Nick's Cove

For lunch today, we stopped at Nick’s Cove, which is south. If you go from Sonoma, and you go to the ocean and go south just a little bit, you’ll get it. We went there because last night, we had dinner at the Martini House, and we wanted to try another one of Pat Kuleto’s restaurants.

This one I read about. It was supposed to look like an authentic 1930’s seafood restaurant on the coast and sure enough it turned out it to be one. It was a 1930’s restaurant that has been on the coast and had been there for forever. It had eventually been abandoned until Pat Kuleto came in, redid the place and made it spectacular. It looked just the way you expect a cool, funky seafood place to look like on the coast.

One of the things that was really exceptional was that afterward there was a long dock that went out to a little boathouse that looked like a place where you can rent boats or possibly, just a dock for people to land on. What they’ve done is they’ve taken this little boathouse at the end of the dock, made it really cool inside with all kinds of ocean artifacts, had a little table set up and even have a phone in there so that if you do happen to wander out there, you can order food from the kitchen and have it delivered to you.

My wife thought the food was just okay. She ordered some (???), but she thought that it was overdone and too crispy. I, on the other hand, had a cioppino(?) that was unbelievable and I also ordered some oysters which were fantastic. I also ordered a sushi rolled with local (???) crab which was pretty good too.

Overall, we didn’t realize that with all the restaurants it was getting harder and harder to walk out of a very good restaurant for under $100. And we realized that in today’s economy a lot of these restaurants are going to start having trouble filling up. On the other hand, all of the restaurants I’ve been mentioning lately have been full of people so it just goes to show that if you’re first class that do better than everybody else, even if the place was a little bit pricey, you’d still be able to fill the place up with customers.

The atmosphere at the place was unbelievable. The location where it was poised was unbelievable and in fact, they have taken some old cottages that were down the way on the water and renovated them into hotel rooms. I can only imagine how beautiful they must have been inside. As we drove by them, we realized one of them was actually a boat that looked as if it was dried out for repairs and they painted it up and made it really cute. They were using that as one of the hotel rooms. The hotel rooms, they told me, were in the $200-$500/night range.