Korean fried chicken sandwich at Pat’s International in Guerneville. Heather Irwin/PD
For nearly 80 years, Pat’s Cafe quietly persisted in downtown Guerneville. With a focus on breakfast and lunch, meals were hearty workaday diner standards with family-friendly prices and fisherman-friendly hours. And for three generations under the ownership of the same family, not much changed.
Time meandered by like the nearby Russian River as salmon runs came and went. Floods came and went. Lazy Bear weekends, summer resort-goers and Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence came and went.
Then came David Blomster and his Korean Fried Crack (aka Korean Fried Chicken) and everything changed.
Huevos Rancheros at Pat’s International in Guerneville. Heather Irwin/PD
Over the last six years, Blomster was behind an evening pop-up at Pat’s that featured Asian-inspired dishes with California flair. It’s messy, saucy, cram-it-in-your-face kind of food, with his sweet-savory fried chicken as the star.
Now, Blomster is heading the whole Pat’s show, taking ownership of the restaurant, removing the old bar, creating a new menu and changing the name to Pat’s International to better reflect the gentle mash-up of cuisines he’s featuring.
You can sit at the retro-cool counter with round diner seats or pad into the dining room with wall-to-wall green carpeting and wooden picnic tables. Napkins, silverware, and jam are already on the table.
Though you can certainly stumble into Pat’s with blinders on, it’s the journey into the town’s history and Blomster’s quirky design sensibility that’s a huge part of the appeal.
Interior of Pat’s International. Photo: Caitlin McCaffrey
To take anything at Pat’s at face value is to miss everything. Every surface tells a story, from the mottled “pecky cypress” wood on the walls to the geometric plastic ceiling tiles that are actually an art installation by artist Jim Isermann to a meticulously detailed 1950s Russian River map made by Bill Schaadt, considered one of the world’s greatest fly fishermen.
Everything at Pat’s comes with a side of history. Or fried chicken. Your choice.
Best Bets The KFC Sandwich, $10: The classic fried chicken sando comes with slightly spicy sweet and savory sauce, vanilla slaw, aioli, and a brioche bun. Skip the chicken and get a fried KFT, made with tofu.
Mac and Crack, $17.50: You can go with the plain mac, made with cheddar, Gruyere and Parmesan cheese, but why not sex it up a little and throw some Korean Fried Chicken on top? If you can eat the whole bowl, I salute you and your powerful appetite.
Ham and eggs Benedict with Mornay sauce at Pat’s International in Guerneville. Heather Irwin/PD
Ham Benedict, $15: Why hasn’t everyone thought to make eggs benny with cheesy Mornay sauce instead of Hollandaise? Details. Truly a triumph of yum.
Huevos Rancheros, $14: The classic made with layers of crispy tortilla, black beans, a thick disc of scrambled eggs, salsa and sour cream.
Chicken Pozole, $16: A heaping helping of mild green chili and shredded chicken soup with hominy. Guaranteed to cure your winter blues.
Opening day at Pat’s Cafe in Guerneville in 1940. Sonoma County Library Digital Collections
Also check out: Tofu scramble, biscuits and gravy, hot cakes and syrup, a grass-fed burger, a vegan soba noodle bowl, “Catch of the Day” fish and chips or the Reuben.
Currently serving breakfast and lunch daily from 8 a.m. to 3 p.m. Dinner will return in the spring. 16236 Main St., Guerneville, 707-604-4007, patsinternational.com.
Acme Burger at Acme Burger in Cotati. (Heather Irwin/Sonoma Magazine)
When we review the readership of our articles, one thing becomes apparent: our readers like to eat and drink. From the best burgers in Sonoma County to favorite kid-friendly wineries, food and wine continue to be incredibly popular topics. But the most-read article of the year had nothing to do with dining. Click through the above gallery to see our top stories of 2019.
How do you capture the essence of a multi-faceted place like New York?
Photographer Helen Levitt took her camera to the city’s poorer neighborhoods. In one of her best-known photographs, shot in 1945, four East Harlem girls watch soap bubbles drift across a desolate street. It’s a fleeting moment. While the ephemeral bubbles float, there is the everlasting hope and magic of New York, the city where everything seems possible.
