Last week Mrs. Flannestad and I had the pleasure of traveling up to Napa for a long weekend.  We were celebrating our ninth wedding anniversary, so we decided to do it up a bit.  I even left work a bit early so we could make our dinner reservation at Ad Hoc in Yountville.

Ad Hoc is a restaurant concept from Thomas Keller & Co, of French Laundry fame.  Like the French Laundry, it only offers one menu a day.  Also, like the French Laundry, it sources much of it’s produce and supplies locally.  It is, however, a much less formal, and somewhat cheaper, restaurant than the French Laundry.

The two highlights of the meal were a salad of fava beans, haricot verte, and small lettuces from the French Laundry Garden and a bottle of Blue Apron Ale.

Blue Apron, so the story goes, was created for Mr. Keller’s New York outpost Per Se.  They asked Brooklyn Brewing to make them a special batch of beer as a special gift for their investors to celebrate some anniversary or another.   However, Brooklyn Brewing couldn’t make just 30 bottles, they had to do a whole batch.  Per Se didn’t really know what to do with the leftover beer, as it is a very upscale restaurant, so they shipped the remainder out to their more casual outpost, Ad Hoc.

As the label below states, it is a delightful Belgian-Style Brown Ale.  We found it a very nice accompaniment to both our salad, described above, and main course of roasted pork tenderloin.