What do I have in common with Gov. Gavin Newsom and San Francisco Mayor London Breed? Beyond the obvious, that is.
Nope, not that. Not that either.
We’re French Laundry diners!
Granted, I probably don’t eat there as often as they do, but I have a first-hand understanding of why they would put aside coronavirus guidelines last month for French Laundry dinner parties.
Who can say no to three Michelin stars? If you possess taste buds, how do you ignore Anthony Bourdain’s declaration that the French Laundry is “the best restaurant in the world, period!”?
Indeed, if Newsom had told me there was an extra seat at his French Laundry table with my name on it, I’d have chucked coronavirus protocols in a heartbeat.
I might have even asked if I could bring Cheryl.
How, you might ask, does a mere scribe have such familiarity with a restaurant as exalted as Thomas Keller’s place where tasting menus go for $350 per person, not including wine and add-ons.
I won the Napa Valley Register lottery, that’s how. In 2013, the Register gave me a gift certificate for two as a reward for my 40th anniversary at the paper.
What a time Cheryl and I had! Three hours of sublime, subdued dining as plate after plate of exquisitely crafted morsels passed before us.
Our dinner was one muted “wow” after another as a parade of wait staff silently approached the table, muttered incomprehensibly, then bestowed endless micro goodies upon us.
I staggered out feeling utterly besotted. Cheryl somehow retained a perky enthusiasm to do it again.
As special as this once-in-a-lifetime event was, it takes second place to my first French Laundry dinner from the 1980s, before Keller bought and world-classed the place.
In its first incarnation, the French Laundry was a more earthy farm-to-table operation created by Don and Sally Schmitt, the couple behind Yountville’s tourism awakening in the ’70s.
Don had overseen the creation of Vintage 1870 (now V Marketplace), a shopping/dining hub where Sally ran a casual restaurant, the Chutney Kitchen. Vintage 1870 was the Oxbow Public Market of its day.
Their French Laundry was no three-star Michelin operation, but it really impressed the young me. I went once, treating a neighbor who had helped me rebuild my dry rot bathroom.
The meal was a gourmet fantasy. We ate slowly, we wandered around the kitchen, we strolled the gardens, we ate some more.
So very lovely and unpretentious.
When the Schmitts sold to Keller in the early ‘90s, they decamped to Mendocino County’s Anderson Valley where they and their children launched new visitor businesses in a more rustic setting.
This fall we dropped in on the Anderson Valley as part of a Mendocino getaway. A Schmitt co-owns an artisanal gift shop, another Schmitt runs an inn and restaurant. And then there’s the Apple Farm on the Navarro River where Schmitts grows heirloom apples, rent guest cottages and hold cooking events.
It was like visiting Schmittville, but without Don, who died three years ago.
We hung out in the gift store and talked Schmitt talk with a co-owner, then I peered into the hotel that was closed to non-guests. Finally, we drove to the Apple Farm in Philo, parked on a dirt lot and gawked at the heirloom apples, jams and chutneys on display beside a rustic barn.
Emotions best described as nostalgia washed over me. Those Schmitts! Up here, they even trust customers to pay for goods on the honor system.
Their French Laundry is the one I have the fondest memories of. Not world-class, I guess. But it felt a lot like home.
Napa Journal: Surviving big winds
I don’t know what was happening at your house last Sunday, but at our place we were rocking and rolling.
The wind threw a tantrum. A side gate slammed all night long. Trees whipped back and forth. Blown debris formed a forest-floor-like layer on our pool. The lights blinked.
What a wind storm!
I’d categorize it as an “extreme weather event,” the kind of big blow that, had it occurred in fire season, might have wiped out a town or two.
At our house, the lights stayed on, but all of us, including the cat, developed a serious case of the jitters.
Emotionally, it felt like the return of peak fire season, awakening fears that a primal force could overtake our lives.
During the worst of last autumn’s wind storms and power shutoffs we were without electricity for over 100 hours. Going dark for that length of time changes a person. If it happened once, could it happen again?
