Ad Hoc

10/4/2009
Yountville, CA: 6476 Washington St - (707) 944-2487
Rating (1-10): 9
Price: High End

"Luxury in Sweatpants"
Ad Hoc is an inviting, casual neighborhood spot serving ultra-satisfying four-course set meals using French Laundry ingredients at about $50 per person. If that doesn't sound awesome, I don't know what does. This is a restaurant everyone can love, many can afford (at least on vacation), and all would appreciate. Ad Hoc can serve as your casual meal or your fancy meal - regardless it might be some of the best food you will have in the Napa Valley.

Comfort is the name of the game here and it begins with the entry to the restaurant, which features a nice open space, free of tables or any other obstacles to crowd you as you wait. You might grab a drink at the bar or just wait near the front, but you won't feel cramped, rushed, or harried either way. The decor is clean and simple, and the hard wood colors give a nice warm feeling to the room. The service is also pleasant and friendly, clearly trained to keep things laid-back; this is high class food but they remove the pretense from the experience. Unfortunately, the server was a bit strong on the upsell, which always rubs me the wrong way, as if to make us feel bad about not spending more.

Ad Hoc offers a set menu that changes each night except certain nights, which are designated for a special dish, such as Monday night fried chicken. On our visit, the offering was a salad with ham, pasta with cauliflower, cherry tomatoes, and beef short ribs, a cheese course and a banana split for dessert. The salad was probably the best I have ever had - certainly the most memorable. Maybe it's just me but I find it difficult to describe the taste of leaves. But these were crisp and bursting with flavor that one might associate with green things. Thin sliced ham was the perfect salty complement to the acidic dressing, which lightly coated the lettuce. This was a rare case where the dressing supported the greens, and not the other way around.

The main course featured large cubes of beef short ribs along with flat pasta served in a saute pan with roasted vegetables and crispy, salty bread crumbs over top. Often, slow-cooked meats are cooked to a consistency that renders a knife unnecessary because the meat is pulverized to shreds by extensive exposure to low heat; it's good, no doubt, but you're losing a little bit of the character and flavor of the ingredient by trying to make it so tender. For example, pulled pork often tastes more like the sauce that it's mixed in rather than actual pork. At Ad Hoc, the beef short rib tastes very much like beef and maybe as a result, they don't even need sauce. The consistency is distinctly meaty and they don't in fact just melt in your mouth; though they were tender and gave way with ease to fork and knife, they retained a bit of toughness as a reminder that this, afterall, meat not pudding.

The accompanying pasta was covered thinly in oil but had no real sauce. Again, this allowed for the ingredients to be showcased and not masked: the tart sweetness of the tomatoes; the earthy cauliflower; the crunch of the breadcrumbs (which were a salty substitute for cheese, as one astute observer remarked); and of course the pasta along with the chunks of beef. The dish was extremely good, satisfying, healthy, unfussy, period.

Many in the area mentioned that Ad Hoc was their favorite restaurant. I'd be hard pressed to find a better value and I'd consider it a matter of course to include this in at least one Napa visit.