Documentary filmmaker D.A. Pennebaker, in his 1953 “Daybreak Express,” revealed mid-century Manhattan through a rush of images from a Third Avenue train. Propelled by the rhythm of Duke Ellington’s music, Pennebaker’s six minute short explores the large, unfathomable city by going small, capturing its everyday details and rapidly-passing scenes to find authenticity and beauty.
In this century, artists continue their quest to capture the pulse of New York.
Some of the most creative renderings of the city’s people and pockets are the original artworks — satirical, poignant and whimsical — on the cover of its iconic publication, The New Yorker, first published in 1925.
To attain the cover of The New Yorker is a mighty achievement for an illustrator and one that Marcellus Hall, a New York resident for 25 years, has accomplished five times. His work also has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic and Time. A selection of his artwork — sketches, drawings and watercolors — is currently being shown and sold at Sonoma Academy’s art gallery in Santa Rosa (Jan. 7 – Jan. 30).
Hall’s illustrations, like Levitt’s bubbles and Pennebaker’s “Daybreak Express,” offer glimpses of ordinary people going about their lives in New York City: crowds at a park on a summer’s day, young people sipping wine at an art gallery, ice skaters at Rockefeller Center, a homeless couple asleep on the street. His subjects, diverse as the city itself, share one thing: they hold their smartphones tight.
While cellphones have changed the ways in which people interact in public since the days of Levitt and Pennebaker (American photographer Joel Meyerowitz said they “killed the sexiness of the street”), Hall continues to be drawn to the more human aspects of the urban experience.
“I think the flux of the personal and universal that exists in cities is what attracts me,” the illustrator said. “Each person embodies a thousand stories. Sometimes I marvel at the millions of faces in New York and I’m desperate to chronicle or preserve them on paper.”
It’s no coincidence then that Hall’s exhibition at Sonoma Academy feels like a collection of vignettes — if not a thousand or a million, then enough to transport you across the continent.
Arrayed on the gallery’s walls, black and white sketches depict everyday scenes on street corners and subways, in restaurants, parks and pedestrian underpasses. Two recent New Yorker covers show a modern Lower East Side and a humorous take on the urban fascination with bicycles. A series of watercolors conjure artistic renderings of Bill Cunningham’s fashion photography.
On a table in the gallery, you’ll find still another portal to New York: a copy of Hall’s recently published graphic novel “Kaleidoscope City.”
“I wanted to get down on paper something poetic that might capture the beauty and pace of my New York experience,” Hall said about his book. “I’ve never felt comfortable with the panel structure of comics, so I employed the Japanese concept of yohaku no bi (the aesthetics of empty space).”
By using a poetically-concise prose style, combined with etching-like minimalist illustrations, “Kaleidoscope City” takes the reader on a journey through the metropolis. The graphic novel’s protagonist, a young artist, wanders the streets of New York carrying only a broken heart and a sketchbook. He finds inspiration in unexpected places and tells his story through a series of postcards depicting “far-flung neighborhoods … fleeting glimpses of a mysterious woman.”
An excerpt reads, “When I first moved to the city I was intoxicated with possibility … the blank page, the unseen future, the unwritten chapters and the endless possibility of chance encounters that presented itself in the shifting river of faces on every street corner. For years, the desire to get it all down on paper nagged at me, this life and all the serendipitous, beautiful things about it … The Fourth of July fireworks reflecting on the river … The horse head on Market Street … That beautiful Friday night feeling. That mix of hopefulness and expectation that comes when you’re rushing off to somewhere. The streets are electric with energy and your heart is beating with the promise of a perfect night … and romance.”
Writer E.B. White likened New York to a poem “whose magic is comprehensible to millions but whose full meaning will always remain elusive.”
While it may be impossible to capture the essence of a city whose only fixed quality is its constant metamorphosis, the exhibition at Sonoma Academy shows that sometimes it takes only an image, or a short sequence of them, to transport the viewer through time and space to the heart of New York City.
Marcellus Hall at Sonoma Academy, Jan. 7-30, 2020, Mon – Fri, 8 a.m. – 4 p.m., 2500 Farmers Ln, Santa Rosa. Free (sign in at the school reception). Show curated by Hillary Younglove. Follow Marcellus Hall on Instagram, @marcellus_hall.