Neither of us slept well Saturday night once the wind came up and began whistling — actual whistling, and it wasn’t a pleasant tune. Twice the house shuddered as it would in the first microseconds of an earthquake, freezing me under the covers.
I lay there and inventoried our tree issues. We live next to a creek where limbs were surely threatening to come crashing down. And Cheryl had planted a blue spruce and a redwood, now giants. Either one was capable of slicing a room off the house if it fell just so.
Just how much flex does a tree have in a howling wind? Did nature design them to handle winds that whistle?
I didn’t only worry about trees. We have a wounded garage fence that nearly toppled earlier this winter and is now held up by ropes. Would this latest storm be the end of it? Were deer already storming into our unprotected backyard?
At dawn’s light I surveyed our surroundings. The tied-up fence still stood. Buckets of chaff from the creek bay laurels covered the pool where a watering can bobbed. A neighbor’s garbage can had toppled, spilling its contents. Chunks of Styrofoam lay on our driveway.
Then, much like Francis Scott Key after the British bombardment of Fort McHenry during the War of 1812, I dared look up.
Key was looking to see if Old Glory still flew, which it was.
I was looking to see if the Mylar strips that I’d installed weeks ago on the second floor peak of our house to deter wood-drilling woodpeckers still flapped.
There was no sign of them. Stiff winds had ripped them off the fascia, 20 feet off the ground, where they had been doing stellar defense against woodpecker attacks. Our house stood defenseless.
With the wind still gusting, I didn’t dare haul out my ladders to install replacement flappers. Instead, I netted a bucketload of junk from the pool, then repeated my harvest an hour later.
Our place was roughed up, but essentially intact, so Cheryl and I decided to take a walk up rural Partrick Road. After such a night of storming, would it even be passable?
Tree debris lay everywhere. We kicked big pieces off the road lest they upend a cyclist barreling down. In a ditch, we found more Styrofoam.
As we walked through a tree tunnel, a frenzied wind struck and the limbs above us shook furiously.
It’s coming down! Cheryl yelled.
It was decision time. We could either run forward, backward or freeze. Or panic and run in a circle. That’s what I did.
Back at the house, the wind was moderating. I got out the ladders while Cheryl cut the Mylar strips and dug around for more tacks.
Then up I went, first to the porch roof, then into the relative stratosphere of the upper rungs of the extension ladder.
My aerial game of “pin the tail on the fascia” went well. The Mylar began snapping in the breeze. Like Old Glory at Fort McHenry.
Napa Journal: Is your mailbox up to snuff?
Some people live cashless lives, but I still carry a wallet with a few 20s tucked inside. You just never know.
Some people get every bill and personal communication delivered electronically, but I still maintain a curbside mailbox. You just never know.
In the course of a typical year my mailbox receives a thousand or more solicitations, two or three Christmas cards, a couple of thank-you notes and zero letters.
All of which raises the question: If I didn’t have a mailbox, would it even matter?
Ignore this blase attitude. It’s fake. When the rusted door to our mailbox fell off last week, I freaked. While our household hardly receives any mail worth stealing, the prospect of deliveries sitting exposed to passing strangers was beyond unnerving.
How does a mailbox door rust off? Very slowly. In our case, it took 44 years.
Cheryl recalls installing the mailbox in 1976, the year she teamed up with a neighbor to build a platform for two galvanized steel mail receptacles and a cluster of newspaper tubes.
Assuming any new mailbox might also last 44 years, we didn’t rush off to buy a replacement. First, I did a crash survey of how neighbors were receiving their mail.
On a morning jog, I examined four miles of mailboxes in Browns Valley. I noted that some areas had no curbside mailboxes at all. These homes apparently predated the requirement that carriers be able to drop off mail without leaving their vehicles.
I lived in such a house once. It was sweet to have mail delivered to our front door. Not only was mail safer, but we got to know the carriers who walked the route.
