Brennan's Restaurant: A wonderful stop for a windy Napa day

The place:  Brannan’s Grill – Calistoga, CA

                Lunch – November 30^th, 2011

First lunch of the trip in Napa.  We’d spent the morning at Castello di Amarello  (Castle of Love) and after 2+ hours there headed a short distance away to Calistoga and tracked down a restaurant on the main drag called Brennan’s Grill.  -  http://www.brannansgrill.com/

Since late November is not exactly the high season for Calistoga (and as you’ll gather from several other of these postings this trip benefitted greatly from taking place in the “off season”), we were brought into an almost entirely empty restaurant and proceeded to have a fantastic meal.

The food:

Butternut squash soup

Mozzarella Grilled cheese

Red wine flight

The results:

At first glance, our soup bowl appeared to be rather small,  but once we dug into the soup found  that it was more than rich enough to satisfy our hunger and considering the wind was blowing a bit it went a long way towards warming our not quite acclimated Florida bodies on a cool northern Napa day

The sandwich was a pleasant discovery as we’re big fans of grilled cheese, but having one based on Mozz was something new.  The combination of the strong flavors from the soup coupled with the simplicity of the sandwich made for a great combination and this is certainly a soup that we’ll look into making once we get back to FL.

Although I had quite a few different wines at Castello di Amarello earlier in the day, this was a nice set of choices to go with the meal that we had chosen. All Napa Valley wines, my favorite of the three was the Allora Tresca (2006), but in the interest of full disclosure I’d had a few different tastes over the morning and can say that all three (which I’ve listed below), were tasty enough that I’d considering them all “try agains”.

Red Wine flight at Brennan’s:

Allora, Tresca – Napa Valley 2006

Bennett Lane, Maximus – Napa Valley 2006

Von Strasser, Cabernet Sauvignon – Napa Valley 2006