New year, new you, and new stores! As much as we hate saying goodbye to some of our favorite businesses that close their doors to the retail scene, we love meeting the new kids on the block and seeing the infusion of style they bring. Here are just a few businesses that have recently set up shop in Sonoma County—click through the above gallery for details.
High tea in the dining room at Jordan Winery // Photo by Kim Carroll
2020 in Sonoma County has a lot in store, including a great new way to sample the best of Healdsburg.
During the last weekend of January, the recently launched Tastemaker Weekend will introduce participants to Healdsburg’s food, wine and artisan scene through a variety of activities, such as hunting for garden treasures with flower farmers and blending wine with renowned winemakers.
The new event is part of an effort to bring more visitors to the northern Sonoma County town in the wake of October’s Kincade fire. Though the fire largely spared Healdsburg, downtown businesses have continued to suffer as less visitors come to the area.
“The message we want to get out there is that we’re open for business,” said Holly Fox, chair of the Healdsburg Tourism Improvement District, the organization sponsoring the event. “What makes [our town] special are all the incredible people who live and work here, and our first ever Tastemaker Weekend gives you the chance to get to know these talented makers and experience their crafts firsthand.”
As Fox suggests, the weekend features one-of-a-kind, hands-on experiences with some of the best and brightest artisans in the city. Among them: A flower-foraging and design class with Carlisle Degischer and her team at Dragonfly Floral; a pastry class with Karah Williams, pastry chef at Costeaux French Bakery; high tea at Jordan Vineyard & Winery with Executive Chef Todd Knoll; a cooking class with Oaxacan chef Mateo Granados; a wine-blending workshop with Lambert Bridge Winemaker Jennifer Higgins; and a distillery and mixology class with Jason Jorgenson, co-founder and head distiller of Alley 6. (Tickets to each experience are sold separately.)
Arrangement by Dragonfly Floral in Healdsburg. (Courtesy photo)
Winemaker Jennifer Higgins is excited to share the wonders of wine-blending with those who previously may only have enjoyed tasting wine.
“Blending is where the artistic side of winemaking comes out…we have this huge blank canvass and much like a painter with a brush stroke, we are creating something beautiful with each blending trial,” she said. “Giving our customers the opportunity to blend allows them to experience first-hand just how much effort and energy go into producing our wines. It’s truly a behind-the-scenes look. I think it will give folks a whole new appreciation for what we do.”
Other Tastemaker Weekend events include a wine cave dinner with Shelly Rafanelli Fehlman, the winemaker at A. Rafanelli Winery; a cooking class with four other local winemakers at Relish Culinary Adventures; a cave tour and bottle-sabering experience at Breathless Wines; a watercolor-painting class with two local artists; and a wild-mushroom foraging excursion.
The weekend itinerary also features a free activity — a trail run to the top of Fitch Mountain, led by Skip Brand, owner of Healdsburg Running Company — and ticket holders can enjoy deep discounts on lodging: 50 percent off a second night at most local inns and many Healdsburg-area hotels, including the new Harmon Guest House, Hotel Trio, Duchamp Hotel, and the Best Western Dry Creek Inn. Considering that this is the off-season in Wine Country, base rates at most properties are already lower than usual, and so the discount amounts to a pretty sweet deal.
Mike Brennan, director of sales at Mill District, a mixed-use real-estate development at the south end of town, says the Tastemaker Weekend captures the very best of what Healdsburg is all about.
“Living and working in Healdsburg, we are fortunate to sample the fruits of [these artisans’] labor on a daily basis,” he said. With this event, he added, “visitors can experience it, too.”
If the approaching new year is making you feel optimistic about improving things, that’s good because the world could use more of that. Making greener, more sustainable shopping choices is a great place to start. From products made locally with upcycled or natural materials to items made with gentle fabrication processes, here are a few things that will help make a difference. Click through the above gallery for details.
There is no better time than the week between Christmas and New Year’s Day to get out and about in Wine Country, sample bubblies of all styles, and stock up for New Year’s Eve and beyond. Any day can be a sparkling wine day in my house, although foam for the holidays is particularly appropriate.
Longtime Sonoma bubbly makers Gloria Ferrer Caves & Vineyards, Iron Horse Vineyards, J Vineyards & Winery and Korbel Champagne Cellars continue to rule the roost, yet dozens of Sonoma wineries now offer sparklers in their tasting rooms.
