Dinner in Sonoma County
It sounds more fancy than it is: a five-course dinner with wine and live music in a region that’s often been profiled as THE place for rarified and expensive California cuisine. Yet this little family-run restaurant has somehow remained true to its small town agricultural origins and offers pretty good food for a reasonable price in a comfortable setting. And for me, it has aged surprisingly well.
Dinucci’s Italian restaurant is located in Valley Forge, California, a tiny burg of maybe a dozen families nestled among the rolling hills of west Sonoma County. Sheep farming has been the main industry here for the last few hundred years, with an occasional tourist dollar dropped on gas or trinkets by folks who are headed for the coast. I spent a lot of time in this part of the world as a child, when we’d pass through these tiny towns on family outings to go dig clams, gather mushrooms, or ride horses at the beach. Most of the time we’d be focused on getting to the Pacific and all that action, but every now and then we’d pull up at one of the small restaurants that are sprinkled around this part of the world and enjoy meals that I still recall fondly. Dinner at those long shared tables was a bucolic and rural scene that I thought was long gone.
I’ve told the stories of these dreamy meals to many friends over the years. I’m sure it always sounds like hyperbole when I describe that happy world, and some friends surely raise an eyebrow at my memory of our parents offering watered-down red wine for the kids with the approval of the wait staff and other diners. Even in the 1960s, these dining halls felt like farm-town throwbacks. I’ve hung onto these stories of an enviable childhood like some people cherish family heirlooms. The Sonoma County of my youth, when it was just a grape-growing region and before it morphed into “the wine country”, was, for me, a safe and happy place. The family outings to share dinner with strangers in the middle of nowhere have always been an important part of that story.
So it was a happy surprise when Amy and I recently discovered that a nearly intact version of that rural dining scene is still alive. We ran across Dinucci's as we were, once again, headed to the coast to walk the beach, climb Bodega Head, and look for Gray Whales. We made note of the dingy white clapboard building as we headed west that morning, but didn’t see fit to make a reservation since you never know where a rambling daylong outing might end up. But in the end, we returned at dusk by the same route, and pulled in. Appearing a little more glamorous in the low light, we were hopeful about the ragtag collection of modest cars and trucks in the parking lot. We parked against a wire fence, and stepped out into a dark yard replete with bleating sheep and the smell of dairy. Some tinny music (”is it live?”) leaked from the back door of the place. Amy and I agreed to see if we could get a table, even as we tried to keep our expectations in check.
I don’t know if it was the front door or not, but we walked right into the bar. Every head turned to assess us in a friendly sort of way, and we inspected the people and place right back. For me, this is the greeting you hope for: that of locals who don’t see a lot of tourists and want to know who is joining them. We were clearly the outsiders, what with the fleece and nice rain gear, but it felt like there was plenty of social space for us. The classic backbar with mirrors and dark wood was stocked with mid-range booze. An aroma of garlic wafted from the dining room. I let my guard down.
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We took a pass through the dining room, confirmed that a table was available, considered the benefits of eating in the bar, but chose the dining room and a little two-top tucked up against the wait station. On the wall, above a caddy stocked with salt, pepper, and olive oil, a hand-carved placard replete with the Italian tricolors announced that we were seated at The Spaletta Table. I quietly thanked that presumably old couple for not going out to eat that night.
The menu at these old Italian places is usually pretty simple, and the courses running up to the main are pretty much a one-version take-it-or-leave-it offering. In this case those first courses included a basic plate of antipasto, French bread and butter (nobody here cares about the gluten monster), a respectable green salad, and a half dozen ravioli adorned with a smear of marinara. In most of these places, if you’re short of appetite, you can stop right there by ordering what my family always called the “up to”, meaning all four courses up to but not including the main. On this night, you could enjoy all that for $17, and they’d bring you enough good food to call it dinner. This, in the same region where a few nights later I’d squander $22 on 15 olives and two minimalist slivers of ciabatta in a fancy wine bar.
It was a congenial scene there in that low-ceilinged dining room. The music we’d heard from the parking lot was indeed produced by a local musician who sang and accompanied himself on the keyboard. Favoring pop and rock covers from the 60s and 70s, he actually had folks singing along over their dinners. When the waitress delivered a cake to a big group in the far corner, he transitioned smoothly from Rocket Man to Happy Birthday and back. We all cheered for the birthday girl.
Unpretentious best describes the scene that night. Nobody was there to be seen, or to criticize the menu, or to compare the place to other establishments. I thought of the concept of a mature forest, an ecosystem that has evolved to its final and most stable form. If you had some highfalutin expectations about a gourmet dinner, I suppose you could have been disappointed. But I sure wasn’t, and I suspect that the majority of diners there, or at least those who returned, were happy to have a pretty good meal with some nice folks who simply wanted to break bread among friends.
We plowed ahead into the main course. These places usually offer a half dozen mains or less. Chicken, beef, or seafood, with a few permutations of each, will often sum it up. Amy and I dove into big plates of chicken cacciatore, not because we needed any more food but because we wanted to run the menu out to its intended conclusion. By the time the waitress rolled our entrees out, I viewed her like an old friend who was entrusted to take care of us. We finished off every bit of that meal, sat and savored our wine, paid the tab, and then lingered some more. Amy and I made eye contact that included the implicit acknowledgement that we were in the midst of a rare and happy scene.
I wonder, or worry, if a place like this will eventually time-out and be transmogrified by the creeping pressures of social media. After all, there surely were things in the menu or decor or service that could be “fixed” to bow to modern concepts of user-friendly choice and diner self-realization. But I have to think that if Dinucci's has survived in this form for all these tumultuous years, then maybe it’ll hang on a little longer, like a remnant of the nearby old-growth redwoods into which people can wander occasionally and be reminded of how satisfyingly simple dinner can be. I sure hope so. I for one will carry a memory of that place wherever I dine out and it’ll affect how I view other restaurants. I don’t hope to find another dining hall like this, but I will be looking for remnants of the intrinsic human values I saw in play that night. After all, it should not be that difficult to welcome customers into your place of business, treat them like friends, share your best recipes, and charge a fair amount for the service. Yet in that description, I now see, there are a lot of steps in which the whole endeavor could go wrong. Perhaps a place like Dinucci's is rare indeed, with hospitality and gracious dining captured in fine balance against the fast-food influence of the rest of the world.
Dinucci’s may not be what a lot of modern diners are looking for, but I appreciate such a place and I hope that other folks do, too. It’s a selfish wish, of course, because all I really want is for them to stay afloat so that next time I’m out in that far end of the county I can veer into the parking lot, thread my way through the bar, and eat happily at a tiny table in the corner. For me, that’ll be a soothing confirmation that there is indeed hope for the world.
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