Good Taste is a weekly menu celebrating excellence and joy in the food world.
David Gelb was in his late twenties when he made the acclaimed 2011 documentary Jiro Dreams of Sushi. He’s now also the creator of the (equally acclaimed) Chef’s Table documentary series on Netflix. Gelb recently appeared at the Culinary Institute of America’s CIA at Copia campus (500 First Street, Napa) to talk about and screen Jiro and the latest Chef’s Table spinoff series Chef’s Table: Legends during the Reel Taste Film Awards. Legends features Alice Waters, José Andrés, Thomas Keller, and Jamie Oliver, and Waters, Keller, and Oliver were at the event the night before I went to see Jiro and Gelb and eat popcorn.
“This movie, and I didn’t even realize this when I started it, became so much more about people than it was about sushi itself,” Gelb said of Jiro after the film ended. “And that became the path that I started to follow for the rest of my career.” At 99, Jiro still hasn’t really retired, and remains an international hero.
The audience learned during the screening and post show izakaya tasting that events like Reel Taste support scholarships for the student body. 90 percent of students receive some form of financial aid as well. CIA at Copia is a beautiful place worth seeing; the campus maintains a full calendar of events that are open to the public.
I don’t drink, don’t have a car, and don’t have a Wine Country budget, so I don’t make it up to Napa County very often. However, thanks to my friend’s points scoring us a free room at the Holiday Inn Express in American Canyon, I was reminded that Napa County has excellent taco trucks and that it’s otherwise possible to eat well in the area without spending too much by venturing into Yountville, where Keller’s fancy restaurant and Bouchon Bakery are located.
Staying at the Express, which has a free breakfast buffet, also puts you across the street from Le Paris Artisan & Gourmet Cafe (3921 Broadway, American Canyon), home of superb sweet and savory pastries and sandwiches. The balsamic glaze-drenched and adobo seasoned pork belly sandwich on a croissant is singularly, as the kids would say, fire! Le Paris also has two additional locations, in Napa and Fairfield.
The main reason I went up to Napa from San Francisco every few years was to buy chocolates from the now-shuttered La Forêt shop. Owner Wendy Sherwood moved to France with her husband, leaving us bereft of the best turtles ever made. Sherwood worked as a culinary instructor and, before that, as a pastry chef at Keller’s French Laundry, and her confections are deeply missed.
If you do go check out something at CIA at Copia, leave time beforehand to visit the Model Bakery (644 First Street, Napa)—get the English muffins, they are Oprah’s favorite!—and forage for snacks and spices at the Oxbow Public Market (610 First Street, Napa), which closes way too early on a Friday night, but maybe that’s what the neighborhood wants? There’s a little market in there that always has the most interesting local packaged bites. This time, I bought and loved a Marin popcorn company called Nobunaga’s Blue Ribbon that makes Japanese curry popcorn. Also fire.
We found out the next day how incredibly rad the farmers (and their produce) and all the indie food trucks and businesses are at the Napa Farmers Market (Saturdays, 8am to 12pm at 1100 West Street, Napa). This is a perfect place to get Saturday breakfast or lunch if you’re just visiting for the day or there for the weekend, like we were. First-season cherries and three-month dried Hoshigaki persimmons demanded our attention, and we picked what turned out to be super juicy loquats from a tree hanging down over our parking space around the corner. Bring a tall friend for this part.
We visited The Slanted Door Napa (1650 Soscol Avenue, Napa) for the first time to pay respects to its late founder, Charles Phan, and have his famous shaking beef again. I had very positive interactions working with Phan over the years, including shooting a cooking demo of him making the shaking beef. We savored every bite and locked that culinary memory in; hopefully the family will be able to continue his plans to reopen his original Valencia Street Slanted Door.
As luck would have it, I also received an invitation to have Sunday brunch at his State Line Road Smokehouse (872 Vallejo Street, Napa) and meet Chef Darryl Bell and his custom smokers. Two of them are named Cassius and Clay, to match the mural of Muhammad Ali in the courtyard. Another smoker, Bell shared, was given to him by Phan, and is worth $40,000. A few wheels on it were broken, and Phan fixed them before bringing it to Bell.
Phan is remembered in a plaque outside the smokehouse, which is dedicated to him.
“He was my friend, mentor and the truest example of SELFLESSNESS,” reads the plaque, “Forever grateful for the time we shared.”
State Line Road is the kind of welcoming and utterly delicious place that makes you want to make plans to go back immediately, even when you live over an hour away. I’m planning another day trip just to go there. I love that you don’t have to order a whole pound of anything; you can ask for one rib or one slice, for example, and pay by weight. Do not skip dessert and just get them all, they’re small but powerful.
The brilliant Bell is the first Black chef to have a restaurant in Napa in over 100 years. He hopes that someone will dig more into that history to see why that happened.
He worked for the Thomas Keller Restaurant Group for seven years, and you’ll see real elegant techniques at play in his barbecue menu in dishes like his weekly “Secret Fish” special, which is usually a fresh fish collar dressed in chili paste with greens and Rancho Gordo beans. The plating evokes fine dining and the complexity of flavors is world-class.
But there’s none of the fussiness or tension that you may experience going to the French Laundry. That’s all I remember feeling the one time I went there, but that may have been associated with the guilt of spending $300 at a time when I didn’t have much more than that to my name, but got a rare chance to join a reservation party. It was mortifying to read about how Keller asked the Chronicle food critic MacKenzie Chung Fegan to leave recently after he caught her there under a pseudonym, and how he treated her after uttering that request.
For all my future trips to Napa County, I’m putting my money on the heroes at Le Paris, The Slanted Door Napa, State Line Smokehouse—and that family-owned taco truck that parks near the French Laundry.
Tamara publishes the California Eating website, newsletter, and zine, and has just launched the Food Book Club.
