St. Helena's Martini House
“The best place to eat on Valentine’s even with a lot of people.”
We didn’t want to have to sit at a formal dining room table and feel forced to order big entreés, so we managed to get reservations in the cellar at the Martini House in St. Helena. The Martini House is the newest restaurant of Pat Kuleto. He renovated what looks like a nondescript, older house, which was probably 50 years old, that’s in St. Helena, California. He took it and turned it into a funky, cool and chic restaurant. When you walk into the door, the first thing that greets you is the unique decorations, such as the row of old prophets(?) on the wall, and in another place, a row of old wine corks.
The place is up the road in 15 miles from Dean and Deluca, my favorite deli and upscale grocery store. The furnishings of the Martini House are mostly antiques and other used furniture. Up above on the roof, they’ve got what looks like a huge piece of driftwood with candles on the top of it. The kitchen is open, and it’s probably where the original kitchen of the house was. You go down a set of stairs into this bar, and when you get in the cellar, there’s a loud bustling bar with a beautiful fireplace, cool decorations and lots of fun people.
Our table was positioned by a window where we could also watch the people at the bar. As the show went on, which was of out-of-town wedding-going sisters being wooed by a drunken local on Valentine’s Day (by the way, the two sisters have children and were married), we sat and watched while dining on course after course of unbelievably great food.
The first thing we got was a salad with cherries, goat cheese and (???) that was out of this world. Then, I ordered their cream of mushroom soup, which I was told that I couldn’t leave there without getting and I understand why. It would’ve been a meal in itself for two people and I almost wondered if I should’ve stopped ordering after I had ordered the soup.
The guy who runs the place, the chef, is a master of mushrooms. We kept joking that because we had so little love on Valentine’s Day, they made us eat in the basement, and we had to dine on the mushrooms that grew there. The next thing we got was the lobster tail, which had been cooked for about a half an hour in butter making it soft. Usually, I honestly can’t stand lobster because it tastes so rubbery, but this one was much softer than most lobster. It wasn’t as soft as the scallops we almost ordered that they ran out of, though. We did, however, sit down to eat at 9:00.
The final thing that I got to eat was a duck tureen. I honestly didn’t know, for sure, what a tureen was. I thought it was simply something you served soup in. It looked like a mixture between chopped duck, bits of nuts, vegetables and a duck pâté all packed together into a compact cylinder. It was surrounded with bacon and had a wonderful, smoky taste. It was served on strings of apple and, I believe, celery with a little dressing, which was out of this world. The sauce underneath the lobster looked like a sherry reduction. It was so good that I scraped every drop of it clean with little pieces of bread.
All-in-all an unbelievable experience. The atmosphere was out of this world, and it’s definitely now on my list of top 10 favorite restaurants.
