Regardless of our culinary inclinations, a heartfelt restaurant, like a bank eager to lend, is a venture all of us can get behind. It warms the cockles of our icy hearts to step into a space that’s aglow with its owners’ good intentions; where the servers behave as if they own stock in the business; where a walkway to the entrance takes us past a garden whose soil supplies the evening’s herbs.
In a restaurant like that, grace notes have the impact of grand gestures. The chefs pop out from the kitchen to thank their patrons. The staff remember you when you pay them a return visit. And high-maintenance diners meet with no resistance when they ask for extra matzoh balls (served in consommé with roasted guinea hen) on the side. If that heartfelt restaurant is Restaurant Eloise, the white cloths on the table reflect refined ambitions, but the ambience is humble and puts homeyness before hauteur. The bar is backed by chalkboard menus listing beers from around the world, and it’s infused with the kind of easygoing chic that San Franciscans think of as pure wine country, out-of-towners might describe as European, and Fox News correspondents would dismiss as French.
Eric Korsh and Ginevra Iverson aren’t from France, but their cooking benefits from Gallic touches. You can taste them in a starter of sautéed sweetbreads, brightened with bites of apple and bacon and drizzled with a Calvados reduction; in milk-poached cod, bathed softly in butter; and in octopus salad, entangled with string beans and fingerling potatoes, layered with white anchovies, and tossed with a creamy dressing that is a twist on a Niçoise.
The husband-and-wife team moved to California from New York, where they worked at the well-regarded Prune. In leaving the Big Apple, they’ve landed in the core of apple country, in the low-slung building on Gravenstein Highway in Sebastopol that used to house Bistro V. Korsh and Iverson’s new location helps them keep things local—very local. A second, larger garden, planted in back, provides a healthy portion of Eloise’s produce and elevates the restaurant’s sense of aw-shucks sweetness. And that was before one of the servers told me that the chefs had named the business after their daughter’s favorite children’s book.
It turns out that’s not true, which is just as well, since their restaurant is nothing like the Plaza Hotel where the fictional Eloise resides. The chefs run a low-key operation and content themselves primarily with rustic cuisine. They enrich their housemade pappardelle with slow-cooked rabbit, and toss plucky puntarelle with candied bacon in a robust chopped-egg vinaigrette. Their cassoulet is a killer version of a classic, composed of duck confit, pork belly, and beef-and-garlic sausage; its long-stewed flavors reach a rare complexity and depth. White Tarbais beans add creamy taste and texture. You could raid dining rooms from the South Bay to Sonoma and not find a better version of this dish.
In keeping with Sebastopol’s growing dual identity, Eloise combines rough-hewn country edges with sophisticated city sheen. In a mushroom toast starter, king trumpet mushrooms sit on crisp bread draped with a poached egg, dusted with black truffles, and dressed with bordelaise sauce. It’s an earthy appetizer with urbane manners. Roasted marrowbones, the essence of elbows-on-the-table eating, take on a pedigreed appearance: ringed by parsley-and-shallot salad, with silver marrow spoons rising elegantly from the bones. Though the menu sometimes verges on relentless richness, it works within the restaurant’s country-French context. You’re not being fattened up, just well fed.
At some restaurants more than others, a personal investment is palpable. At Eloise, a sense of dedication filters through the staff, who treat you just like your close relations would, if only all that therapy had worked out. They’re sharp but not show-offy, fluent in the compact French and California wine list, and instinctive enough to know when you need them and when you want to be left alone.
Their relaxed expertise strengthens the appeal of a family-run restaurant that you’re inclined to like, even in the moments when it lets you down. On one of my visits, the skate wing with artichokes came drenched in butter, a veal chop arrived badly undersalted, and the creamed-spinach accompaniment showed no evidence of sorrel, no matter what the menu said. Desserts disappointed, too, striking repeated notes of heavy, bready sameness, as in a body-blow rum baba and butter-soaked lemon crêpes that cried out for something to cut through their heft. Housemade hazelnut-and-chocolate ice cream offered little respite, but it didn’t matter—what left an impression was the lingering sweetness of the place itself.
2295 Gravenstein Hwy. South, Sebastopol, 707-823-6300, reservations recommended, wheelchair accessible $$$$ * * *