Evangeline — Restaurant in Calistoga

Quick Summary: This restaurant is a bit of a mixed bag. The venue is beautiful and welcoming, but the food is inconsistent, which is unfortunate. Let me explain.

We ordered the Fried brussel sprouts for a starter and entrees Roasted Mary's Chicken & the steak frites.

The fried brussel sprouts were delicious! Plain and simple. They come with a side of lemon aoli, which I found to be an odd pairing as it tasted too acidic and the two didn't go together well with the buttery brussel sprouts in my opinion. I still recommend this one. Just ignore the aoli.

The Roasted chicken was delicious as well! The chicken had great flavor and was very moist. It comes with mashed potatoes and carrots with a very savory sauce which goes perfectly with everything in the dish!

The steak frites was a mess, however. The meat had absolutely no flavor, I suspect it wasn't seasoned at all. The sauce it comes with is chimichurri, which is an odd choice being a French restaurant. Unfortunately, the sauce was lacking salt and garlic. Also, this chimichurri was heavy on the oregano. I prefer no oregano or less oregano than parsley in the blend, since oregano is a much more aromatic herb. It was not a good chimichurri. The fries were dry and, again, tasteless. A bit stale too, like they had been made hours before we ordered them. They felt like the frozen kind. The microgreens didn't go with the dish. It just didn't blend well with other flavors. Everything just tasted bland and the Herby notes like oregano and microgreens stood out too much instead of the flavor of the steak. I don't recommend this dish!

The service was good and the ambiance was welcoming, but unfortunately the menu felt like a gamble. You don't know which dish is going to be good, and which is going to be odd and tasteless. Too inconsistent. Also, the prices are fairly high for the amount of inconsistencies in the food, odd pairing of flavors and just underseasoned food. I do not recommend this place unless you already know which dishes are good and which are not.

Lastly, this was my first time in the Napa region which is known for its wine and food, and this happened to be my first restaurant experience in the region. Needless to say I had high expectations and it's unfortunate it wasn't...

We arrived on time for our reservation and waited a long time before anyone came to the host stand. I booked this over another restaurant because the reservation didn’t say anything about outside or inside seating and assumed we would sit inside. Most of the seating is outdoors either on a patio or a covered/enclosed area with plenty of heat lamps. We had a reservation and they said the table wasn’t ready when in fact, it was, my fiancé saw on the map that our table wasn’t ready second of 5 and there were 2 empty tables in the second position of 5 tables.

It took a while to get waters and eventually our server came to take our drink order but left before we could add our apps. My glass of wine was so large and full I couldn’t swirl it due to the volume of liquid (a good thing, I suppose).

She took our order and we got the gem salad and fries and I asked to try another sauce. The gem salad was small and plain and the fries were good but they gave us about a tablespoon of the sauce I ordered on the side (Louis sauce on the burger, yum, it was like mayo with pickles and a sprinkle of paprika).

After 20 minutes they came out to inform us the gumbo yaya was sold out, didn’t bring a menu and asked my fiancé to pick something else. After being there for over and hour 8:50pm we still didn’t have our food.

They brought out the food and it was good. The halibut was cooked well and served over salty beans, the pearl onions were yummy. It turns out there was a miscommunication about what my partner ordered and he got a $69 steak instead of the short ribs. The steak came with grilled asparagus and potato gratin cake, but the potatoes were not fully cooked.

This is on us, but we were honestly none the wiser that we ordered the wrong thing. We were shocked when the bill came back so high. By the way, we ordered fries $8 on the menu and they charged us $11 dollars for them. Despite the error on the steak they refused to reduce the price.

There was no bread service either. Maybe I was just hangry and we had a...

Evangeline, Calistoga: A Meal That Rattled the Rankings

By the time the sesame-crusted ahi tuna arrived, I had already made a quiet, internal note — This place is special. But by the end of the meal, that note had turned into a full-throated declaration: Evangeline just delivered one of the best meals I’ve ever had in Sonoma County — and I’ve eaten everywhere.

The tuna was a masterclass in balance. Thick-cut and expertly seared, its sesame crust offered a delicate crunch that gave way to the supple richness of the fish itself — a texture that felt closer to ceremony than cuisine. But it was what surrounded the tuna that elevated the dish to near mythic: a green papaya mango salad that was vibrant and tart, whispering tropical brightness into every bite; house-made rice noodles, gently tangled beneath, soaked in a sweet Mae Ploy sauce that dared to be decadent without overpowering; a subtle yuzu vinaigrette that shimmered with citrusy restraint; and a final sweep of herb oil, as if the plate had been kissed by a hillside garden.

Paired with a crisp Sauvignon Blanc — bright, grassy, alive — the entire experience felt choreographed, not served.

And then came dessert.

Let me tell you, I have sipped many espresso martinis. Most of them try too hard or taste like they gave up halfway through. But this one? This one was deeply layered, lush with coffee and vanilla, a texture that lingered like the last note of a Nina Simone song. It was the perfect partner to a truly stunning bread pudding — rich but never heavy, warmly spiced, finished with a caramel that didn’t beg for attention, only earned it.

There are meals that satisfy, and then there are meals that rewrite the rankings — meals that whisper to you on the drive home and shift the way you’ll measure everything that follows. Tonight, Evangeline did that.

In a region where the bar is already sky-high, Evangeline didn’t just meet the standard — it made...