We ended our day at downtown Napa’s Torc, a smart-looking restaurant that we wished we had in New York—if not for the inventive, unpretentious food, for the cool logo featuring a boar. We wondered about that, and learned from Chef Sean O’Toole (who once worked in New York), that “torc”—an ancient Gaelic word for boar—also symbolizes feasting with friends. As the torc also appears on the O’Toole family coat of arms, it seemed destined . . . .
The seasonal menu is driven by a mosaic of ingredients: Dungeness crab with yuzu kosho, “Fairytale Pumpkin Soup” with hedgehog mushrooms, and steelhead trout with fresh garbanzo beans. We left convinced that Napa’s gain was NYC’s loss.