Escoffier Questionnaire: Emma Lipp & Stephanie Reagor

VALLEY BAR + BOTTLE, SONOMA

In a number of significant ways, Valley Bar + Bottle offers a radically different experience than what one usually encounters in a restaurant located smack dab on the historic Sonoma Plaza. It manages to do that while still maintaining a deeply rooted California feel through its food, philosophy and sense of community. That both things are simultaneously felt at Valley echoes the complex simplicity of the place itself.

Valley is owned by two couples. Lauren Feldman and Tanner Walle run the front of house, or dining room. The other half of the ownership group, Emma Lipp and Stephanie Reagor, are responsible for the back of house, aka the kitchen—so it was their stories and responses we sought for this edition of the Escoffier Questionnaire.

Valley celebrated its second anniversary this past July. On launching a new restaurant venture in the middle of a pandemic, Reagor says, “We were consecrated in Covid, but we still had a very warm welcome.”

Emma grew up in Napa with a winemaker father and worked in restaurants from a young age, but she says it was not until she worked at Navarre in Portland when she was 23 that she “got the bug.”

“It was, like, a true farm-to-table restaurant where every week the restaurant had a contract with a farm and they literally just got everything that the farm had. It made it the most extravagantly abundant menu, and then sometimes you were eating just potatoes and kale,” she recalls. “It was very informative and inspiring.”

From Portland, Lipp moved to New York. While working at Prune, Gabrielle Hamilton’s pioneering farm-to-table restaurant, she met longtime Chez Panisse chef David Tanis. At the time, Tanis was moving from the Bay Area to New York to write a newspaper column and also to work on the book that would become his One Good Meal. Lipp wrote to him after their meeting, asking if she could be his assistant—and he agreed.

These experiences feel like a foreshadowing to what Emma has helped to create at Valley—Tanis and Hamilton share an extraordinary dedication to capturing the essence of an ingredient, while also “letting the thing be the thing,” an ethos that is omnipresent at Valley.

Reagor grew up in the northern suburbs of Chicago and attended cooking school there—”kind of late, after studying sociology,” she says. Afterwards, she did her externship at Chicago’s Blackbird, and ended up staying there to cook for a couple of years. “The chef at the time was a disciple of Wiley Dufresne [a leading proponent of ‘molecular gastronomy,’ aka incorporating complicated scientific methods into food preparation and presentation] and so that was the kind of food we were making,” she recalls. The fastidiousness of that kind of cooking didn’t resonate. “I’m glad that I got to learn a bit about that, but then I moved to the Publican [also in Chicago], which was a much more rustic style of cooking.”

After Publican, Reagor moved to New York where she initially worked at The Spotted Pig. “That was during the height of all that madness there,” she says, referring to the period immediately following allegations of sexual misconduct made against one of the owners. After that she worked for the Brooklyn restaurant group The Marlow Collective, starting at Roman’s. “I would say that those are like Bay Area restaurants,” she says. “They’re taking inspiration from Chez [Panisse], working with the finest ingredients and making simple foods. It was the first time I learned about the concept of letting the food be a little different based on who’s cooking it. That was really powerful. We definitely use that here [at Valley].”

Despite both having worked in the restaurant industry in New York during the same period, Reagor and Lipp did not meet until one fateful harvest season in Sonoma County.

“A friend who I met while working for Andrew Tarlow [the restaurateur behind the Marlow Collective] was working at Scribe [Winery] and randomly reached out to me to say they needed hands in Sonoma for six weeks, and I just so happened to be at an untethered place and thought it would be, like, a working vacation. On the seventh day of the sixth week, Emma and I locked eyes in a different way,” recalls Reagor.

“Lauren [Feldman, one of the four partners at Valley] and I had been talking for a few years about doing something and we were privy to information about this particular space. Towards the end of Steph’s time at Scribe, we really connected in the kitchen, even before the romantic part. We just shared a sensibility. And she is such a talent. We could really communicate well. I don’t know if being a couple cemented the idea of working together or kind of complicated it. But it just proved to be the right decision for us,” Lipp says.

“I don’t think I want to work without her anymore,” Reagor adds.

“It was a challenge to open this restaurant,” says Lipp. “It is a challenge to operate it. I would definitely share that with anyone attempting to open a place around here. That being said, I do hope what we’re doing here is a green light for people in the community and [that] we can be a resource, help open doors for people.”

In just over two years of existence, Valley has become known for its dedication to supporting local food and drink producers. “Sourcing is our highest priority,” Lipp says. “Whether they realize it or not, it is one of the things that people like most about Valley.”

“A lot of the feedback we get is about freshness, which is really about sourcing,” adds Reagor. “And lightness. Like the natural wines we serve. You just feel better walking out.” She continues, “We want to support the health of the land and the community. We feel great spending our money with the local farms and on our employees. Luckily we have enough regulars that support what we are doing to make it all work.”