Staff shortages forcing Wine Country’s Terra to close.
On the eve of its 30th anniversary, St. Helena restaurant Terra will close at the end of service on Saturday, June 2, marking the end of one of Wine Country’s most influential restaurants. During the restaurant’s life span, its chefowners — Lissa Doumani and Hiro Sone — came to define a modern California cuisine in their use of European and Japanese influences.
The reason for the closure, said Doumani, who owns the restaurant with husband Sone, isn’t profitability. “We’re making money (but) we can’t get staff,” she says.
Napa restaurants have had a hard time attracting talent for years, but as the summer tourist season approaches, the issue has grown particularly acute. The main issue, Dou-
mani thinks, is housing. “Before the fires, it was ridiculously expensive, but sometimes (staff ) could find granny units. After the fire all those went to locals that were put out of their homes. It’s the right thing to have happened, but there are consequences.”
Terra, with its handsome stone walls and precise, delicate California cuisine, has been a stalwart presence in St. Helena so long that few Bay Area diners can remember its founding.
The couple met in 1983 when Sone took a job at Spago in Los Angeles just as Wolfgang Puck’s restaurant was hitting its peak. A Japanese company had tapped him to be the chef of Spago Tokyo and sent him to California to apprentice for a year. There he met Doumani, then a pastry cook. The two reunited a few years later in Tokyo, and when Doumani returned to California, Sone followed her. In September 1988, they took over La Belle Helene, renaming it in the process.
Sone has always been Terra’s chef, Doumani its pastry chef. Over the years, their Mediterranean-inspired food has increasingly showed the culinary influence of Sone’s upbringing on a rice farm in Miyagi Prefecture, Japan.
Terra was on Michael Bauer’s first Top 100 Restaurants list for the Chronicle a quartercentury ago and has remained there for its duration. Over the years, Sone and Doumani have opened other restaurants — notably Ame and Urchin Bistrot in San Francisco, which have both since closed — and have split their flagship into a restaurant and a bar.
Having recently reupped their lease for another 10 years, Sone and Doumani had no expectation of closing. But due to short staffing, Sone has been working several stations in the kitchen, and Doumani has even been pressed into service in
the kitchen. They’ve mulled over dozens of ways to restructure the restaurant to require fewer employees. “You play all these scenarios in your head,” she says. “But none of them make enough of a difference.”
Once the couple had made the decision to close, the changes happened quickly. This weekend Doumani and Sone told the staff — one of whom has worked there for 20 years — about the restaurant closing, and they have just a few days to get the word out to customers. Next, they’ll have to sell the business, and then they can figure out what might be next.
For years, they’ve talked — joking? dreaming? a little of both — of running a tiny bistro where the couple could work supported only by one or two additional employees. “It was one of those retirement dreams,” Doumani says. “We’re not ready to retire. We just need to get away from the stress of what this is.”