Inside Sonoma

At a chef’s cook-off competition two weeks ago, the organizers set out an elaborate spread of shellfish, cocktails and cheeses to keep attendees occupied while they set up the main event.
As the reception stretched past an hour, my companion and I did the natural thing: we stuffed ourselves silly on Hog Island oysters, potent concoctions [...]

The story around town is that the chef at Taps needs to wear rubber gloves and goggles to handle the hot sauce for his chicken wings. The hottest version, a fiery “Stage 4,” comes with a warning that customers “will have to sign a waiver… no joke.”
Yet as good as the wings are, most of [...]

We’d call it a “throwdown,” except that when the dish you’re talking about weighs some 125 pounds, it’s not all that easy to toss around.
Yet that’s essentially what Sonoma celeb chefs John Stewart and Duskie Estes will be doing next Sunday, Feb. 28, at the Cochon 555 U.S. Tour Kick-Off. With their special ingredient, a [...]

With a name like PizzaVino 707, the theme is so crisply, intoxicatingly, numerically obvious.
There’s pizza in a starring role at the downtown Sebastopol restaurant, the thin-crust pies wood-fired and topped with locally sourced ingredients.
There’s 707, which is the area code from whence those local ingredients come.
And there’s wine, in approachable California- and Italy-centric varieties.
Yet now, [...]

Not surprisingly, there are olives to be enjoyed at the fifth annual VinOlivo, a grand tasting being held next Friday night at the Lodge at Sonoma. There’s an entire olive bar, actually, stocked with the local, savory fruits and the lovely oils that come from pressing them.
Naturally, there’s also a bit of the “vin” going [...]

The good news is that a meal at Café les Jumelles now requires a shorter drive for most Sonoma County residents. The cozy comfort food café has relocated a wee bit west, from Monte Rio to Guerneville.
The bad news is that it’s taken over the space that used to house Nit’s Thai Creations, that amazing [...]