9 Best Restaurants in Napa and Sonoma, California

Shades of brown and beige predominate in the Four Seasons resort's indoor-outdoor fine-dining restaurant, whose Mexico City–born, Napa-raised chef, Rogelia Garcia, prepares an elaborate multicourse tasting menu based on seasonal California ingredients. The artistry of the flavors and presentation has earned the chef and his team national recognition and the restaurant bucket-list status.

A decade after his beloved, same-named Healdsburg restaurant closed, celebrity chef Douglas Keane of Top Chef Masters and other fame reopened a "2.0" version inside an 8,000-square-foot steel, glass, and concrete structure in an Alexander Valley vineyard. Keane bills his flagship prix-fixe culinary experience as The Dining Journey, with guests (two-person minimum; solo diners charged double) changing rooms a few times for multiple internationally inspired courses based on hyper-seasonal, mostly Northern California ingredients.

Inside a soigné Victorian former residence with textured wood walls and adorned with contemporary textiles and artworks, the downtown Sonoma restaurant operated by Stone Edge Farm Estate Vineyards & Winery presents a tasting menu built around ingredients from the winery's nearby organic farm. Founding chef Brian Limoges describes Sonoma County and its rigorously farmed, raised, and caught ingredients as his “muse,” with his New England youth, French culinary training, and turns at four iconic San Francisco restaurants providing additional inspiration.

Possibly the most romantic roost for brunch, lunch, or dinner in all the Wine Country is a terrace seat at the Auberge du Soleil resort's illustrious restaurant, and the Mediterranean-inflected cuisine more than matches the dramatic vineyard views. The prix-fixe dinner menu (three or four courses), relying mainly on local produce, might include caviar or diver scallop starters, delicately prepared fish or vegetable middle-course options, and mains like prime beef pavé, spiced lamb loin, or Japanese Wagyu A5.

The 1877 farmhouse that gives this restaurant its name contains two warmly lit dining rooms, one with a wraparound mural depicting the founding family's five generations in Sonoma County agriculture. It's a fitting flourish, given the emphasis in the featured tasting menu (à la carte also available) on produce and proteins so "hyper-local" that the inn's gardener cultivates many of the former on-site and one of the owners raises some of the latter on a nearby farm.

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.

The chef-owners of this neighborly restaurant say their fare "walks the line between comfort and haute cuisine"—mostly California-inspired and "hyperseasonal" items that might include Mt. Lassen trout with leek roulade or local duck breast in Grand Marnier sauce served with fig and potato gratinée. The same could be said for the casual but knowing hospitality and the decor (bare wooden tables yet linen napkins), but it all works: dining here engenders quiet excitement.

Chef Charlie Palmer's ultramodern restaurant—pastel walls, soft lighting, contemporary artworks, and a gently vaulted ceiling meant to evoke a wine cave—enchants diners with clever combinations of flavors and textures in three-course prix-fixe and six-course tasting menus based on seasonal, often local, ingredients. Early courses might include kanpachi crudo or sweet-potato mochi, followed by mains like a 50-layer lasagna, pine-nut-crusted halibut, or chicken roulade with crispy polenta.

Even before diners settle in their seats, the Montage resort's glass-walled special-occasion restaurant captures the imagination with exterior views of vineyards, oaks, and far-off Mt. St. Helena and interior haute-luxury touches like chandeliers of locally handblown Czech glass. The Cali-Continental connection comes full circle in dishes—rabbit cassoulet or caviar with house-made potato chips to start, perhaps, or striped bass with prawn, uni, saffron, and fennel—whose French flourishes elevate the seasonal ingredients.