February 11, 2010 - Cyrus Restaurant

Cyrus in Healdsburg, CA (Sonoma wine region)
http://www.cyrusrestaurant.com/

Our decision to eat at Cyrus was fairly rash. I was supposed to fly to SF for Valentine's Day and we already made reservations at Dining Room at the Ritz for the Friday before Valentine's Day. Through some sort of chain of events, we decided to book a room at Indian Springs Spa in Calistoga. We then decided that we might as well eat at a nice restaurant to complete the mini vacation. I had been wanting to eat at Cyrus since the moment I discovered that it existed, and since we were not likely to ever be this close to Healdsburg again, this seemed like a good time to try it out. Luckily we had no problem making a 7pm reservation about three days before we wanted to eat there. Unluckily, Healdsburg is actually a 40 minute drive from Calistoga, half of which is through windy mountain roads.

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Like a good husband should always do, I insisted that we order the eight course tasting menu. Ellie thought there was some decision that had to be made with regards to the menu, as she clearly didn't look ahead of time. Cyrus had exactly four menu options to make. Five course or eight course. Vegetarian or meat. I can't speak for the vegetarian, but the eight course meat was $28 more expensive than the five course. It was the five course plus, chicken cooked two ways, a cheese plate, and an additional orange flavored dessert. Not to give anything away, but you actually would be better off with the five course and an additional cheese plate for $18. In other words, the cheese was worth $18, but the chicken plus additional dessert was not worth $10.

But it's not like we came here to save a couple bucks. We wanted food. And food we got. Pretty much as soon as we sat down a very extensive caviar and Champagne cart rolled up on ice. It was beautiful, but certainly not anything that we are presently interested in (maybe for our 20th anniversary?). We immediately noticed that Cyrus had a similar style to the high caliber style of Joel Robuchon, but it had a much more welcoming vibe. Our head waitress offered us the caviar cart, and provided a very detailed explanation that some patrons prefer to start with caviar, "but of course you may also offer to forgo this cart and go directly to the main menu options." We mentioned that we would forgo the caviar. We also mentioned this with dSLR in hand pointed at the caviar cart. Ellie managed to snap a couple pictures while it was still there, and she handed the camera to me because I had a nice close up shot available. Our waitress was actually kind enough to mention that their weights (pieces of gold with seals on them) made for a very nice shot. She opened the case where the gold weights were kept and patiently waited while I took a shot of them (but as you can see from the blog, I screwed that up so no pics are included). It was very welcoming, but unfortunately you can't tell because I suck at taking pictures, even with a shiny piece of gold one foot away from an awesome camera.

Once we ordered the eight course (four of the courses had options, so there were something like 15 different items that we tried counting the amuse et al) menu, a cute platter of flavor sensation was brought to our table. No really, a platter of flavor sensation. We were told that the bottom contained an example of umami and sweet, the middle of salt, and the top of bitter and whatever the other taste sensation is. We both thought the highlight was umami (maybe we need to get in touch with our inner umami?), as it offered, well, a different flavor sensation than we were used to. Really though, it was a warm mushroom tasting soup with a mild lemon flavor. It was really refreshing, and a soup made from this base would be incredible.


An amuse bouche of Nantucket Bay scallops served three ways followed the flavor opening experience. There was a raw scallop, a ceviche scallop, and a seared scallop that was cooled in the fridge. This was fun as they tasted different but essentially looked the same.



After the amuse bouche, we were then offered an array of bread. It wasn't quite the cart from Joel Robuchon, but it was a breadster holding a pair of tongs and a big old basket of bread. He named about eight breads, and Ellie and I each picked two. They were pretty good. We were also provided a small serving bowl that contained sea salt from somewhere in Europe and another Hawaiian sea salt with shrimp flavoring. And two different butters. A yellow one from Sonoma and a white one from Europe. Whatever though, the butter wheel from Joel Robuchon still had them beat.

After we were no longer hungry from all the food we had already eaten, we finally got our first course, tuna sashimi. The tuna was clean and fresh tasting, like somebody had just plucked a fish out of the icy ocean and cut a little piece of for us. It went well with the side as well. This was a good start to our actual meal. The next course was some sort of soup (abalone?) that I don't recall.

Apparently we got some duck or something at some point. A memory lost to the ravages of time ...






