'The Audacity of Simplicity' at Napa Valley's Charter Oak
At the St. Helena, California restaurant, Christopher Kostow and his kitchen team closely collaborate with their own three-and-a-half acre farm.
Welcome to the weekend! Here’s what you’ll find in this week’s newsletter:
Cover Story: The Charter Oak, from Christopher and Martina Kostow, has a menu full of dishes cooked over a live-fire hearth that are simple but creative.
Weekend Getaway: Madison, Wisconsin has many great restaurants and bars. Get all our recommendations by downloading our Field Guide to Madison, a 38-page dining guide organized into a curated three-day itinerary with 25+ recommendations for breakfast, lunch, dinner, and drinks. It’s free this month for paid subscribers!
The Order: At Doe’s Eat Place in the Mississippi Delta, the broiled shrimp with garlic butter is a must-order appetizer.
Weekend Reading: Amy writes about some great Chicago taverns for Punch,
visits Starlite in San Francisco for The Mix, and Stacey Leasca shares some of the top Boston breweries in Travel+Leisure.
The Flavors of Napa Valley
ST. HELENA, CALIF. — If there’s a dish that, to me, says Napa Valley, it’s the crudité from the Charter Oak. Consisting of seasonal raw vegetables from the restaurant’s farm served with a fermented soy dip for dunking, it’s the restaurant’s signature dish (that and the burger, which we’ll get to in a minute). It’s a representation of the growing season and the soil, the way food here is ingredient-focused and lets the flavors shine. Yes, the dip packs a wallop of funky, umami flavors (and here’s the recipe if you’d like to try it), but the simple presentation lets the vegetables themselves shine.
The Charter Oak is from Christopher and Martina Kostow (who also have Ciccio and Loveski Deli, and run The Restaurant at Meadowood, which has been closed since 2020 when it was destroyed by the Glass Fire, but will be reopening). The menu is filled with dishes cooked over a live-fire hearth that are simple but creative and delicious and use the best of the area — a spring pea salad with charred peas and shallot and thyme vinaigrette, grilled lamb with preserved marigold pesto dried plum, roasted black cod with preserved wild mustard, those crudités.
“We wanted something that showcases a moment in time at the farm,” Christopher Kostow says about the dish. “Over the course of the year, you’ll have an almost infinite number of iterations of it. Just as you need to menu plan specific things, so to do you need dishes that can accommodate whatever’s happening. That was a day-one dish. Opening chef Katianna [Hong] and I came up with it together. The dip has not changed at all but that dish has changed a thousand times over.”
Up to 90-percent of the vegetables the restaurant uses come from Charter Oak’s three-and-a-half acre farm, which is a half mile from the restaurant. The restaurant and farm teams frequently sit down to discuss what’s growing and how to plan for the future. “It involves multiple meetings every week to have an understanding of what we need to be doing six months from now,” Kostow says. “They suggest things they want to grow or have grown previously with success, and we say what we want to cook.”
The menu planning process is also done together. “We craft a menu together based on what's coming when,” Kostow says. “It’s very intensive and very cool. It teaches us a lot about farming. Our farmer, Zac [Yoder], suggests dish ideas because we’ve been doing this together for so long. It’s inseparable, frankly, the culinary process and the agriculture process.” The farm also tests out new crops. “We’re doing a lot of different onions this year, like pearl onions and leeks,” Kostow says. “We’re always digging into varietals, what we think is going to grow best. We’ll grow four kinds of cucumbers, six kinds of peppers, 10 kinds of tomatoes. We’re doing some cardoons this year, which will be fun.”
Charter Oak’s other signature dish is the excellent cheeseburger, which has a rich beef flavor. Kostow, who grew up outside Chicago, says it was inspired by one he made during his first cooking job at Ravinia, a popular summertime destination for live music. “It was flattop cheeseburgers and we also made nachos,” he says. “I was 14 or something and I always used to make cheeseburgers with the nacho cheese and jalapeños for myself and the other cooks. That’s more or less what this is based on. It’s not super smashed but two thinner patties, white American cheese, a relish made of jalapeños and onions, a lot of Kewpie mayo. We steam the buns before service, like a Chicago hot dog bun. So that’s what gives it that super softness and holds together like it's one thing that was born as it is.”
