3 Best Restaurants in Sonoma, Napa and Sonoma

Even before charting on Esquire's list of 2022's best new restaurants, the intimate, bungalowlike establishment of New York City transplant Joshua Smookler (formerly chef at his own Mu Ramen and Thomas Keller's Per Se) was already drawing a crowd for its mash-up of Basque, Jewish, and Korean cuisines. Smookler, whose wife, Heidy He, runs the front of the house, consistently delights with idiosyncratic flavor combinations in dishes like feather-cut ibérico pork, lobster in XO sauce, grilled whole turbot, and dry-aged rib eye.

Inside a soigné Victorian former residence with textured wood walls and adorned with contemporary textiles and artworks, the downtown Sonoma restaurant operated by Stone Edge Farm Estate Vineyards & Winery presents a tasting menu built around ingredients from the winery's nearby organic farm. Founding chef Brian Limoges describes Sonoma County and its rigorously farmed, raised, and caught ingredients as his “muse,” with his New England youth, French culinary training, and turns at four iconic San Francisco restaurants providing additional inspiration.

A San Francisco culinary star with establishments worldwide, Michael Mina debuted his first Wine Country restaurant in 2020, its interior of charcoal grays, browns, and soft whites dandy indeed, if by evening vying with outdoor spaces aglow with firepits and lighted water features. Seasonal regional ingredients—Pacific Coast fish, pasture-raised meats, freshly plucked produce—go into haute-homey dishes, prepared open-fire, that include pizzas, handmade pastas, steaks, and the signature lobster potpie with brandied lobster cream and black truffle.