I took a quick trip to wine country with some friends.  The gals in this group all love wine, food, and fun. We are the perfect travel companions for each other. We found a good rate on Hawaiian Airlines from Hilo to Oakland and decided to jump on it to get our group to Sonoma. Our flight arrived at Oakland Airport at about 7:30 p.m. and we rented a car from and drove straight to Sonoma in hopes that we would make it to our 9:30 p.m. reservation at a highly touted restaurant called girl & the fig. It is just two blocks away  from the Inn at Sonoma, where we stayed.

We used Google Maps on the iPhone to help us navigate our way from Oakland to Sonoma straight to the restaurant.  It was a quick and easy drive and the directions were easy to follow. We found street parking right outside the restaurant and walked in and were greeted by a personable host. The vibe at the restaurant felt hip and fun and the restaurant was pretty full at 9:30 p.m. on a Thursday night.

We were seated and quickly served a small plate of incredibly delicious olives!  I love olives.  I grew up eating canned black olives that I used to stick on my my fingers like they were tiny shoes. I thought those were so yummy. I later found out that there were other even more delicious olives than those canned ones.  These olives pictured here are the best olives I have had! I need to find out what these are and keep them in my life!We ordered some wine flight tastings to go with our dinner.

Even though the four of us are similar and are great traveling companions, we aren’t exactly the same. Between the four of us, we ordered a variety of wine flights~rose, red, and white. We shared and were all happy with our choices.There were a lot of glasses on the table.We liked that the glasses were eclectically different. What I didn’t realize until after the trip is that the glasses were organized by height to help the servers figure out which wine is which. I had the red varietal fligth that included the dominant red grape varieties in France’s Rhone valley. (2013 Frick Counoise, Dry Creek Valley; 2014 Lioco Carignan, Mendocino; 2014 Skinner Mourvedre, El Dorado; 2012 Mathis Grenache, Sonoma Valley; 2013 Highway 12 Reserve Syrah, Sonoma Valley)

We shared all the dishes so that we could each get a taste of all the incredibleness that came out of the kitchen here.
We enjoyed our cheese plate. We could customize our plate and we decided to get one cheese each from cow, goat, and sheep. It came with some sliced apples and dried fruit.  Delicious!  I need to do this at home with some crusty bread and some cured meats and a salad like the one below. Perfect!Love this salad.  Fig and arugula salad.  Toasted pecans, Mano Formate pancetta, laura chenel chevre, fig & port vinaigrette.
Pastis-scented steamed mussels, frites with garlic, leeks, herbs, and grilled bread. Duck confit. With fava beans, roasted yukon potatoes, onions, duck jus.

Side note:  The first time I had duck confit was at a place called Millie’s Diner in Richmond, Virginia. When I think of diner food, I don’t think of duck confit and good wine.  Millie’s in Richmond was worth the stop. Yelp reviews showed me the way and I’m glad to have had the chance to go there. The reason why I share this story is because I don’t ever want to forget what my daughter said after that meal. We were reminiscing about the good food and my daughter was raving about the great “duck feet” that she had there.  We had a good laugh about that. When I showed her this photo of this dish from girl & the fig, she immediately knew it was duck confit (and not duck feet).
We love steak and ordered this.  Can’t go wrong with a side of frites–or fries.

Wild flounder meuniere.  Yukon potato puree, cello spinach, lemon-caper brown butter. Delicious. This may have been our favorite entree.

We were so happy to have made it to girl & the fig and enjoy the rustic French food they serve.  We were the last ones out of the restaurant–seems to be a pattern with us.