the girl and the fig

Sonoma county, just north of San Francisco, has to be one of the most expensive places in the world. Basic B&Bs cost about $200 a night, with a 2-night minimum at weekends, while small vineyards go for millions. When I went for a wine-tasting tour last weekend, a crappy St Francis merlot was horribly metallic, the sort of thing you'd reject in a Glaswegian pub. It was also $25 a bottle. Good wines – the sort of things which cost maybe $8-$13 in your local wine shop from Australia or Argentina – cost $50 at the Sonoma wineries.

So when we needed a place to eat on Friday night, I wasn't expecting anything amazing. We cruised around the town of Sonoma, and one of the first restaurants we saw was called the girl and the fig (they want it in lower case, they can have it in lower case). "I like girls, and I like figs," I said, so we checked it out. The menu looked good, we went in and asked if they had any tables that evening, they did, and the choice was made.

the girl and the fig is cozy and comfortable: easily the most welcoming hotel restaurant I've ever been in. Maybe that's a California thing, maybe it's because it had already been going for four years in a different location before it moved in to the Sonoma Hotel about a year ago. The staff are efficient, friendly and informal; the settings are rustic in ways that make you feel at ease, without sacrificing any quality. (The wine glasses, naturally enough for Sonoma, were top-notch.)

I think I would have been happy eating at the bar, where a casually-dressed clientele paired flights of wine with delicious-looking cheese plates. When we were shown in to the dining room, I already knew one thing I was going to order: we started off with the combination platter of three cheeses and one aged sausage.

Before it arrived, we had to decide if we were going to go for flights of wine, or whether we should do the old-fashioned thing and order a bottle. I thought that flights would be too distracting, and that drinking 2oz glasses of wine with food was a bit on the impractical side, so I ordered a local cinsault off the very approachable wine list. (Castle Vineyards, the wine maker, is so small that I think the only place you can get their wine is at the winery or at the girl and the fig.) It turned out to be a great choice, although I'm sure I could have more or less thrown a dart at the reds and come up with something equally good.

The wine list is exceptional in more ways than one. While being very carefully chosen, and obviously biased towards local wines, nearly everything on it is under $50. the girl and the fig has obviously decided not to apply standard restaurant markups to the wine, which means they can offer good Sonoma wines at non-threatening prices. What's more, you'll look in vain for any chardonnay, merlot or cabernet sauvignon – this is a place to discover less well known Rhône varietals like cinsault, mourvedre and – especially – viognier.

The cheese was easily the best I've ever had in north America. Going against type, we were given a hard goat, a hard sheep, and a soft cow. The sheep, Ossau Iraty from the Pyrenees, was nutty and delicious. The goat, with the fabulously Californian name of Cypress Grove Midnight Moon, was only just hard: it held together fine, but melted in your mouth. But it was the cow which really blew us away. A triple cream cheese called Pierre Robert from Seine-et-Marne in France, it was soggily soft and bursting full of flavour. Apparently it's enriched with crème fraiche, which sounds a bit dubious to me, but boy does it work.

At about this point I wanted to order another cheese plate, with another three cheeses (they have a dozen or so on the menu at any one time), but our first courses were coming. I had the specialite de la maison, the fig salad, while Michelle had a butternut squash soup (her favourite) which she pronounced the best she'd ever had. (On the other hand, she usually says that when she has butternut squash soup.)

Good as the fig salad was, I still think that figs are a bit like oysters or lobster: the sort of thing which is best eaten pure and unadorned, on its own. Perhaps the fig salad is a year-round thing, and they have to gussy the figs up for the time when they're not fresh. But these were good figs, and good figs don't want to be covered in a port vinaigrette, no matter how light.

Then, while Michelle had the fig salad as a main course, I moved on to the duck. I'm one of those people who finds it almost impossible not to order duck when he sees it on a menu, so I've had a lot in my time, but this was definitely among the best I've ever tasted: the skin was so crispy it crunched, while the flesh melted in the mouth.

The meal was at an end, we were both very happy indeed, and the last of the cinsault had been poured. But just as we were about to make the standard no-we're-completely-stuffed noises, I spied a port and fig ice cream on the desert menu, and the friendly waitress told us about the pot de creme special. We couldn't resist.

Much as I love my local ice cream artisan, I have to say the port and fig ice cream was beyond a doubt the best ice cream I've ever had. Lusciously creamy and lip-smackingly flavourful, it was almost enough to make me think that there are good ways to cook with figs after all. And then the pot de creme – what my grandmother used to serve as her world-famous petit pots, only bigger, darker, and covered in coffee whipped cream. Michelle, the chocaholic, said it was the best chocolate desert of all time, and I was inclined to agree, yet even so it was so rich that the two of us together couldn't finish it.

All that was left was the bill, which I have to say I dreaded. When a restaurant serves food this good, with chocolate, ice cream, duck and cheese all in best-ever land, you know you're not going to get away without a painfully hit wallet. When it's in Sonoma, you know it's going to be worse. But our four courses, with a fantastic local wine and excellent coffee, came to just $112.55 (before tax and tip) for the two of us. I've had meals which cost that much per person which don't compare.

No wonder, then, that when we started telling people where we'd eaten, they all looked at us in astonishment and asked us how on earth we managed to get a reservation: apparently the girl and the fig is known throughout northern California as a gourmand's paradise. All I can do is thank my lucky stars we managed to get a table on an hour's notice, thank the girl and the fig for the best meal I've had all year, and hope that I will be able to repeat the experience some time. And encourage you all, if you find yourselves anywhere within a 50 mile radius of Sonoma (and that includes San Francisco) to get a reservation and go there.

Posted by Felix at 21:31 EST