LaSalette

LaSalette is chef Manuel Azevedo's Portuguese restaurant, tucked into a courtyard on First Street East, just off Sonoma Plaza. Azevedo opened it in 1998 and has cooked the food of Portugal here for more than a quarter century, in a style the restaurant calls Cozinha Nova Portuguesa: new Portuguese cooking that joins family tradition to California produce. The room is warm and unfussy, with brick walls and a wood-fired oven at the heart of the kitchen, and it serves both lunch and dinner. The cuisine is genuinely uncommon in California: not Spanish-Portuguese fusion, not modernized for effect, but the rustic, sea-and-soil cooking of Portugal, translated faithfully for a Sonoma dining room by a chef who has kept to that path since the day he opened.