up to napa
We drove up to Napa today, and spent the afternoon at Copia. We had a pretty good time, although David had some issues with patience. I was a bit impressed by the size of their garden. At first we couldn't find it, until we realized that it was this huge tract of land stretching clear across the street.
Afterwards, we drove north, partly to kill time before our dinner reservation. There's this winery that we passed that looks like this huge ancient Egyptian temple. We were clearly not hip/trendy enough for this place. Granted, I haven't been in that many wineries, but I've been to about a dozen over the past year, and this was the most ostentatious, gaudy winery I've ever seen. It really reminded me of one of the Vegas strip casino monstrosities.
We went to Bistro Jeanty in Yountville for dinner. Denise had escargot (yes, the snails) & coq au vin, and I had fried smelts and roasted rabit loin in a cream sauce with egg noodles, carrots & chanterelle mushrooms. David shared out food. None of us had had escargot before, and it wasn't bad at all. It really didn't have much unique flavor of its own, but instead picked up the garlic butter sauce. Even David had some (although we didn't tell him what it actually was, and all he said was that it was in a shell). The smelt were quite tasty (and David loved them). My main course was ok, although I was a bit disapointed at the relatively small portions of rabbit compared to the heaping amount of noodles. Denise loved her coq au vin, and the bits that I tried were pretty good. For dessert, Denise had a crepe suzette with orange butter sauce. I had a bread pudding with berries, and a scoop of vanilla icecream. I think I came out on top for the best dessert prize. It was absolutely delicious. There were huge tart blackberries & raspberries baked into the bread pudding, and the scoop of melting vanilla icecream on top of the piping hot pudding made it even better. The service was ok, although out waiter seemed a bit ditzy at times. Denise explicitly told him to bring David's food with the main courses, and instead we got it *before* the appetizers, which just confused & annoyed David. He was also not terribly efficient at clearing the empty dishes away in a timely fashion. Overall, it was worth it though, and we'd probably go back again eventually.