Whenever people ask me for dinner suggestions here in Napa, I usually try to steer them away from restaurants like 25º Brix, Hurley’s and Tra Vigne. I consider these places to be tourist traps, although not in a completely negative sense. By the sheer basis of having access to California produce, these restaurants will be passable — possibly even memorable — to many of Napa Valley’s visitors. I’m not here to call mediocrity a crime, but it’s fairly obvious when a restaurant owes its entire success to its location.
The restaurant community here in Napa is small, so the cooks who work at the good places will often take particular delight and snicker among themselves when someone like Michael Bauer takes one of these tourist traps to task (as he did with Brix last week: a half star for the food — ouch). Anyone who has lived here and who has eaten here should have seen that review coming. Last summer, I would frequently see job listings at Brix for high-level kitchen positions, including Executive Chef. This type of turnover, especially in the kitchen, should be an enormous red flag.
Luckily, for a lot of these places, Johnny Tourist has no clue as to what’s really going on behind the scenes here in Napa. For instance, I think a lot of people must still associate Michael Chiarello with Tra Vigne, since his popular Tra Vigne Cookbook — originally published way back in 1999 — is still in print. But Chiarello has since left Tra Vigne for other ventures, and the consensus among anyone familiar with the Napa dining scene is that the restaurant is now a mere shadow of what it once was under Chiarello’s reign. Still, people who know Chiarello from his Food Network shows will continue to make reservations at Tra Vigne, perhaps blissfully unaware of his departure.
But even as I snub the current incarnation of Tra Vigne, I will admit that the Positano pizza from Pizzeria Tra Vigne (located in a small building behind the main restaurant) is perfectly delicious. For me, it is the “Tra Vigne” brand’s single silver lining, and something to definitely seek out for lunch or for a light dinner. The Positano, according to the pizzeria menu, features “gulf shrimp, crescenza cheese and scallions,” but the item that really sets this pizza apart is conspicuously absent from its menu description: fried lemon slices.
Lemon may be one of the last flavors or ingredients that one might associate with pizza, but these small bursts of citrus — slightly sweet, barely bitter — are just amazing in this context. Perhaps it’s the lemon’s inherent acidity that provides a perfect contrast to the richness of the cheese, or perhaps it’s the fact that things just taste great when they are breaded and fried. Either way, the lemon slices on the Positano certainly help bring the pie to the brink of transcendence (it’s still a West Coast pizza, so I’m not going to go too far overboard here).
Of course, it would be remiss for me not to mention the pizza crust itself, since the crust is the foundation of any noteworthy pizza (and forever the source of great debate). I am hardly alone when I claim that there is no substitute for pizza from a wood-fired oven, and Pizzeria Tra Vigna has that criteria covered, much to its credit. The smoke and the intense heat from a brick oven are each critical factors that influence both the flavor and the texture of pizza crust. Subsequently, I found the crust of the Positano to be spot-on — both airy and crispy — with the appropriate degree of oven-char.
When was the last time you dined at Tra Vigne, not the pizzeria?