From my jogging survey, I can report that the vast majority of street boxes are of traditional design, resembling tiny Quonset huts, and sit on simple poles or posts. But some people get fancy.
They’ve crafted substantial pedestals of brick and stone —sometimes the material matches the trim on their homes — then perch the mailbox on top.
If the pedestal is mighty and the mailbox is dinky, the look is not a particularly good one. Head’s up, people.
Some folks take the traditional mailbox and decorate it to resemble a toy house where a doll might live. Which is cute.
A few take this theme a step further and plant flowers around the base. Which is maybe too cute.
Some buy metal boxes and posts that are incredibly ornate. I wondered if perhaps this was too fancy. Is your house Versailles? Are you Louis XIV?
Then there are the austere black boxes of substantial capacity that lock. I suppose this makes sense, mail theft being what it is these days.
My street has 11 unlocked mailboxes and three locked, which I interpret to mean we live on a relatively safe street. The Neighborhood Watch sign at the entrance must be doing its job.
But up Partrick Road where homes are infrequent and eyes-on-the-street practically non-existent, it’s all locked boxes. A lot of locked gates, too.
A letter would have to pass through a series of security measures — like someone trying to visit a loved one at San Quentin — to reach its intended recipient.
We headed off last Saturday morning for Home Depot to check out their inventory. Nothing I’d seen in my neighborhood had changed my desire for a replacement without ornamentation or locks or fancy pedestal. I wanted to keep it simple.
Home Depot had a bunch. We bought a lovely black one of galvanized steel for $18. The color matches our asphalt. With me fetching tools and extension cord, it took Cheryl about 30 minutes to install it.
The new mailbox looks wonderful. The door closes with a reassuring snap. The flag is a blazing red. Bring on the mail!
The neighbor with whom we share the mailbox platform stopped to admire our postal upgrade. Our new shiny box sits next to his rust-covered one with a flag that is no longer red.
I suspect he was pea green with envy. I know I would be.
Napa Journal: Nashville comes to Napa Valley
My sister who lives in Nashville is coming for a three-day visit with her husband, which is absolutely thrilling. Her only previous visit to Napa was 40 years ago.
Much has changed. I have a different house, a different wife, a different hair line.
Napa’s transformation has been even greater. That mom-and-pop downtown of old? Blown out. We got wine and real restaurants now.
In theory, hosting Dorothy and Jamie for an extended weekend ought to be easy. Just show them the shiny new Napa.
Only there’s a problem. Cheryl and I aren’t all that familiar with the ultra new stuff.
What happens if they’re seeking the Napa Valley of elegant wine salons and spa treatments only to confront a Courtney lifestyle defined by Two Buck Chuck and homemade taco salads?
We rarely venture north of Yountville. I’ve paid to taste wine only once in my life. I still believe that bellying up to the bar for free samples was a good thing.
Cheryl’s pre-visit jitters exceed my own. Being Dorothy’s brother, I can probably rest on my Courtney laurels, she says, whereas she’s a relative newcomer and carries the greater burden of getting home base in order.
Is our guest bedroom too shabby? Do Dorothy and Jamie have exotic eating preferences?
With the visit six weeks away, we’ve begun testing possible itineraries. At night, Cheryl reads Napa Valley restaurant menus online.
There’s surprising sameness. Steak and salmon are everywhere at near-identical prices. Burgers cost $18 and up. And pasta, pasta, pasta.
Ethnic menus leave us scratching our heads. If we haven’t dared taste them, would Nashville embrace them?
Last weekend I did the logical, overdue thing. I called Dorothy to clear some things up. I know very little about your lifestyle and preferences, I said. Our living 2,000 miles apart for almost 50 years has created vast info voids.
What are your Napa Valley expectations? Would you rather use Napa as a launching pad for day trips into the Bay Area, which by many accounts is a more exciting place?
Dorothy, bless her heart, told me to relax. They were coming to see us in our everyday Napa world. No far-flung sightseeing necessary. No spa treatments. She was particularly keen to tour the Register office.
