Charlie's Taps Fun and Nostalgia in California Wine Country

Welcome to the weekend!

Today we’re chatting with Elliot Bell, chef-owner of the St. Helena restaurant Charlie’s. Dinner here was one of our most memorable meals on our latest trip to California Wine Country — our table was covered with fried chicken with caviar ranch dip, pristine West Coast seafood, great pastas, a nostalgic campfire pie, and terrific martinis and local wines. For this week’s Cover Story, Amy talked to Bell about his food philosophy, cooking local, and why St. Helena is a great American small town.

For more West Coast travel inspiration, download our fresh Signature Field Guide to California Wine Country, which is included with your paid subscription or available on our website for $25. The 54-page guide features a five-day itinerary to the Napa and Sonoma Valleys. Charlie’s is in there, of course, as are more than three dozen other vetted recommendations for breakfast, lunch, dinner, and drinks.

Before we head out for the weekend, we’ve also shared a couple stories in our Weekend Reading list, which includes a spotlight on a hot Chicago bar, guides to where to eat if you’re hitting a World Cup game, and a report on an appealing new Portland, Oregon restaurant.

Thanks for reading!

— Amy Cavanaugh & Kenney Marlatt
Editors, American Weekender

Cooking in the Heart of Napa

ST. HELENA, CA. — When chef Elliot Bell moved to Napa Valley, he found a reminder of home. “St. Helena really reminds me of the small town that I grew up in in Iowa,” he says. “Obviously not for the tourism aspect, but for how deeply rooted the community is in agriculture and how that brings the community together. In the morning, if you’re up at five, everybody is at the only gas station in town that sells diesel, filling up their trucks and tractors for the day. Most people work in some form of hospitality or wine or food. A lot of that is growing the food and grapes.”

At Charlie’s, which Bell opened in St. Helena in October 2023, he draws deeply from the land around the restaurant. Before moving to Napa Valley, he lived and worked around the country — born in New Zealand, he moved to the United States at three, and grew up an hour south of Iowa City. He attended the University of New Hampshire, then began working in restaurants, including Blue Ginger in Wellesley, Massachusetts and Gramercy Tavern in New York before heading to Napa Valley to stage at the French Laundry.

“In New York, we had the great Union Square market and Upstate has a bunch of great farms, but I had been in the concrete jungle,” he says. “When you staged at the French Laundry, you’d work four days in the kitchen and one day in the garden. You would be able to see that produce still warm from the ground. It was barely touched, just cleaned up a bit, and would go straight to the plate. It was mind expanding for me. It was a new perspective on cooking.”

What he thought would be a three-month stage turned into a 12-year run at the French Laundry. Working there was influential for Bell, and he draws on many of the lessons from the French Laundry kitchen. “The directive was that the produce and the product drive the menu and then we work around that,” says Bell, who has carried that into his culinary philosophy at Charlie’s. “Besides our own farm, we have a couple farmers that we work with right here in St. Helena. They are constantly updating us with what vegetables they have. Our approach is to take the best of what we did the year before and build on that and do something fun and new. We use a lot of technique, but try to let the vegetables or the product speak for itself.”

Bell also approaches his dishes with a sense of fun and nostalgia, particularly with ingredients diners may not be as familiar with. Take caviar, which is served with potato skins and caramelized onion dip, as an accent to corn dogs, and mixed into “fancy ranch,” an upgrade to the fried chicken. The juicy chicken, which has just the right crunch, comes with pickles and hot sauce. The ranch makes a great dip for the bird.

“Fried chicken wasn’t something I ever intended to be known for,” Bell says. “But it spans so many different cultures. I grew up eating it. Some of my mentors and friends are from the South, so they taught me their techniques. Then I have some chef friends who are Korean and showed me their techniques. It’s this blended approach.”

He first created the fancy ranch for his young daughter, Georgia, who loved Bell’s housemade version of the dressing. “I wanted to see if she would like caviar, so I mixed it into a little ranch in that same vein of making it approachable,” he says. “She loved the saltiness it added. It became a staple on the menu.”

It’s not just about the fancy ranch — the housemade hot sauce is a terrific accompaniment, too. “When we came up with the fried chicken, we knew we wanted a hot sauce that wasn’t too hot and had a bit of sweetness,” Bell says. He decided to use aji dulce peppers, which they grow at the restaurant. “The flavor, especially when you ferment them, is so unique,” Bell says. “They look like they would be really spicy, but they actually have this fruity sweetness.” He adds fresno chiles and jalapeños to give the sauce some heat.

A relationship with the land is vital to the approach at Charlie’s, and the restaurant’s website calls out a number of their local purveyors. They work with Spring Mountain Vineyard, located three miles from the restaurant, where they care for the garden and orchards and use the products, including finger limes, walnuts, and pomegranates, at the restaurant. They also source meat from Napa Valley Land and Livestock. It’s owned by Johnnie White Jr., who Bell met at the St. Helena Fire Department, where he is a volunteer firefighter. Their cattle graze on vineyards, and White sells Bell whole cows that are half Wagyu, half Angus. He uses that beef across the menu; a standout dish on our visit was the single-layer lasagna, which is made in the wood-burning oven in the restaurant’s courtyard.

