We stopped off for a Sunday lunch at Tra Vigne, one of the classic Napa valley Italian restaurants. We sat in the bucolic, Tuscan-style courtyard, which has one of the more creative fountains in the area.

There’s no doubting that it’s a beautiful restaurant that’s designed for upscale rustic comfort, and the meal started off nicely enough… with some assorted olives and fresh bread…

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Wood Oven Baked Pizza with Smoked Prosciutto and Mascarpone Cheese. We both liked this a lot. The crust was pillowy with a satisfying crunch on the bottom. There was very thin layer of something like a tomato sauce beneath the cheese and prosciutto, and they all came together for a very balanced and delicious flavor. I look at this pizza now, and I want a slice.

Papperdelle with Broccoli Rabe, Red Onions, Creamy Pecorino Sauce, and Sage Pesto. This could have been perfect. The flavors are so well-matched, with the sage pesto providing just the right touch of gusto, but the just slightly over-cooked pasta and the starchy undercurrent of the sauce brought it down to just pretty good. I added salt to mask the faults, and I wasn’t unhappy with it.

We were feeling pretty good at this point, so we both got dessert. That was a big mistake. If the meal had stopped with the main courses, we would have left as pretty happy people. But then this was put in front of Chad…

Chocolate Torte with Caramel Sauce. What’s going on here? To be sensitive to the tortured artist who created this, I won’t go into aesthetics. What I will go into is how this was stale, and the ganache on top was so hard that it was nearly impossible to break through its layer of steel. The bottom was soft in that old ‘n saturated full of liquid way, which made it an even more unwieldy. If the ganache is intended to be that hard, it should be used as a crust, and if this is intended to be eaten fresh, it should be served so. And we paid $8 for this, and for what was set in front of me…

“Babba’ Al Rum” with Fresh Raspberry Puree and Creme Anglaise. Ever since we made an utterly fantastic rum baba at school, I’ve been looking forward to further rum baba encounters. But this one didn’t work. The baba here was full of large holes, which lent an unsettling sensation to the tongue, and the flavor was eggy-rum in a bad, sour way, with a cloying underlying sweetness. The flavors just didn’t harmonize, and the raspberry puree didn’t help; and I’d hate to think it was there to just add some color. The anglaise was way too thin — it should have been cooked longer for a more velvety and fuller texture.

So, we left, dejected and hurt, muttering about how we should have stopped with the pizza.

This entry was posted on Monday, August 21st, 2006 at 5:56 pm and is filed under Napa Valley, Restaurants. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.