The relocation of Rack & Riddle Custom Wine Services from Mendocino County to Healdsburg has provided the equipment, storage space and know-how to produce fine fizz locally. Traditionally made sparklers, for which still wine goes through a secondary fermentation in the bottle to create the bubbles (often labeled as “méthode champenoise” or “méthode traditionelle”) are labor- and time-intensive. Rack & Riddle supplies everything a winemaker needs to turn his or her own grapes into liquid gold.
“When I worked at J (Vineyards & Winery), through 2006, there were a dozen producers of sparkling wine in California,” partner Bruce Lindquist said. “Now Rack & Riddle has 100-plus sparkling clients, a private-label business, and most (Sonoma) tasting rooms have bubbles.”
All the wineries below are bubbly masters, and also produce and sell still wines. Guest experiences might include wine and food pairings, tours, and the opening of older vintages and magnum-size bottles. Tasting room hours vary, so call ahead before visiting.
Courtesy photo
Breathless Wines
Rack & Riddle co-founder Rebecca Faust and her sisters, Cynthia Faust and Sharon Cohn, own Breathless Wines and pour their sparklers at a tasting room adjacent to Rack & Riddle.
Don’t let the industrial park setting deter you from visiting: They offer a fun, art deco France-meets-Sonoma vibe, with several sparkling wines, patio and inside service, recorded music and experiences that include instruction on the art of sabrage – the removal of a sparkling wine cork with a sword. Recent events have included crepe and dim sum brunches.
The wines, made by Penny Gadd-Coster, are fruity and so very easy to drink, made in a slightly sweet, crowdpleasing yet remarkably refreshing style.
Alan Baker and Serena Lourie’s winemaking business is a labor of love – for each other and the wines they like to drink. Chardonnay, Riesling, Gewurztraminer, Rosé and Pinot Noir are among their offerings at their downtown Healdsburg tasting room, though sparkling wine holds a special place in their hearts. They make two: a lovely, nuanced 2013 Brut Rosé ($68) and 2013 Brut Zero ($68), an all-Chardonnay blanc de blancs to which no sugar was added at the time the yeast was removed after secondary fermentation – an otherwise common practice. The wine is bone-dry and yet remarkably rich and textured.
This is the oldest continually operating sparkling wine house in North America, established in 1882. That history gives Korbel the legal right to use the term “Champagne” on its labels, even though the wines are not from Champagne, France. They’re produced in Guerneville, from grapes sourced from Sonoma and throughout California.
The bruts, rosés, blanc de blancs and blanc de noirs are ubiquitous in national markets, yet visits to the winery are highly recommended. Not only does the staff pour winery-only reserve bubbles and still wines, it’s also a great place to taste and buy the 2016 brut made from organically grown grapes, a bit harder to find. Don’t miss the tour of the ancient cellars and robust gardens.
13250 River Road, Guerneville, 707-824-7316, korbel.com.
Courtesy photo
J Vineyards & Winery
Judy Jordan and her father, Tom Jordan of Jordan Winery, founded J Wine Co. in 1986 for the express purpose of producing méthode traditionelle wines. Judy later took over the business and with her then-winemaker, Oded Shakked, vaulted J to the top tier of U.S. sparkling wine houses. E. & J. Gallo purchased J in 2015 and has continued to offer a great visitor experience.
Belly to the bar for the five-wine J Signature tasting, or reserve ahead for the Legacy Tasting (small-production wines paired with artisan cheeses) or chef Carl Shelton’s five-course tasting menu, with winery-only and older-vintage bottlings, in the J Bubble Room. Want to see how Sonoma sparkling wine is produced? Book a tour and tasting.
11447 Old Redwood Highway, Healdsburg, 888-594-6326, jwine.com.
Courtesy photo
Iron Horse Vineyards
Barry and Audrey Sterling purchased the property in 1976 and made their first sparkling wine in 1980. Their daughter, Joy Sterling, and her brother, Laurence Sterling, are the out-front faces of the company, though Barry and Audrey continue to live on the estate and have a hand in continuing the tradition of producing prestige-level bubbles from their Chardonnay and Pinot Noir vineyards in the chilly Green Valley of Russian River Valley AVA, several of which have been served at White House diplomatic dinners and the 1986 Ronald Reagan-Mikhail Gorbachev summit meeting in Iceland, which ended the Cold War.