After the soup, we were then served half a lobster tail with pickled ramp and a yuzu sauce. This was incredible. The lobster was perfectly cooked and the flavors paired very well together. But after tuna, abalone, and lobster, we were in for our first truly amazing course.

The foie gras came out in lobe form. It was a huge piece of seared foie gras. It wasn't all small and pretty. This was large and ready to be eaten. And eat it we did. Now, we are usually excited to eat small amounts of refined food, but this was a quality foie gras, and I could have eaten an entire lobe if given the chance. I'll let Ellie add specifics if she would like. I just ate a turkey bagel dog on the airplane, so it's pretty hard to think of descriptive ways of describing food.

A salmon course came out next. This was good enough to remind Ellie that she actually likes salmon. I cooked it for her once when we first met, and because it was fresh from a fish monger I let some of the salmon flavor sneak through by not cooking it super well. I was going for a seared sushi type of thing, but it just reminded her of raw meat so she had been disgusted by salmon for the last couple years. This managed to reverse that.

Ellie then got a wagyu course. I had basically come to the conclusion that wagyu is good, but drastically overrated and never worth the supplement fee or the premium it commands over other foods. However, this wagyu was incredible. I felt like it was what wagyu was supposed to taste like. In other words, a tasty piece of meat with the flavor and tenderness of fat but the texture of a meat. By this point, our experience had easily propelled the meal to a top three best meal ever. Up there with Coi and wd-50. These are all so different that ranking them would be impossible. They are all perfect depending on your mood. But hey, we are only done with the entrees. There was still plenty of food to eat.

After our wagyu course came the cheese. There was a pretty extensive cheese cart that rolled our way. The cheese guy asked us a few questions about preferences, like location, type of cheese, hard or soft, stinky or mild, and he then used our answers to create a perfectly calibrated plate of six cheeses. He picked two cow, two sheep, and two goat. Since we both like soft, but Ellie likes mild and I like stinky, he gave us a ridiculously stinky cheese that was almost the texture of warm queso cheese that you would find on cheap nachos. This was my favorite. He also cut what must have been a four ounce chunk of blue, which was good, but that is too much blue. It's the only thing that was left on our plate out of the probably 10 ounces of cheese that we were served.


We then apparently had a bunch of desserts. The orange dessert (bottom right) came with a really good French macaroon, but the rest of the dessert was pretty boring. -- Actually, we are filling this paragraph in almost a year after the fact, and I can't believe how many desserts there appear to have been. In fact, the top left one doesn't look like a dessert at all, but we don't know what it is. Ellie seems to remember the bottom left dessert being a donut-like dessert with Nutella filling, which sounds pretty great.

After our second dessert, a mignardises cart came by. I really liked how the guy basically just looked at us and decided which mignardises we would like. It was refreshing to get a big plate of personalized chocolate handed to you without having to make any decisions. Also, it's super hard for me to remember more than my favorite three, but I always want more than three. I think we did ask for an additional macaroon though. Also, we didn't really eat any of them, as we opted to stuff them into the brownie box that they they proceeded to give us (which included a really soft fudge brownie with walnuts).

I think there were only two very small complaints. We ordered a half bottle of white wine which was simply left on the table and not put on ice. It would have been nice if they asked us if we wanted it on ice. I'm sure we could have asked if it actually bothered us, and we did seem to imply that we would possibly order a second half bottle, so they probably just assumed that we would finish drinking it before it got warm. But that ended up being incorrect. It took us over two hours to finish the bottle. The only other complaint is that most other tables seemed to be offered a homemade chocolate soda. After our amazing grapefruit soda experience at Coi, we were looking forward to homemade soda from Cyrus. But after the cheese plate we literally became too full to even care about getting the soda. For real, soda seemed too filling.

So basically Cyrus was exactly what we were expecting Joel Robuchon to be. There was lots of amazing food, all kinds of super extravagant things like mignardes, a caviar cart, tons of bread options, and multiple amuse bouches, excellent service, and the whole place made us feel really comfortable. In all, this dinner competes with Coi and wd-50 as top restaurants that we have been to so far. In fact, it was so good that we came really close to canceling our Dining Room at the Ritz dinner which was scheduled for the very next night. But ... we didn't.