8 Best Restaurants in Napa and Sonoma, California

Even before charting on Esquire's list of 2022's best new restaurants, the intimate, bungalowlike establishment of New York City transplant Joshua Smookler (formerly chef at his own Mu Ramen and Thomas Keller's Per Se) was already drawing a crowd for its mash-up of Basque, Jewish, and Korean cuisines. Smookler, whose wife, Heidy He, runs the front of the house, consistently delights with idiosyncratic flavor combinations in dishes like feather-cut ibérico pork, lobster in XO sauce, grilled whole turbot, and dry-aged rib eye.

Chef Ari Weiswasser honed his craft at The French Laundry, Daniel, and other bastions of culinary finesse, but his Sonoma Valley outpost revolves around haute-rustic cuisine, much of it emerging from a wood-fired oven. Weiswasser turned the day-to-day reins over to a new chef de cuisine, but the mainstay crisp-crusted, richly sauced Margherita and other pizzas continue to thrive in the oven's torrid heat, as do tender whole fish entrées and vegetables like brussels sprouts and brown-sugar-bacon marmalade.

Todd Humphries has overseen swank haute-cuisine kitchens in Manhattan, San Francisco, and the Napa Valley, but he focuses on multicultural comfort plates at his high-ceilinged industrial-contemporary restaurant downtown. The signature dishes include a silky cream of mushroom soup, flatbreads, pho, Vietnamese noodle salad, duck banh mi sandwiches (go for the voluptuous duck jus add-on), and sweet, spicy, and succulent chicken wings, among many other crowd-pleasers that keep this place hopping even in the off-season.

The seasonally oriented Japanese dinners known as kaiseki inspire the 10-course prix-fixe vegetarian, meat, and seafood menu at the spare elegant restaurant—redwood walls, walnut tables, mesquite-tile floors, muted-gray yarn-thread panels—of internationally renowned culinary artists Katina and Kyle Connaughton (she farms, he cooks). As Katina describes the endeavor, the micro-seasons of their nearby farm plus SingleThread's rooftop garden of fruit trees and greens dictate Kyle's rarefied fare, prepared in a theatrically lit open kitchen.

First in a historic roadside haunt that perished in the 2017 wildfires and now in a strip-mall storefront whose exterior masks the urbane restaurant within, Willi's serves inventive globe-trotting small plates paired with international wines. Pork-belly pot stickers represent Asia, the Mediterranean inspires Tunisian roasted local carrots and Moroccan-style lamb chops, and curried crab tacos straddle two—maybe three—continents.

Calistoga's flashy 19th-century entrepreneur Sam Brannan built the depot in 1868 to receive well-to-do spa patrons, but it was looking careworn until a 21st-century equivalent restored the wood-frame building, connected by a boardwalk to vintage railroad cars. One of four dining options amid the Calistoga Depot complex, which includes a few bars, the deli serves plant- and meat-based sandwiches, salads, and wood-fired pizzas.

A dependable varied menu makes this modest corner restaurant occupying a brick-and-glass storefront many Napans' go-to choice for a simple meal. Empanadas and iron-skillet cornbread with lavender honey and butter show up at all hours, with buttermilk pancakes and chilaquiles scrambled eggs among the brunch staples and cassoulet and roasted heirloom chicken popular for dinner.

As the name suggests, the chefs at this restaurant with an expansive patio often packed on weekends are willing to experiment, starting with sushi plates that include spicy hiramasa (yellowtail kingfish) rolls with rainbow-trout caviar. Cedar-plank salmon, wild-mushroom meat loaf, the buttermilk fried chicken sandwich topped with Swiss, and a slow-roasted pork sandwich served with coleslaw are perennial favorites.