Besides looking forward to several days of great wine tasting, we always anticipate some tasty meals when we visit Walla Walla, Wash. Following our first visit to Whitehouse-Crawford late last fall and being enormously impressed, we knew we wanted to return there in May for Spring Release weekend and share the experience with some of our wine friends from Portland. Knowing how popular this fine-dining restaurant is, we got our reservations in at least a month in advance of our visit. We allowed ourselves a few hours to rest up after our day of visiting wineries all over the valley before we arrived at the historic brick building for our feast.

I wrote about our first experience there in a blog last fall (which you can revisit here), where I shared photos and the history of the building itself. The food and the service seem to be consistently top-notch, with the menu changing often to allow the chefs to draw upon the regional, seasonal bounty. One of the items I can’t get enough of in the spring is asparagus, and the locally grown spears in Walla Walla show up everywhere — and certainly starred or played a supporting role in several dishes that night.

I started with the Walla Walla asparagus salad featuring local spring greens, radishes, pinenuts, mint, local Monteillet goat cheese and a light and lovely sesame-lemon vinaigrette.   Harry enjoyed the shrimp ravioli with tender and fresh English peas.   Our friends Jim and Amber shared a fabulous warm spinach salad with smoked trout, bacon and grilled sweet onions. 

Though we’d brought two red wines to drink with dinner, that didn’t prevent us from selecting entrées all across the board. Whitehouse-Crawford is justifiably know for its Painted Hills beef tenderloin served with creamy mashed potatoes, mushrooms and a red wine reduction sauce three days in the making, and Harry quickly opted for that.  Both Jim and Amber chose the Alaskan halibut served with asparagus on a bed of white rice in a vermouth cream sauce.   I decided to try something completely different and ordered the Japanese-style fried chicken with a Napa cabbage-kohlrabi slaw and tofu sauce. The (thankfully) boneless chicken was moist and tender inside its crispy, light shell, and the slaw provided a tangy, crunchy counterpoint.  

We left room for dessert; Whitehouse-Crawford always has unique and flavorful homemade ice creams and sorbets as well as at least four or five baked good options. Another spring favorite of mine, rhubarb, made my choice of dessert easy: the rhubarb custard cake featured honey-roasted rhubarb, pomegranate molasses and a scoop of a sinfully creamy buttermilk lemon ice cream sitting atop the moist, light wedge of cake. 

Our friends have become fans of the restaurant as well, and we’re already planning to get our reservations in early for our next trip to Walla Walla.

— Patty Vanikiotis, associate editor/copy editor