Cafe Rustica

Kenwood is the stretch of Sonoma Valley that cameras tend to skip — between Glen Ellen's literary residue and Santa Rosa's highway junctions, it is one of the quieter wine-growing enclaves on Highway 12. The cinematography doesn't do it justice. Kenwood is where Kunde and Kenwood Vineyards sit; where the Kenwood Inn collects its more particular visitors; and where the restaurants, unencumbered by Sonoma Plaza's reservation theatre, take on a different rhythm. Cafe Rustica is the unofficial mayor of this rhythm.

The room is modest — warm wood, brick, a wood-burning oven visible from the back of the dining room, windows onto the vineyards that run up to the highway. The menu lives in the Italian-Californian tradition that governs most of the better neighbourhood restaurants in this part of wine country: a short list of wood-fired pizzas (margherita, fennel sausage, wild mushroom, the rotating pizza of the week that leans on whatever arrived from the farms that morning), a handful of handmade pasta dishes (pappardelle with a long-braised ragù, rigatoni with house sausage, a ravioli special), and a few composed mains — a roasted half chicken, a short rib, a piece of Pacific fish treated simply.

This is, deliberately, not ambitious cooking. It is the kind of restaurant that exists because a wine region needs places where people who actually live there can go on a Wednesday night, drink a glass of Kenwood-grown Zinfandel that costs less than $14, and share a pizza with a friend. Tourists are welcome; the restaurant is not built around them. Prices sit in the mid-range — most entrées land between $22 and $32, pizzas between $18 and $24 — and the wine list is leaner than the flagship addresses of the Plaza, with a Sonoma-heavy selection that rewards knowledge rather than budget.

Come on a weeknight when the Plaza's reservation books are full and the tourist calendar has emptied out. Sit on the patio in warm months and watch the light change over the ridge. Order the wild-mushroom pizza and a bottle of local Sangiovese. Ask your server which farm the tomatoes are from; they will tell you, and the tomatoes will have come from there. This is the unglamorous half of wine country dining that the glamorous half depends on for its moral footing.

For a first date that wants to skip the performance register of white-tablecloth rooms, or for a solo diner working through a Saturday afternoon with a book and a glass of something cold, Cafe Rustica is the Kenwood answer.