Casual Birthday in Sonoma County

We'd already gone to Flour + Water for my birthday dinner last month, but Shweetie still wanted to take me out around my actual birthday. We made a reservation for dinner at Hana Japanese, this highly rated sushi restaurant I've been wanting to try, that is in, of all places, a strip mall in Rohnert Park, so we decided to just spend the whole day up in Sonoma County.

We drove up north that morning and had lunch at Bovolo, this little restaurant (if you can even call it that) in the back of Coppersfield's Books in Healdsburg. We ordered their pork cheek sandwich and a waffle special. The sandwich was pretty good but the waffle was pretty unremarkable.

The World Famous Pork Cheek with Roasted Peppers and Salsa Verde

It had been raining off and on during our drive up north, and when we were finished eating, it was raining pretty hard, so we hung out in the bookstore for awhile, then headed around the corner to Downtown Bakery and Creamery. We got a couple of dessert items, including a cupcake and a deliciously flaky lemon tart, which we ate in the car as we pondered our next move.

We had a lot of time to kill between then and our early dinner reservation, so we decided on a whim to go check out the Charles M. Schulz Museum, which was really cute and had tons of interesting information about the Peanuts gang and about Charles Schulz. The place is not too big, and we were able to go through everything in a couple of hours. I had fun going through all the little exhibits. And I learned that the chateau that Charlie Brown refers to in Bon Voyage, Charlie Brown is actually a real place!

We stayed at the museum until they closed, then still had a little more time to kill so we stopped in at a Sprint store to check out new phones (we are finally going to make the leap to smart phones, LOL) and then headed over to our dinner reservation.

We sat at the sushi bar for dinner, and enjoyed watching all the action behind the counter. We opted for the Sushi Omakase and a couple of cooked dishes. It was fun stuffing ourselves with piece after piece of fresh nigiri.

Aji (Jack Mackerel) and Sawara (Spanish Mackerel)

Hana Japanese has fresh fish and a decent selection, and we really enjoyed their uni, even though we're not usually big uni fans. However, we were expecting knock-your-socks off freshness in their fish, something along the lines of Sushi Sasabune in LA, and it fell short of that mark, though their prices were similar to Sasabune.

I don't regret trying out Hana Japanese, but as far as the Bay Area goes, I will still stick to hole-in-the-wall Japanese places.