This Wine Country cafe is known for its hot, tender biscuit sandwiches. Here's the best one to order
I was waiting for my breakfast order of biscuit sandwiches when Contimo 's co-owner Ryan Harris plopped down on the bench next to me. 'I'm sorry,' he said, poker-faced, 'but I'm going to have to ask you to leave.' Not without my biscuits, Ryan! In his review of the Napa sandwich shop, my colleague Cesar Hernandez correctly raved about their tender crumb, a product of the grated frozen butter in Harris' grandmother's recipe. I would argue equal word count could have been devoted to Contimo's pimento cheese, which melts unctuously into the warm-from-the-oven biscuit ($7.75).
Contimo Provisions. 950 Randolph St., Napa. contimonapa.com
I feel like rhubarb is less popular in California than it is in New York, where the first pink stalks at farmers markets harbinger the arrival of spring. It's a promise as much as it is an ingredient. In milder climes, perhaps rhubarb is less emotionally significant, but I still order it whenever I see it on a menu — which is why the strawberry and rhubarb galette ($13) edged out the salted fig caramel trifle (four words of real beauty) at Sonoma's The Girl and the Fig. The sweet-tart pastry, topped with toasted almonds, a burnished caramel and a mondo scoop of vanilla ice cream, teleported me from a 90-degree Wine Country summer day to April back East.
The Girl and the Fig. 110 W Spain St., Sonoma. thegirlandthefig.com
'We ordered ours with cheese,' I said to our server when she dropped our order of seemingly cheese-less tteokbokki ($20) at um.ma. Not to fear, she explained, the cheese was mixed into the crimson sauce. This was immediately evident as I served my dining companion a spoonful and was treated to a cheese pull of epic proportions. The cheese content is so high, in fact, that I would caution you to eat at a relatively quick pace; the sauce congeals into a semi-solid state as it cools.
um.ma. 1220 9th Ave., San Francisco. ummasf.com
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