Today, modern chefs honor meatless recipes as a delicious challenge to their talents, showcasing the natural flavors, textures, and visual appeal of the finest garden ingredients. And few get it fresher than West Sonoma County restaurants, celebrating the beautiful farms, ranches, and orchards in their own backyards. For unusual menus and distinctive style, try these near-secret treasures.

Casino, Bodega

Forget that this rural town is home to just 200 souls, and look past the scruffy clapboard exterior of the building (that is not a casino), there’s top notch cooking coming from this little kitchen, courtesy of uber-chef Mark Malicki and other guest talents. The menu changes daily, but gorgeous global plates might include pumpkin curry with tofu and Thai basil; fried kale, rainbow chard, and crimini pastitsio; a pretty platter of Green String Farms asparagus, poached egg, and Eli's bread; or comforting potato cake topped in roasted beets and raisins with a touch of grain mustard and Tzudick’s horseradish.

Dick Blomster's Korean Diner, Guerneville

A circa-50s American diner formerly known as Pat’s, this crunchy, funky spot cooks up wild but successful recipes like braised chrysanthemum leaves tossed with hot chile peppers, maitake mushrooms, and pungent black garlic. Sit at the counter in front of the tiny kitchen window or in the wood paneled back room, order a stiff drink from the dive bar next door (they deliver), and nibble on hand-cut Seoul fries sprinkled with garlic, Korean chiles, green onions, seaweed, and sesame seeds. For a bigger meal, a hearty soup hits the spot, brimming with kale and shiitake mushrooms over soba, udon, or rice noodles studded with market vegetables and tofu.

Barley & Hops, Occidental

Artisan brewed beer with vegetarian food? Indeed, your server can direct you among the line-up of handcrafted brews made by owner Noah Bolmer, for the best pairing with a Vegan Bohemian Burger smothered in beer-sautéed mushrooms; or the mac-n-cheese gooey in béchamel, beer, Gruyère, cheddar, and Parmesan. No one will ever miss the meat with oh-so-flavorful dirty rice balls stuffed with cider braised apricot and fried for dunking in roasted red pepper aioli; or crisp-edged, pan-fried, black bean cakes dolloped in smoked pico de gallo alongside coriander rice pilaf, and lettuce-jicama salad in lime dressing. 

Forchetta Bastoni, Sebastopol

Owner Jamilah Nixon put together a stylish loft lounge with seating on low sectionals made of repurposed shipping palettes topped with pillows covered in colorful Thai sarongs. And she sets a stylish table of Southeast Asian street food, offering bar nibbles and full plates like shoyu ramen with mustard greens, and tofu; Vietnamese dry noodles dotted in tart pickled vegetables and roasted peanuts; sweet-fiery green papaya-chile salad; and a spicy vegetable-tofu curry swimming in creamy coconut sauce dressed with basil, kaffir lime, and ginger.

Peter Lowell’s, Sebastopol

The ingredients are so fresh here that they’re called “hyperlocal,” as in sourced primarily from Sebastopol. The sleek, chic, Italian café looks pretty fancy, but tempts with simple pleasures like a bagel sandwich stuffed with BBQ tempeh and caramelized onion (fried egg optional); or wood fire pizza topped in artisan cheeses including soy-based, and finished with goodies like marinara, wild arugula, exotic mushrooms, Calabrian chiles, escarole, tofu, and seitan. Chalk the explosive flavors up to those amazing ingredients: panna cotta, for example, is made of Rainbow’s End goat milk, pure vanilla, and fresh-picked cherries from nearby trees.

Backyard, Forestville

Chefs Daniel Kedan and Marianna Gardenhire love their local orchards, farms, creameries, and foragers, so they visit them frequently, to see what’s best for their extensive, mouthwatering, veggie/vegan menu. The roadhouse set up is a shrine to pure flavor, bringing gluten-free, purple potato gnocchi with king trumpet mushrooms, young onions, Cinderella squash, and fava-hemp seed pesto; or spiced tempeh with saffron rice, roasted young onions, hedgehog mushrooms, and piquillo pepper.