To me, the restaurant showcases the best of Napa and speaks to a California culinary ethos, and Kostow says he initially created it when he was unable to find many restaurants doing just that. “Our focus was hyper-simplicity, very simple cooking predicated on the things that we ourselves grow,” he says. “That sort of ethos you find in other places, obviously — Charter Oak did not invent farm-to-table cooking. But it was always interesting to me as someone who lived in the Valley that there were very few restaurants that felt like a Chez Panisse did or a Zuni [Café] did. The Valley just didn't have it.”
So he created Charter Oak to highlight the agriculture of the region. “What Charter Oak is predicated upon is the audacity of simplicity, using really simple products and doing very little to them,” Kostow explains. “We say, ‘We grow it, we grill it, we put it on the table.’ We’re not creating dishes. We’re growing and sourcing good things and presenting them to the guest.”
1050 Charter Oak Ave, St Helena, CA 94574 | @the_charteroak
READ MORE FROM CALIFORNIA
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Broiled Shrimp at Doe’s Eat Place
GREENVILLE, MISS. — There are restaurants that we build a trip around, and we went to the Mississippi Delta to eat at Doe’s Eat Place. Open since 1941, this Delta classic is located in a white house on a side street, and to get to your red-and-white table-clothed table, you walk through the kitchen, where cooks are making Delta wet salads, hot tamales, and big steaks.
Everything is great, but the broiled shrimp are our favorite thing. The shrimp are broiled with garlic butter, Worcestershire, lemon, and a variety of spices, then brought to the table in a crock basking in all that spiced butter. The move here (which I learned from a random Instagram comment that was left on someone else’s post) is to get the garlic bread to go with it. You can fork a shrimp onto the French bread, and use the rest to sop up all the extra butter.
Doe’s has additional locations and franchises in places like Paducah, Kentucky; Little Rock, Arkansas; and Jackson, Tennessee, but the original is special and worth the trip.
502 Nelson St, Greenville, MS 38701
We have a drinks-focused reading list this week — we’ll meet you at the bar!
ILLINOIS
Taverns in Chitown: Earlier this spring, Amy wrote about Chicago’s Essential Taverns for Punch. “To truly understand the city’s culture, you have to pull up a barstool at its long-standing taverns and dives,” she wrote. “Every neighborhood has at least one. Order a shot of bourbon or Jeppson’s Malört and the bar’s cheap beer of choice (you’ll know what that is by taking a quick look around).”
MASSACHUSETTS
Breweries in Beantown: Travel+Leisure asked the experts to weigh in on the best breweries in Boston, where “beer has been brewed and poured for some 400 years,” writes Stacey Leasca. “Today, that tradition thrives, and Beantown is home to over 130 craft breweries — roughly one brewery for every 5,000 citizens. The impressive scene is packed with large, established producers and smaller, innovative craft breweries, all slinging unique and tasty libations.” There are some longtime favorites of mine on this list along with some new brews I need to check out. Got a favorite New England brewery? Share it in the comments!
CALIFORNIA
Cocktails in The City: A recent edition of
explored the cocktail menu at Starlite, the reimagined Starlight Room atop the Beacon Grand hotel. “With every drink on the 15-item list of original cocktails, [Scott] Baird pays homage to either cocktail history, San Francisco history or both,” Simonson writes. “There is a Pisco Punch, one of the cocktails most associated with the city’s drinking past. The tequila-based Baghdad by the Bay bears the nickname legendary San Francisco columnist Herb Caen (a Starlight regular) gave the city. There’s even a nod to Baird’s own bartending past in the Pimm’s Cup, which is taken directly from the famous version long served at 15 Romolo.” Simonson adds that there is, of course, a Cable Car, which he notes was long the de facto house drink at the Starlight Room. The Cable Car was also a go-to order of mine when I lived in the Bay Area near the turn of the millennium. The drink popped up frequently on cocktail menus both in The City{1} and closer to my home in San Jose, and it was a favorite drink of my early craft cocktail explorations. I’m glad to see it getting a renewed spotlight at Starlite.– Compiled by Kenney Marlatt
{1} A quick moment for us: Shorthand nicknames for San Francisco can include “The City” or sometimes, “S.F.” But locals would never, ever say “San Fran.” This has been a quick moment for us.
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So much goodness packed in this newsletter. Love the sounds of charter oak and every photo is so crisp!