“My favorite part of lasagna is the crispy edges around the outside,” Bell says. “We’re thinking, how can we recreate that over the whole lasagna? This single-layer lasagna, which some friends had done for staff meal in New York, came to mind.” They make a bolognese with lesser-known cuts of beef and turn that into lasagna with ricotta, Parmesan, and a pasta sheet.

We loved many other dishes at Charlie’s too — shrimp cocktail with fried saltines, pretzel-wrapped kielbasa to dip into sweet-hot mustard, a little gem salad dressed with tangy with sour cream and onion dressing, and fluffy Hawaiian rolls brushed with charred pineapple pork fat. But you have to leave room for dessert at the end so you can have a slice of the layered campfire pie. It’s an homage to the one that lauded California chef Cindy Pawlcyn served at Cindy’s Backstreet Kitchen, which was in the space that Charlie’s now occupies.

“Cindy is a legend in the Valley,” Bell says. “She was one of the original chefs at Meadowood and Cindy’s Backstreet Kitchen was a local’s favorite. When we were doing construction, every day somebody would stop by and talk about how they celebrated their graduation here or their first wedding anniversary. So we wanted to make sure that we honored that.” One way is by serving their version of Campfire Pie, which was a signature dessert at Cindy’s. “I talked to Cindy and she gave us her blessing,” Bell says. “It’s an Oreo crust on the bottom, a layer of chocolate ganache, then it has marshmallow on top that gets torched. This almond candy that she called almond ding is crushed over the top.”

Charlie’s isn’t the only thing on Bell’s docket. He also has Georgia’s, a year-old ice cream cart that he takes to events like concerts in the park. “I have three kids now, so naming the restaurant after Charlie, who’s my oldest, was a little shortsighted in terms of needing to have two more concepts,” he says. Named for his daughter, the cart serves ice cream treats like fancy takes on Choco Tacos and It’s-Its.

Up next is Elsewhere, a St. Helena wine bar that Bell is opening with Nick Kokonas, the former owner of Alinea in Chicago. “Nick has a home here in St. Helena and he was a regular at the restaurant,” Bell says. “He became a business mentor. We’d grab coffee and discuss — what does the Valley need? What does St. Helena need? We always came back to this idea that there are no wine bars, which seems so odd for Napa Valley.” With the wine-drinking focus of the region more on wineries and tasting rooms, Bell and Kokonas saw an opening for a bar that serves wines from Napa and Sonoma as well as global offerings. “You’ll be able to compare wines from Napa with France,” Bell says.

Like the wine, the food will push beyond California in its focus. “At Charlie’s, we focus on locality, like all the seafood comes from the West Coast and a lot of everything comes from right here in the Valley,” Bell says. “A lot of that will ring true for Elsewhere as well. We’ll focus on the beautiful product that’s here, but we’ll branch out more in tandem with the wine and have ingredients from around the world.”

The menu will include small bar bites as well as a rotating selection of three dishes, one each to pair with red, white, and sparkling wines. “The difference here will be the food will be in service of the wine, like if there’s a really fun, interesting riesling that goes well with a curry,” Bell says. “We’ll be able to go all over the world.” But like all of Bell’s food, it’ll still reflect the heart of Napa Valley.

1327 Railroad Ave, St Helena, CA | @charlies_nv

Download All Our Favorite Spots in California Wine Country

All our California Wine Country picks are available as a five-day Field Guide that you can download on our website. As always, it’s free for paid subscribers — just use the discount code found in this month’s Weekend Getaway newsletter at checkout. Here’s what you get:

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ILLINOIS

Fun House: After a couple slow years of bar openings, Chicago’s drinking scene has been thriving over the last year and a half. We’ve been loving Gus’ Sip & Dip, Kitty’s Cosmopolitan Club, Culebra, and Belmont Tavern, and have a long list of other bars we’re eager to visit, including the Alley Cat and Tune-Up. One of the newest hotspots is Bar Bambi from bartender Katie Renshaw. The vibe is fun, the cocktails are clever (my favorite is the mezcal margarita that takes inspiration from mango sticky rice), and the food is terrific (don’t miss the dill-chip-topped deviled eggs or the fried fish sandwich). You can read more in my report for Chicago magazine. (Chicago)

UNITED STATES

World Cup Eats: Are you attending any of the World Cup games this summer? If so, besides seeing the game, you’ll have a good opportunity to eat well. While that can be challenging — many stadiums are outside of a city — I found a few helpful guides to navigating eating. Here’s on Kansas City; on East Rutherford, New Jersey outside Manhattan; on Inglewood, California outside Los Angeles; and on Foxborough outside Boston. Plus, here are our own picks for Boston, Philadelphia, and the Bay Area (San Francisco and San Jose).

OREGON

Pretend You’re in Paris in the Parking Lot of Oscar Food & Wine: Portland, Oregon is a place I wish I could visit every year, because my to-visit list of restaurants is constantly growing. A newcomer to add: Oscar Food & Wine, which channels the casual cafe vibe of Paris with a menu that’s heavy on my three main food groups — seafood, veggies, and natural wines. writes: “Spring asparagus is tempura-fried, served with a slice of lemon and a savory tonnato sauce—you don’t see that on a lot of Portland menus. Beets are spooned over crème fraîche with first-of-the-season strawberries, basil and a miso vinaigrette. The mains thread a similar needle—great ingredients treated with a little flair.” (Willamette Week)

— Compiled by Amy Cavanaugh

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