Not to be missed are the 2015 Ocean Reserve Blanc de Blancs ($54), 2014 Classic Vintage Brut ($45) and the festive 2014 Wedding Cuvée ($45) — Iron Horse’s youngest sparkler that still spends three years aging on the spent yeast cells. Come for the wide range of classy bubblies, and stay for the jaw-dropping view of Green Valley from the outdoor patio tasting room. At this time of year, rainbows make frequent appearances.
Longboard Vineyards owner and winemaker Oded Shakked, accompanied by his dog, Bear. (Christopher Chung)
Longboard Vineyards
Fizz runs through the veins of Longboard owner and winemaker Oded Shakked. A former sparkling winemaker for J Vineyards & Winery, he founded his own business in 1998.
While Syrah, Pinot Noir and Sauvignon Blanc are foundation wines at Longboard, Shakked’s love of bubblies wines are on display at his Healdsburg cellar: a brut ($45), brut rosé ($50) and a scintillating Brut Z, a late-disgorged wine with zero dosage and four years in the bottle ($75). Fermentation of the juice in neutral oak barrels is a signature of his sparkling winemaking style, which adds depth and palate weight to the naturally acidic bubblies.
Guests attend Gloria Ferrer’s annual Holiday Crab Feed at Gloria Ferrer Caves & Vineyards in Sonoma Saturday, December 12, 2015.
It is not every day that Wine Country makes an appearance in a presidential debate. But we live in strange times, and stranger things have happened.
Judging from news sites and social media feeds, one of the key moments during last night’s Democratic debate was when Senator Elizabeth Warren criticized Mayor Pete Buttigieg for holding a fundraiser with wealthy donors in a luxurious Napa Valley wine cave (turns out, it was Hall Wines in Rutherford).
Following the contentious exchange between Warren and Buttigieg, the hashtag #winecave quickly began trending on Twitter. What is a wine cave? Where is the wine cave? These were some of the questions the American people pondered as they were assessing the performances of the Democratic candidates.
Now, while we try to stay away from making political remarks here at Sonoma Magazine, the question we’d like to ask is this: Why not Sonoma, Mayor Pete? We also have wine caves with excellent wines — but with fewer shiny items to distract voters from the real issues at hand.
Ok, you’re from Indiana, we’ll give you that — but you’re a smart guy: you should have known this Napa wine cave might have been a tad too much. If nothing else, the chandelier with 1,500 Swarowski crystals should have given you an idea… But hey, we’re kind folks here at Sonoma Magazine and we’re always eager to help out-of-towners have the best Wine Country experience. That’s why we’ve lined up a few Sonoma wine caves for you to try on your next visit.
You’re welcome, Mayor Pete. Click through the gallery above for all the details.
Elotes and smoked trout salad at Handline restaurant in Sebastopol. I can’t even say how good the corn was. Oh. My. God. (Heather Irwin)
Every year, I love making my very idiosyncratic list of favorite meals. It’s highly unscientific and reflects both my moods and my personal taste, but I think it also captures a snapshot of a year of dining out in Sonoma County. There are newcomers you may have never visited (and now are dying to go to), tried and true favorites you’ll all agree with…and a few curveballs thrown in just for fun.
So how do I come up with the list? It’s not that hard, actually.
Like anyone, certain dishes just hit all the right notes for me. For the most part it has to look beautiful, have a “best-in-class” quality, be surprising in its flavors and (usually) well-sourced. It’s exceedingly rare that anything lives up to all of those expectations, but when it does happen, it’s notable. Restaurants I visit toward the end of the year tend to be more top of mind, but I go through my entire backlog of photos to make sure I haven’t missed any earlier faves.
Click through the gallery to see my faves of 2019. Let me know below some of yours.
Online reservation service OpenTable released today its annual “Top 100 Restaurants in America.” This year, California dominated the roundup with 22 restaurants featured on the list, which is generated from diner reviews collected between October 1, 2018 and September 30, 2019. Four Sonoma County spots, including two wineries (!), made the list — click through the gallery for details.
