The Charter Oak Restaurant
Aged beef tartare with ember mayo and milk bread, which the MICHELIN inspectors call maybe the finest version they have seen. Everything else comes off the hearth and off a 3.5-acre garden down the road.
Why go
Christopher and Martina Kostow own it, and he cooks at The Restaurant at Meadowood, the three-star room up the hill.2 This is the other kind of restaurant: a hulking hearth, high ceilings, and food the guide says is best enjoyed as a group.
1 The vegetables come from a 3.5-acre culinary garden that sits on the grounds of the St Helena Montessori School, farmed organically and picked several times a week through summer.3 Zac Yoder runs it, and in July he is already seeding fall: Our first round of cabbages, cauliflower, kohlrabi, and broccolis will be in the ground or seeded in our greenhouses by the end of this month.
3 That is why a bowl of raw vegetables is a course here and not a garnish.
Order this / avoid
- Order: the aged beef tartare with ember mayo and milk bread.1
- Order: the bowl of just-plucked vegetables with the fermented soy dip, then the chicken with preserved lemon and the rice cooked in house-cultured butter.1
- Avoid: eating here alone off a plated menu. The kitchen builds for a table, and the sides carry as much fire as the mains.1
What locals & experts say
- MICHELIN Guide, California (selected):
Christopher Kostow's casual-cool retreat continues to be a well-regarded and rightly applauded Napa mainstay... A starter of aged beef tartare with ember mayo and milk bread may just be one of the finest versions we've seen yet.
1 - Zac Yoder, farm director, on the July harvest:
All of our major summer crops such as beans, tomatoes, peppers, squash, cucumbers, and eggplants are all in full production. These crops need to be regularly harvested in order to continue producing fruit, which means our harvest schedule sees them multiple times per week.
3
Good to know
- Booking: through Resy, and this is a room that fills. The restaurant's own hours page serves a JavaScript shell, so check times on the booking page rather than the site.
- Standing: in the MICHELIN California selection, with no star and no Bib Gourmand on its guide page.1
- Hygiene: not established. No inspection instrument for this county is on file here.
Verdict
should-visit — The inspectors put it plainly on the tartare, aged beef with ember mayo and milk bread, calling it possibly one of the finest versions they have seen, and that is a judgment on a plate rather than a nod at a name. Everything comes off the hearth and off a 3.5-acre garden that Zac Yoder farms on the Montessori school grounds, which is why the vegetable course is the one the guide leads with. It sits in the California selection with no star and no Bib, checked against Auro's starred page on the same host, so read it as the room Christopher and Martina Kostow built to be eaten in rather than studied. Go with people and share, because the sides are where the fire shows.