Auro - Calistoga
View of the kitchen (behind glass)
Rating: 15/20
Where: Calistoga, California
When: Dinner for 2 on 26 October 2023
Cost: Tasting menu $175, Wine pairing $105
Accolades: 1 Michelin Star
Why: Gorgeous location in California wine country, good service, some excellent dishes
“Auro” is the flagship restaurant of the brand-new Four Seasons Resort in Napa Valley, just outside of Calistoga at the northern end of California's most famous wine growing region. Auro shares a kitchen with its sister restaurant Truss, but offers only a tasting menu, whereas Truss has an a la carte menu. The main dining room has floor-to-ceiling windows facing a terrace and the open kitchen. Two tables are located right inside the kitchen, and can only be booked by phone. It's also possible to have an al fresco dinner on the terrace, but on this slightly chilly October night, nobody took the staff up on the offer.
Just before entering the dining room, we were served a splash of local sparkling wine and a gougère filled with goat cheese and honey. The pastry was merely ok, and didn't seem too fresh, but the bubbly was a nice touch 13.
Given that there was a fixed tasting menu (apart from dietary restrictions), the only decisions that needed to be made related to drinks. There was a wine pairing on offer, with generally decent but not spectacular wines. At $105 it was not prohibitively expensive as such pairings go, but a few wines by the glass might do an equally good job.
Our dinner started with a collection of amuse bouches, all served at the same time. Hawaiian tuna tartare was seasoned with a Mexican spicy lime dressing. A refreshing dish, but also very sour and somewhat spicy 15. Better was a slice of fried Spanish octopus that was served on top of a squid-ink-colored yogurt sauce. The warm octopus had a good flavor and texture with crunchy skin 16. An oyster-cracker pillow was filled with crème fraîche and topped with a slice of wagyu beef and some caviar. The latter disappeared a bit into the dish, but otherwise this was a nice combination: crunchiness, saltiness, creaminess. The ingredients didn't upstage each other, and they all lasted the same time 16. Less exciting was a small cube of ora king salmon that was seasoned with honey mustard and served on an endive leaf. The mustard's flavor overpowered the much lighter salmon 14. A hollowed-out egg shell was filled with a “boozy egg nog”: a very light foam that was sweet and tasted of alcohol. A fine dish when considered by itself, but it was the odd-one-out in this lineup of amuse bouches - much sweeter than anything else 14. Finally, we tried a baby Tokyo turnip with truffle cheese. The turnip was very (read: too) light in flavor, and the “cheese” felt more like butter with a hint of truffle flavor 13.
The first official course of the tasting menu was a ten-day-aged kampachi served with slices of avocados, cucumbers, a citrus/mandarin agua chile, and some cilantro oil. The agua chile was lovely - acidic with a light fruit taste -, but the rest of the dish was sorely lacking in flavor. We felt that it needed either more salt, more spices, or, well, anything really. The consistency of the fish was also a bit low on texture, probably due to the aging process - I would have preferred a fresher feeling fish 13.
Japanese milk bread was brushed with honey and topped with toasted sesame seeds. Served with two butters - one local and one from Normandy -, this was a great bread, but quite sweet thanks to the honey. This sweetness limited its usefulness in sopping up the sauces of the following savory dishes, so we finished it in quick order 15. Oddly, while our bread plates soon disappeared, the leftover butter was never removed from our table. One of a few instances where we thought that the service was not quite polished yet. Another example were stains on the wine glasses from dish washing. And finally, when we ordered something from the sister restaurant's a la carte menu to go, the process was surprisingly complicated, and resulted in us waiting quite a while for our food.
The following courses were each preceded by a table-side presentation of the main ingredients, in this case a bowl of colorful heirloom tomatoes. The dish consisted of a tomato bisque and some tomato slices, served with a pumpernickel tuile, a few slices of ham, and a puree of medjool dates. After all the talk of heirloom tomatoes, we had expected a flavor explosion, but unfortunately got no such thing. The tomato soup seemed almost a bit canned, with muted flavors. The fresh tomatoes were equally lackluster. The date puree was quite nice though, and started to add some welcome contrast to the dish, but unfortunately there was vanishingly little of it on my plate 13.
Luckily, things improved with the following courses. First, a slice of kinki fish was served with a beurre blanc and some vegetables such as tomatoes and beans, and was topped with a citrus lace herb. The fish was wonderful, cooked perfectly with a crunchy skin. The creamy sauces went very well with it. Only two nitpicks: why were the tomatoes room temperature while everything else in the dish was warm? And why was the portion of the fish so tiny - we would have loved to have had some more 17.
The final savory course featured a steak of Australian wagyu beef - more precisely, it came from a cross of Australian and Japanese wagyu breeds. The steak was served with maitake mushrooms, a bok choy soubise and an oxtail bordelaise with black truffles. The vegetable sides were excellent: the greens had a strong flavor, as did the mushrooms in addition to adding a nice crunch. The sauce was lovely as well, and the meat was good, although some parts were a bit chewy, ideally it would have been “melting in one's mouth” all the way through 17. The pescatarian version of this dish replaced the wagyu and the oxtail sauce with salmon and a chimichurri sauce, but left the sides the same. This was a perfectly cooked salmon bursting with flavor. Even better than the beef 18.
A brief tour of the kitchen brought us to the dessert station and a lemon curd meringue popsicle. Crunchy and sweet 16.
Back at our table, we received a vanilla mousse surrounded by fresh and cooked figs, some shortbread cookies, and basil leaves, all seasoned with basil oil and balsamic vinegar. A light, not too sweet dessert, where all ingredients combined nicely 15.
The final dessert was based on chocolate. A chocolate mousse was served with a candied pecan nut, some Chantilly cream and a salted caramel ice cream. The ice cream was excellent, and the mousse also good. A good, but a bit unsurprising dish 14.
Some petit fours concluded our dinner. Small canelés had a nice crunch and were quite good for their size 15. Matcha shortbread had only the barest hint of matcha flavor, and the sugar crystals in the shortbread felt a bit too prominent 14. Salted caramels with pistachios were good, but I wished that the nuts had had more of a crunch, they were quite soft 15. We took home some hazelnut brittle.
Overall: A somewhat uneven dinner in California’s wine country. Half the savory courses were easily in two-star territory, but the other half was nowhere near even a single star. The service was all very friendly, but there were small hiccups along the way. But there is no denying that the restaurant has a gorgeous setting. Given that the restaurant had been open for less than a year, there's hope that these issues will only be temporary 15.