A sweet response, don’t you think? If seeing my cubicle isn’t sufficiently entertaining, I suppose I could show them the murals in back on the Vine Trail.
Dorothy has sharp memories from their previous visit circa 1980. She remembers downtown Napa as a sleepy place. As far as wine went, we toured Robert Mondavi and Sterling, or so she said.
I was impressed. I remember nothing about that visit. Dorothy’s assertion to the contrary, I’m not convinced it even happened.
While Mondavi and Sterling were classic choices for 1980, I didn’t think visits to those two big boys would cut it today. The zeitgeist has moved on.
Thus, Cheryl has added tours and tastings at smaller wineries to her internet searches. But whatever we do, forget The Prisoner, she said. Just the name gives her chills.
If readers have suggestions for local places to taste wine and eat food and sightsee that would appeal to visitors from Music City USA, I’d like to hear them. We have three full-day itineraries to fill.
Part of me says not to sweat it. At its most elemental, this visit is about a sister visiting her older brother — a brother whom she’s seen maybe a dozen times over the decades.
We’re members of a select club, Dorothy and I. Only a couple of people on the planet share the personal histories that we do. Our parents are gone. Our brother Joe died in 2018.
We have a lot of talking to do. The Courtney world we share is shrinking.
Napa Journal: Living in a time of coronavirus
Before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, my dad was a high school teacher in Massachusetts, my mother a nursing student in Memphis.
Kevin Courtney is city editor of the Napa Valley Register.
When they met months later, my dad had become an army captain, my mother an army nurse. They quickly married and he went off to war. I was conceived upon his return three years later.
For me, a lovely story. I somehow emerged from the cataclysm of World War II.
It leaves me wondering if the COVID-19 pandemic, a virus cataclysm, will someday produce some positives.
Right now everything is so horribly bleak. Public life in Napa and much of the world is shutting down in ways that would have been considered unthinkable beyond the pages of a sci-fi novel.
For weeks I had considered the coranavirus news disturbing, but nothing that would threaten my little world. At home and at the Register, I kept on keeping on.
I was so naive. I never imagined Napa community life shriveling to a husk of its former self in only a few days’ time.
I had thought sheltering at home was something people did for an hour or two, during a police or fire emergency, say — not a new lifestyle without a realistic end in sight.
As I write this, the Register newsroom is more than half empty, with five reporters and several editors working from home. Those of us still coming to work enter through a lobby locked to keep out the public. The newsroom smells of hand sanitizer and Clorox wipes.
But at least I’m coming to work. Journalism is considered an “essential activity” under California’s shelter-at-home order. Meanwhile, untold numbers of my neighbors are abruptly losing their livelihoods.
Cheryl has a job that is also considered essential during a pandemic. Each morning we both drive off to work just like normal.
Of course, nothing is remotely “normal.” The streets don’t look normal. The remaining opened stores don’t look normal. The most common diversions outside the home — movies, restaurants, coffeehouses — are either closed or operating as takeout.
This is as mind-bending a situation as the one that confronted my parents at the start of WWII. I can understand rallying to defeat a military aggressor. But fight an invisible microbe that could be anywhere, on anyone, and spreading?
Is anyone sleeping soundly through all this? We’re not.
Cheryl and I both have adult children who lost their jobs last week. Worry ripples through my brain at night. Cheryl also lies awake over concern for her pregnant daughter and a son who works with the homeless in San Francisco.
They say humans can habituate to whatever life throws at them. The abnormal soon becomes the new normal. Maybe that’s what it will take for good sleep to return.
I have a confession to make. This is a gratifying time to be working for a community newspaper. Readers have an insatiable appetite for coronavirus news and it’s our job to provide it.
Weirdly, I’m helping to report news that my brain has trouble fully accepting. Is it really true that when I’m not working or shopping for groceries, I’m basically not supposed to be out and about, unless maybe I’m hiking?
So I stay home and what? Climb the walls? Binge watch? Read my old New Yorkers?
