Dry Creek Kitchen

The story

Crafted with passion, served with love

Progressive American Cooking, Rooted in Place

At 317 Healdsburg Avenue, Dry Creek Kitchen has spent 25 years making the case that the best meal you can eat in Sonoma County is one built entirely from it. Legendary chef Charlie Palmer — whose Progressive American style shaped a generation of fine dining — was drawn to Healdsburg not by ambition alone but by what the land produces: extraordinary produce, world-class wines, and a community that gathers around the table. That conviction still drives every plate.

The Kitchen and the People Behind It

Palmer's vision is executed daily by Executive Chef Shane McAnelly, whose approach keeps the menu in constant dialogue with the seasons. The nightly three-course dinner menu reflects whatever is freshest from farms just up the road. For guests who want to go deeper, McAnelly's ever-changing six-course Tasting Menu includes at least one dish available nowhere else on the menu — a quiet way of rewarding curiosity. On Thursday evenings, the Sonoma Neighbor Menu offers a three-course celebration of Northern Sonoma County's local bounty, and McAnelly's rotating Pasta Tasting Menu brings a weekly-changing six-course showcase of handmade and extruded pastas built around seasonal ingredients.

The wine program matches the ambition of the kitchen. With more than 600 bottles on the list — described as the most expansive exclusively Sonoma County wine list in the world — guests can trace the same landscape they explored during the day through what's in the glass. Wine Spectator recognized this commitment with its Best of Award of Excellence, a distinction the restaurant has held since 2002.

More Ways to Sit Down

The bar offers the full dinner menu à la carte, first come first served, alongside more than twenty local wines by the glass and a craft cocktail list drawing on over fifty scotches, whiskeys, and gins. For something more intimate, Studio Cellar by DCK hosts up to ten guests in Hotel Healdsburg's Wine Library for a seven-course tasting menu surrounded by rare local bottlings. The adjacent Spirit Bar, set in the hotel's Fireplace Lobby Lounge, runs happy hour Sunday through Thursday and hosts live acoustic and jazz music on weekends.

Once a month, Dry Creek Kitchen hosts a rotating series of experiences — winery collaborations, deep dives into Sonoma's niche grape varieties, valley-focused wine dinners — that reflect the same curiosity the restaurant has brought to American cooking from the beginning.