6 Best Restaurants in Petaluma, Napa and Sonoma

Youthful vacations in southern France inspired the menu at the wide-windowed storefront restaurant opened by Nick Ronan, a longtime San Francisco restaurateur and author of The Kissing Chef. "I feed my soul through people," the chef has been known to declare, his zeal for community informing his effusive hospitality and diligent Cal-modern reinterpretations of onion soup, cassoulet, coquilles St. Jacques, beef Bourguignon, and other familiar fare.

An early participant in the Slow Food movement, Central Market serves creative, Cal-Mediterranean dishes—many of whose ingredients come from the restaurant's organic farm—in a century-old building with an exposed brick wall and an open kitchen. The menu, which changes daily depending on chef Tony Najiola's inspiration and what's ripe and ready, might include spicy duck wings or seafood sausage starters, pizzas, a stew, two or three pasta dishes, and wood-grilled fish and meat.

The Petaluma-based owners of this hip-homey counter-service restaurant pay homage to Swedish street food, whose influences, it turns out, include Middle Eastern cuisine. Seasonal ingredients, for the most part locally produced and raised, find their way into kebabs, Swedish meatballs, Wiener schnitzel, gravlax, herring, and korv kiosk (grilled frankfurters or sausages), all prepared with élan.

The chef-owners of this neighborly restaurant say their fare "walks the line between comfort and haute cuisine"—mostly California-inspired and "hyperseasonal" items that might include Mt. Lassen trout with leek roulade or local duck breast in Grand Marnier sauce served with fig and potato gratinée. The same could be said for the casual but knowing hospitality and the decor (bare wooden tables yet linen napkins), but it all works: dining here engenders quiet excitement.

Fried chicken and St. Louis ribs whose meat glides off the bone are among the hits at this open-air, partially covered restaurant where diners sit at sturdy oak picnic or high-top tables. Many ingredients come from artisanal protein and produce purveyors; craft breweries make most of the two dozen beers on tap.

Long a locals' favorite for traditional Italian-American cuisine, this restaurant has a warmly lit, often packed dining room and a heated back patio with Petaluma River views. The chef, who trained in Italy, prepares several pasta dishes a night, along with mains that might include veal scaloppini or saltimbocca, roasted chicken stuffed with arugula and pancetta, and pork tenderloin with Gorgonzola sauce.