Cheryl and I are talking more at night. We linger over dinner and process the coronavirus developments of the day. This favorite business is now closed. A doctor’s visit just got postponed. Will the dentist be next?
People are still calling the Register wanting stories on topics that have nothing to do with the coronavirus. Topics that we might have jumped on in normal times.
The world has changed, I want to say.
Napa Journal: The virus made me an alpha male
Since the Register sent most of its employees off to work at home in March, I’ve never felt so isolated ... or so important.
Only two of us are in the newsroom this week. Many hours of the day there’s no one in advertising. The front office has two or three employees, depending on the moment.
For a newspaper office designed to hold dozens, a mere four or five bodies is creepy.
You doubt my count? Check out the Register parking lot.
We used to have to jockey for a space. Latecomers could find themselves hoofing it from a block or two away.
Not during shelter-at-home. We could now rent out the lot for tractor-trailer rigs and still accommodate the few of us who come through the locked front door each day.
Just as weird, I’m the only male pulling full office shifts this week. When I look around, I see a scattering of women.
So the thought arises: Lacking competition, have I become an alpha male?
I’ve never been an alpha anything. How remarkable that it took a worldwide pandemic to breathe life into this remote possibility.
The Register’s true alpha males are Davis Taylor, our publisher, and Sean Scully, the editor, but I haven’t seen hide nor hair of either one for over a month now.
Are they still working? Do they even still exist?
There is email evidence that they do. The continued daily news and advertising product is also suggestive. But flesh-and-blood evidence? There is none.
Some mornings I stare at the closed doors to the publisher’s and editor’s offices and think, What if the balloon goes up today? Am I in charge?
That’s me having an army flashback. If the balloon goes up, we’re under nuclear attack ... and woe is us!
In this case, woe is me. I’m the only male in the building, remember.
Some days I wonder if our publisher has sneaked into his office and is busy doing publisher things behind closed doors, only nobody told me.
How would I find out? Do I dare turn the door knob to check?
Of course not! What fool would pop the door to find the shocked man himself at his desk, doing the work?
I know Sean’s doing the work. He floods me with his emails. Or a bot pretending to be Sean does.
I answer each one as quickly as I can. I don’t want to anger the Great Bot at the other end.
In the old days, BP (Before Pandemic), there was frequently competition for the one stall in the men’s room. An uncomfortable situation, let me tell you.
Today? I often have the facilities all to myself. The lights remain off until I turn them on.
Confession time: My only newsroom coworker this week is Jennifer Huffman, news reporter and business editor. Sometimes we remove our noses from the grindstone and do several minutes’ worth of stretching exercises.
Nothing like this WOULD EVER OCCUR in a fully populated newsroom, but hey, when it’s just us chickens ....
Another confession: We have ironclad rules about not eating at our desks, but during COVID-19 my adherence has become spotty. Around 3 every afternoon when I’m on an email round robin with all the section editors and Sean-the-possible-bot, I sometimes nibble on almonds.
Unsalted, non-greasy almonds that won’t gum up my keyboard or create stains on the carpet, but there I am, almond chewing and NO ONE IS THE WISER!
Who knew I was such a rule breaker!
I suspect the coronavirus is teaching us all a thing or two that we hadn’t known about ourselves.
Editor’s Note: Because of the health implications of the COVID-19 virus, this article is being made available free to all online readers. If you’d like to join us in supporting the mission of local journalism, please visit napavalleyregister.com/members/join/
Kevin can be reached at 707- 256-2217 or Napa Valley Register, 1615 Soscol Ave., Napa, 94559, or kcourtney@napanews.com.
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December 13, 2020 at 09:00AM
https://napavalleyregister.com/lifestyles/real-napa/columnists/kevin-courtney/napa-journal-the-french-laundry-then-and-now/article_de44bfe0-419e-5675-97db-cd93b16ea251.html
Napa Journal: The French Laundry, then and now - Napa Valley Register
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