th Street," he said.
Mr. Palmer may have left big-city stress behind him, but his offerings here are as sophisticated as any of his more urban efforts. Of them, I sampled a subtle shiitake mushroom bisque, langoustine "cappuccino" and a phenomenal "pot roast" with Kobe-style beef and organic potatoes. None of those are simple country dishes, nor is his vegetable pot au feu: young local vegetables cooked sous vide (at low temperatures in vacuum packages) and bathed in tomato water.
The wines at Dry Creek Kitchen are almost all from Sonoma, with impressive multivintage collections of rare Williams Selyem and Rochioli Vineyards pinot noirs along with exciting offerings from little known (to me, anyway) wineries such as Mauritson, just outside town on Dry Creek Road. Mr. Palmer is serious about Sonoma wines: he slaps a $15 surcharge on the non-Sonoma wines on his list.
Dry Creek Kitchen may have raised the quality bar in Healdsburg, but there have been good restaurants around here for more than a few years. Bistro Ralph is a longtime favorite of mine, right on the plaza in the center of town. Be careful, you might miss it. It's a low-key place, long and narrow, in an old storefront space. There are usually a few tables outside in warm weather.
There really is a Ralph: Ralph Tingle, who worked at Taillevent in Paris and at Le Cirque in New York and was executive chef at Fetzer Vineyards before opening his bistro in 1992. My most recent visit was on a rainy Monday night, when guests were few and the menu limited. Luckily, a few of the signature portobello mushrooms were available for a starter, and a decent roast chicken. But I missed the wonderful Provençal lamb stew, served with the crème fraîche-and-horseradish mashed potatoes that are usually on the menu. I was tempted to go back for lunch, but other places called.
One of them was Willi's Seafood and Raw Bar, on Healdsburg Avenue a block north of the Hotel Healdsburg. A handsome place with a Southeast Asian look, Willi's is the latest effort of Mark and Terri Stark, who also run Willi's Wine Bar and Monti's Rotisserie and Bar down Highway 101 in Santa Rosa. The wine bar serves only tapas, and the place here in Healdsburg is mostly fish. There are a few meat things, all on skewers: marinated chicken, minted lamb, hanger steak, all grilled.
But stick to the fish, in dishes like the delicious bacon-crusted broiled oysters (oh, all right, bacon is meat) that I tried, flash-fried calamari or the Dungeness crab cake with Meyer lemon aioli and piquillo pepper vinaigrette. Healdsburg is a long way from the rockbound coast of Maine; even so, Willi's serves up a lobster roll - with garlic butter and fennel - that would make Kennebunkport proud. All fish restaurants talk about freshness. Willi's seems to pull it off, even with the lobster rolls.
There is a respectable wine list, of course, but some of these spicy dishes beg for beer. Try Caroline's Blonde ale, from Ruth McGowan's brewing company up in Cloverdale, the jumping-off spot for Route 128 out to the wild Mendocino coast.
Zin Restaurant and Wine Bar is another old-timer. I used to love sitting there into the late hours with Rod Strong, drinking a brawny zinfandel from Rodney Strong Vineyards and listening to his uncensored tales about the gentry down Napa way. He's ailing now, but the restaurant goes on.
Zin the restaurant makes a sincere effort to serve meals that stand up to zin the wine. No culinary esoterica; just American classics. I had meatloaf, barbecued ribs, grilled lamb chops and a house special, sliced duck breast on a king-size bed of garlic mashed potatoes. A local guidebook suggests one main dish and two forks. Just the thing to go with one of those 16-degree-alcohol blockbuster zins from Cecil De Loach.
Ravenous is another holdover from the pre-latte days. Once a little hole in the wall with six or eight tables next to the Raven movie theater on North Street, it's now on Center Street, a few blocks away. It's bigger and, the locals insist, better. There is an appealing south-of-the-border touch to the Ravenous menu in items like the pork quesadilla and the salmon on corn cakes. The original Ravenous is now called Ravenette, and it's still going strong at the old stand.
Manzanita, on Healdsburg Avenue, is a warm, inviting place with a great wine list and some terrific dishes: grilled rabbit stuffed with polenta, for example, or Yukon Gold potato gnocchi with asparagus and truffled pecorino cheese. You'd never know this used to be a Chinese restaurant.
Over on the southeast corner of Healdsburg Plaza is the latest branch of Napa's famed Oakville Grocery, a perfect place to pick up some sandwiches and a bottle of wine for a picnic out along the Russian River. You can eat right at the Grocery, and you can buy great wine and olive oil to take home. I always think of Oakville Grocery as a rustic Zabar's.
Healdsburg's newest and most opulent eatery is Cyrus, in the equally luxurious Les Mars Hotel on North Street, a few steps off the plaza. It's named not for the Persian king but for Cyrus Alexander, a rugged pioneer who gave up panning for gold to farm and grow the first grapes in what is now the Alexander Valley in 1846.
I suspect that old Cyrus would have been taken aback by Cyrus the restaurant. Done up in heavy swags, thick leather banquettes, dark paneling, rich fabrics and muted colors, and with waiters suited up like bank officers, the restaurant suggests an overstuffed hotel dining room from the 1960's. In a town as studiously laid-back as Healdsburg, Cyrus comes off as more than a bit pretentious, like formal attire at a church picnic. This is a minority opinion. On two visits the place was packed with lively, enthusiastic diners.
Happily, the cooking at Cyrus is first-rate. The menu is divided into courses, offered in any order a guest chooses. Three courses are $58, four $69 and five $80. A seven-course tasting menu for the table is $95. Trios - not from Beethoven but from the chef, Douglas Keane - are much in evidence. Three styles of foie gras for example, three different styles of lobster and, at dessert time, three custards by the pastry chef, Annie Clemmons. Some of the main courses are inspired: the pork belly with a bourbon-ginger glaze that I had, served with peaches and fresh grits, or the roasted twin quail with black mission figs and mousserone mushrooms.
The polar opposite of Cyrus and the surprise of my most recent trip to northern Sonoma was Santi, a rough-and-tumble, red-checkered-tablecloth Italian place in Geyserville, about 10 minutes north of Healdsburg. Behind the unimposing brick facade can be found some of the most heartwarming Italian food outside the North Beach section of San Francisco.
For starters, the simple platter of homemade salamis was superb, but then so were the polenta crepes with roasted corn. Florentine-style beef tripe - trippa alla fiorentina - braised with tomato, fresh basil and chili flakes and topped with Parmesan cheese was my favorite main dish, followed closely, very closely, by the homemade potato gnocchi with green olives, baby leeks and braised rabbit.
Santi is still a bit of a local gem. Wednesday is locals' night, with an old-fashioned special like sausage and peppers or that not-so-Tuscan favorite, meatloaf and mashed potatoes. The wines, like Santi itself, are more sophisticated than one might expect.
Healdsburg (all right, Geyserville, too) is where St. Helena and Yountville and Calistoga were in the 1960's and 70's. It is an old town, too, but it manages to convey an infectious sense of adventure, of experimentation that the wine towns to the south no longer have. It's worth another 30 minutes on the road, preferably on Route 128, up through the gorgeous Alexander Valley.