Napa in a day

 

My husband is two days older than me, and I love to remind him he is my older man. Every year for our birthdays we run away to the greater San Jose area. We are huge hockey fans and every year as a birthday treat the San Jose Sharks play back to back home games around our birthdays. This year we went to a game on Thursday and Saturday which left Friday open to escape to Napa for the day.

 

Our day started the best way possible with a Parisian breakfast at Bouchon Bakery. Every rich and savory treat you could wish for was ordered and paired with a heavenly salted caramel latte. The ivy covered building and seating area outside provided the perfect backdrop to allow for my fantasy of sitting in Paris somewhere.

 

 

From there we stared our day of wine tasting. My favorite by far was taking the tour and tasting at amazing Domaine Carneros. Every girl should have a little bubbly on her birthday.

 

 

We ventured downtown Napa and stumbled into the coolest place, The Oxbow Market.  This market place had several restaurants with communal seating so we got some treats from a few places. Our favorite was Hogs Island Oysters.  We then did some light shopping through the market at Whole Spice and Napa Valley Distillery where we got some unique bitters for cocktails. If you go to downtown Napa, I highly recommend this place.  

 

 

After some more wine tasting, a dream came true, we had dinner at Ad Hoc. For anyone who knows me, I am obsessed with Thomas Keller, and specifically this cookbook created after this restaurant. The cover of the pig was painted on our dining room wall...that's obsession.

Ad Hoc's menu changes every day, you will never experience the same meal there twice. They do a 4 course family style menu with one optional supplement; if you go, get the supplement.
 

 

Our meal was amazing and lived up to all of our expectations. My husband, being the smooth talker he is even got us a tour of the kitchen and we got to talk to the head chef. Words cannot express enough the high level of service and amount that extra attention and we got after they learned it was not only our birthdays, but how utterly food-geeky we were for being there!  Dreams do come true for these foodies.