As the Bay Area wakes up following the early morning 6.1-magnitude earthquake (see ongoing Gate coverage here), details from Napa County continue to emerge. And its robust restaurant and wine industry is reeling as damage is assessed in the earlygoing.
“It’s not a pretty day in Napa. That’s for sure,“ says Marion Emmanuelle of the Thomas and Fagiani’s, the downtown Napa restaurant/bar where there’s “a lot of broken everything.” The next step is the engineers’ assessment of structural damage. (Update, 3:30pm: The Thomas will open its downstairs bar, Fagiani’s, Sunday night. See below for more.)
Many downtown Napa restaurants, including the Thomas, will be closed today, at the very least. As you get further up valley, it’s closer to business as usual. In Yountville, Bouchon, Bouchon Bakery and Ciccio are open, among others; others like Ad Hoc and Redd are still without power as of this morning. St. Helena and Calistoga have similar intermittent power outages.
But on the restaurant side, downtown Napa is the stay-away zone — at least on Sunday.
“If you’re traveling to Napa, and you have plans, it’s better to call first,” says Tom Fuller of Fuller & Sander Communications, a Napa Valley-based public relations firm.
The most common refrain from restaurateurs, aside from the power outages, is broken windows, broken wine bottles and broken glassware. In short, there is a lot of clean-up, even before assessing bigger financial damage like lost wine inventory and possible structural damage.
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