Napa Food Fest

A couple months back Andrew and I needed to get out of town so we went up to Napa for a food festival he found. We had a lovely day and stayed at a great hotel. It was a great experience. Here's how the food stacked up.

We started with a steak tartare prepared by a teacher from the Culinary Institute. It was simple but tasty. The meat was fresh and it was covered with a very good quality olive oil, some lemon and seasoning.
It takes a lot to make a tartare stand out to me these days, but this one was really solid. The quality fresh ingredients really created a tasty bite.

The second dish from the Culinary Institute were barbecued oysters. This was pretty standard. It was by no means bad - I had two. It just didn't stand out among the other food we had that day. I feel like the only way to elevate the dish and make it stand out would have been to create a really great and unique sauce. The barbecue sauce was at best mediocre.

Next we went to the Heritage Fires table, which offered two breads. The above was my preferred dish. Their version of garlic bread was basically a thin focaccia with butter, onions, a red pepper saute, gorgonzola and parmesan cheeses. It was also super cute that they had a gentleman walking around with a box of it strapped to him offering it to hungry patrons.

The bruschetta was good. The tomatoes were fresh and in season. It definitely didn't stand out as much as the garlic bread but was a nice clean palette cleanser - not the best I've had but not bad and the acid was welcome change from all the meat.

Next we had some lamb sliders from Sepia. Aesthetically these were nothing to write home about; however, they were one of my favorites because of their taste. The slider consisted of a lamb and garlic sausage with a caraway and beer slaw.

Magnolia's chef had some sort of hand injury so I was only able to try one of their dishes. The above sausage was delicious - Spicy Thai cheddar smoked pork sausage. The compressed watermelon salad with Thai basil and mint was kind of a throwaway. I was unimpressed with just a piece of good sausage on a plate. I heard the chicken served was very tasty but I did not receive any because of the chef's hand injury which was kind of gross and bs.

I skipped the rabbit station because there was a bunch of signs about cooked bunnies - Bambi barf. So instead I went with the Night Wood Restaurant's delicious taco. They had a whole roasted albacore tuna with pasilla negra, pica de gallo, queso fresca and avocado. Watching the fresh tuna be flaked off and put into my taco was pretty tops. This was a crazy good taco.

This was pretty clearly supposed to be the centerpiece of the festival. It was a Heritage Berkshire roasted pig stuffed with Australian black diamond truffles from Todd Spainer - the King of Mushrooms. I thought it was kind of overdone. First of all I was totally chastised while waiting in line because I declined pork skin. Then the pork was cooked well but the abundance of black truffles in the sauce was a bit overwhelming. It was so many that they didn't even taste like truffles. This was probably my least favorite dish at the event.

The above salmon dish from the Whole Beast was really tasty and HUGE. The centerpiece was the whole roasted California Chinook Salmon that was glazed with a Vietnamese black pepper and caramel  fish sauce. It was accompanied by a papaya, white peach and mango slaw. I only had the salmon as I am allergic to both papaya and mango but I heard the slaw was tasty. The salmon was a dream. Super delicious and something I could eat everyday.