July 17, 2026

Dead Letter, Sonoma: The Girl & the Fig Team Trades Rustic French for Charcoal and Crudo

One SF/Bay Area opening a day, chosen and checked. Today: the North Bay's turn, as the team behind Sonoma's 29-year-old Girl & the Fig breaks from its rustic French signature to light a charcoal grill in a former post office just off the Plaza.

For nearly 30 years, John Toulze and Sondra Bernstein have owned the rustic French end of the Sonoma Plaza. They opened the Girl & the Fig in 1997, moved it to the Plaza in 2000, and last May converted their Glen Ellen sister Fig Cafe into Poppy, where chef Jeremy Zimmerman plates escargot and steak au poivre. Yesterday they switched registers. On Thursday, July 16, they opened Dead Letter, a sleek, fish-forward room catty-corner from the Fig in what was one of California's earliest post offices, a post office for only 14 years (1896 to 1910) and, for more than two decades, the Mexican restaurant Maya (Press Democrat, SF Chronicle).

Toulze calls the cooking "undefined California cuisine," and the engine is a three-level Spanish charcoal grill rather than the wood-fired hearth every Wine Country kitchen now runs. "Everybody is doing (wood-fired) hearth cooking," he told the Chronicle. "We don't want to do that." Zimmerman, who leads all three of the group's kitchens, sends the bigger plates out to share. "We're removing food envy," he told the Press Democrat. "When the food hits the center of the table, people keep talking."

The menu reads like dares that land. A butterflied trout sits in a young-ginger red curry with charred cucumber labneh ($42), built for two. Fried chicken karaage rests in a pool of hummus with preserved tomatoes ($24). Local rockfish, cut with sushi knives, becomes a strawberry aguachile with radish, basil, and pine nuts ($18); "rockfish was never an elevated fish like this," Toulze said. The soft-opening standout was a shrimp toast ($25) on crustless white bread, "like a kid's PB&J," that he says made everyone "lose their mind." A 24-ounce bone-in strip steak for two ($125) comes with bone-marrow butter off the grill. The wine list leans international and low-alcohol, and the cocktails play on the building's postal stint, with names like Burned Envelope and Return to Sender.

The 65-seat room leans into that past too: mid-1800s quarry-stone walls, a wooden post-office window stuffed with vintage postcards, an Art-o-Mat vending machine selling $5 art in cigarette-pack form, and 400 rotating digital pieces by more than 100 artists, alongside Bernstein's own work. It lands as downtown Sonoma fills back in, beside the three-Michelin-starred Enclos and the smashburger spot Smash, and Toulze frames it as "a more modern and upscale Wine Country approach than what Sonoma currently has to offer."

Dead Letter, 101 E. Napa St. (at First St. E.), just off the Sonoma Plaza. Open Wednesday, Thursday, and Sunday 5 to 9 p.m., Friday and Saturday 5 to 9:30 p.m., closed Monday and Tuesday. Reservations are live at deadlettersonoma.com.

Tracking

• Bar Auklet (Point Reyes): still no first review six weeks in, but its site now points diners to a Resy reservations page.
• Mt. Diablo BBQ (Lafayette): grand-opening party set for August 2, with positive early feedback after the soft open.
• Esme (Divisadero): quiet since the Eater review on July 13; the NoPa room to watch for a Chronicle notice.
• Lencho's (Napa) and Bar Skula (Oakland): quiet week, no new coverage.

Also opening

• Saam, SoMa (SF): Bangkok Michelin-starred chef Thitid "Ton" Tassanakajohn's first US restaurant, a family-style Thai room built on "three flavors, one soul" in the former Sun & Moon at 415 Brannan; reservations are live for a late-July opening. (SF Chronicle)
• Tụ Tập, San Anselmo (Marin): Justine Kelly, who spent 18 years at the Slanted Door, builds her own Vietnamese room to honor the late Charles Phan, with a mesquite grill and a rooftop bar aimed at Mount Tam; opening late July. (SF Chronicle)
• Sweet Fingers, Uptown Oakland (East Bay): the longtime Jamaican restaurant left Foothill Boulevard in April and has soft-opened on Telegraph with oxtail, curry goat, and jerk chicken wings; grand opening in August. (Oaklandside)
• Milky Flakes, Walnut Creek (Contra Costa): Japanese-style shaved milk ice with organic matcha and Hokkaido-milk soft serve, newly open on North Main. (Oaklandside)