Mustards Grill is a restaurant in Napa, CA, where there are a load of high-quality places to eat, mostly because of the area’s high-quality, local produce.

Mustards Grill is no exception…it’s not the perfect place, but it’s very good, especially the food.

But, before we get to the food, what abuot the decor? Surprisingly simple…it’s very casual inside, almost like a Chili’s. The environment is similar as well: neither loud nor quiet, neither spacious nor crowded.

The restaurant’s weak point? Well, in our experience, it was the service…though not because they didn’t try. Our servers were all nice and polite, and our food arrived in a timely fashion. the problem is the food wasn’t the right food on multiple occassions. The truth is, looking around the restaurant (albeit on a Saturday night), the place was PACKED…and they just didn’t have enough people to deal with this many customers. As a result, each waiter or waitress was too rushed and, inevitably, mistakes were made.

So, the food. While they serve relatively plain, simple dishes, the high-quality ingredients and execution make it all stand out.

We started off with bread that was really good (you can somewhat tell the quality of a bread by the flatness of the bottom crust and the size of the holes in the bread…more importantly, it was just good.), and people ordered some excellent crab cakes and an interesting tamale which was realyl light and let you taste the flavor of the corn…mmm! I also had a ceasar salad…it was just a ceasar, but it was done exactly the way I like: quality, shredded parmesan (not grated), fresh-made croutons and the lettuce was cut (not in huge leaves, which I don’t like as much).

Among the things we ordered, we had a vegetarian mushroom burger (no, not the all-too-common portobello mushroom) that I thought would be a mistake. I was wrong…this “burger” was amazingly flavorful and delicious! I had a pork chop which was excellent and had an interesting sauce…the only thing I didn’t like was the red cabbage salad on the side. However, one of their daily specials was a ribeye that sounded REALLY good, so all the other people at our table got it…and it wa actually rather disappointing. The steak was kind of lacking in flavor and a little overdone. It’s too bad so many people at our table got this dish.

Dessert, however made up for a lot of it. Wow…an excellent sundae, a good creme brulee, a very good fruit tart and an absolutely AWESOME chocolate dessert made us leave happy.

Save for one entree that was disappointing and mistakes made by our server, it was an excellent dinig experience (and the price isn’t even that high!).