One evening late this summer, I dined at Charlie Palmer's Dry Creek Kitchen, a restaurant attached to the Hotel Healdsburg in Sonoma County, CA. My dinner companion was my oldest friend, Circe Sher, whose family owns the hotel. We plowed through a six-course meal whose menu, when we read it, seemed conventionally eclectic in its influences and very Northern Californian in its emphasis on local ingredients.

We ate a tomato consomme with a yellow tomato sorbet; branzino, a form of Mediterranean sea bass, stuffed with truffles and wrapped in bacon; squab with chanterelle mushrooms on a bed of foie gras; cumin-infused lamb; beef prepared two different ways and presented with a variety of vegetables; and, for dessert, a peach tarte tatin.