Amid tough times to keep a restaurant open, Cook St. Helena has shown for two decades how it’s done, with small menus of local offerings to excite both locals and visitors.
The St. Helena eatery is known for authentically made, locally sourced northern Italian cuisine, using rotating menus kept tight to showcase what’s in season and fresh. Chef Jude Wilmoth and his wife, Meagan Rounds, are well-known in the community for their longtime relationship with local purveyors to keep up the quality of the small but elegant restaurant and menu. Visitors come for an intimate fine dining experience and return for the excitement of new seasons and revamped offerings, with house-made pastas at the center.
Wilmoth was born and raised in the Napa Valley and began his career working at former local restaurants, Taylor’s Refresher and Tra Vigne, where he moved from busing tables to making salads. That experience helped him build a restaurant alongside Rounds, which he says stays in touch with what Napa Valley foodies want to see and taste.
Rounds, from Colorado, worked at different food establishments in Hawaii before moving to San Francisco, where she worked as chief concierge at W San Francisco for nearly a decade. That hospitality background has informed running a restaurant, including through difficult times such as local wildfires and the COVID-19 pandemic, she said.
The pandemic reshaped the restaurant’s operations, as during that period, the pair decided to only open for business on the weekdays. As parents of two young children at the time, Rounds said the schedule change afforded them better time management. Wilmoth added that the decision became permanent as it moved them to focus on locals and what is affordable and homemade “to keep us open and keep us paying the bills.”
“Coming out of it (the pandemic), we just really took it slowly trying to figure out what the next steps were going to be,” Rounds said. “When things started opening up again, it was like, let’s take a step here, and OK, that’s working. Another step here, and OK, that needs to be pivoted more. It’s being here every day and listening and responding to the daily feelings we see people having in the community.”
Looking back on more than 20 years in business, the pair said they are surprised by how much things have changed. Wilmoth said he found a menu and wine list from 21 years ago that demonstrated how much has affected the industry, and Rounds agreed that in part, it’s because prices of supplies have gone up.
Other changes have worked well with the pair’s effort to use food that is grown and sourced from within 50 miles of the restaurant. Wilmoth said that over time, people have asked for more food that is palatable for those with different allergies, and so the restaurant’s menus typically have options for people who are vegetarian, vegan, gluten-free or have celiac disease.
“I’m never going to be able to be completely flour-free, because we make our own pastas in-house,” he said. “But we’ve adapted well with most of the other allergies and dietary restrictions.”
Requests from customers have shaped menus in other ways, they said, including when locals request an old dish from years past. Rounds said what has always stuck are the homemade pastas, which are all created in-house from the noodles to the cheese.
“Doing all the things we can in-house has been a dream come true, to keep that consistency over the last 21 years,” she said.
It’s also been a dream for them to maintain the same close relationships with suppliers as hands-on as possible, with Wilmoth placing orders every night and then checking with purveyors in the morning.
“So many of these purveyors have grown and handle a lot of large restaurants, but I’ve had some of these relationships for 30 years,” Wilmoth explained. “They are flexible with me ordering a little bit at a time. We eat out a lot, and there’s a lot of overcomplicated dishes out there. So we’ve stayed in our lane and kept it simple.”
In February, the menu featured entrees like an eggplant parmesan with marinara and béchamel, or a slow-roasted pork fagioli all’uccelletto with butter beans, tomatoes, herbs and Calabrian chilies. The restaurant’s signature pastas include a fazzoletti bolognese with housemade ricotta, a spaghetti alle vongole with manila clams and wild Gulf shrimp in a spicy white wine broth, and a cavatelli all’arrabbiata served with housemade sausage. The risotto is noted as “always different,” and Rounds said the wine list is “compact,” comprising about 150 wines largely from local wineries and Italy.
What can food lovers look forward to as spring arrives? Rounds hinted that the season is great for budding beauties like mustard and asparagus, which “bring light and fun to the menu.”
“The rosés and Sauvignons Blancs come out,” Rounds said. “It goes from heavier braised meats to lighter fare like fish, and later the seasonal tomatoes.”
Asked why their style of doing business has worked amid so much change in the Napa Valley restaurant community, Rounds said: “It’s really special to be able to really have it develop from relationships more than just, ‘I read this wine was amazing.’ We’re putting things on the list because they’re amazing people and they grow it and sell it.”
“You can tell the wine industry is in a little reset pattern,” Wilmoth said. “I feel like supporting those locals all those years has helped us and helped them. We refer people to these wineries (and businesses) when they see it on the list. We’re all in this together.”
Cook St. Helena is open from 11:30 a.m. to 8:30 p.m. weekdays at 1310 Main St. (Highway 29/128) in St. Helena. Visit cooksthelena.com for more information.
