Explore the Restaurant

Every day, the cooks and sommeliers here taste together, testing dishes against bottles until each one makes the other better. It is a working habit, not a slogan, and it explains why the wine list reads as a partner to the menu rather than a separate volume. Depth is only part of it. The floor team’s real skill lies in guiding a table to the right bottle.

The discipline comes from Ken Frank, who has been cooking this way since his teenage years in France. At 21 he drew national attention as chef of La Guillotine, insisting on seasonal ingredients long before that was standard practice, and he went on to open Michael’s in Santa Monica, the room credited with launching California cuisine. In 1979, at 23, he put the first La Toque on the Sunset Strip. Wine country pulled him north in 1998, to Rutherford, and a decade later the restaurant settled in downtown Napa’s Oxbow District, inside the Westin Verasa.

His cooking still answers to the season. Dinner runs à la carte or as a six-course Chef’s Tasting paced without hurry, with a vegetarian counterpart of equal length devoted to peak produce. The signature plate, a prime New York strip loin with Rutherford red wine sauce, was conceived specifically to stand beside Napa Valley Cabernet, which the house calls the home team.

The motto is fine dining without the pretense, and the room lives up to it. Guests are encouraged to dress for the evening and then to laugh their way through it. Many are regulars, locals and visitors from abroad who return for their milestone dinners year after year.