Sunflower Center, Petaluma

Call it rawsome. The combo theater/community gathering spot and café from health food goddess Lydia Kindheart focuses on uncooked foods in remarkably tasty success stories like the burger made from quinoa, carrots, beets, celery, kale, parsley, basil, and sesame, sunflower, and pumpkin seeds (it tastes kind of like meaty peanut butter). The raw green soup is probably healthy even if you just absorb the aromas, of kale, avocado, cucumber, cilantro, ginger, celery, herbs, lemon, and seaweed flakes, while Lydia’s Favorite Crepe seems like cheating, in a rainbow-flavorful gluten-free buckwheat round stuffed with purple cabbage, carrots, beets, seaweed, kale, avocado, herbs, and kalamata olives in a bright dressing of olive and sunflower oils, pumpkin seeds, herbs, and lemon.

While the amenities arms race rages on among well-heeled and well-equipped tech offices across the city, a floating coworking space that is rusty, drafty, encrusted with birds’ nests, and laden with fish carcasses is luring some of the brightest minds in the Bay Area.

The Maritol is a 39-year-old ship from Iceland that used to ferry cars and trucks through the icy North Sea, earning it the nickname the Icebreaker. Today it is docked at Pier 50. Potted plants and bike racks line the entryway—a sloping gangplank, which leads to a keypad-secured hatch. Once inside, you see artwork featuring swirling galaxies and space shuttles hanging between portholes that overlook the Bay. All who board must sign the “Enter at your own risk” waiver, located on a small table, along with a handful of pens. Each morning, dozens of programmers, engineers, and entrepreneurs make the commute from land to sea. After heading to the galley to brew up a shot of espresso, commuters then proceed to set up shop somewhere in the unlikely collections of “offices.” The choices include spreading out over a group of couches on the lower deck, staking a claim in a hammock swaying above fake turf on the sunny top deck, or taking a station at a standing desk inside the wood-paneled wheelhouse.

Levit and Kahle had a bar built from cypress to match the dining table.

The nearly all-steel Icebreaker is a floating brain trust dreamed up by Creon Levit, a NASA scientist, and Brewster Kahle, founder of the Internet Archive, a digital library. The pair bought the ship three years ago from designer Olle Lundberg, who lived on it with his wife. Lundberg had the boat brought over from Iceland and, although he added a few skylights and sliding glass doors to make it habitable, maintained the natural industrial vibe. Levit and Kahle envisioned a maritime community of stellar start-ups and nonprofits, and the ship has since been home to fledgling companies, such as Matterport (3-D modeling) and Lookflow (an image recognition company that was purchased by Yahoo last year). “We just want to work with people who are doing interesting, worthy things,” says Levit, who explains that there is no official system of leases or tenancy in place. “It’s more like a private club, with dues depending on usage and privileges. Or sometimes we just donate space to people doing really cool things, and hope that they remember us when they make it big.”

Payment and procedures don’t seem to be a high priority for anyone on the Icebreaker. “I’ve never worked well in a traditional office setting,” says Squirrel Sciuridae, who has been operating from the boat for nearly a year. “This space fosters intense creativity while offering a perfect level of distraction—you can’t be bothered by the hum of the hydraulics opening the hatch.” Levit and Kahle’s vision of a community has also been very much fulfilled: When they brokered the deal with Lundberg, they asked that his hot sauce collection and a 30-foot-long cypress communal dining table be left in place. Today the table serves as both a group desk and the site of biweekly dinners for the boat’s community. A collection of petite sleeping berths and two showers come in handy when an intense assignment or communiqué with coworkers in Asia requires pulling an all-nighter—a coder wandering around in a bath towel is not an uncommon sight.

Bay breezes and open spaces can make the ship a chilly place to work, so the sofas around the fireplace are popular on cloudy or foggy days.

But the idea of a floating office is a new one, and the Icebreaker crew has had its share of tangles with the San Francisco Port Authority, who isn’t sure what to make of the uncommon arrangement. After being threatened with eviction late in 2013, Levit and Kahle have navigated through considerable red tape in order to become “a tenant in good standing” and ensure smooth sailing in the future—literally, as the ship needs to prove that it’s seaworthy. To that end, after nearly a year of repairs and preparations, a cruise around the Bay is scheduled for this month. After that, Levit hopes to build even stronger ties with the maritime community. They have already signed on companies specializing in submersibles and even rockets designed to launch from beneath the waves, proving their endeavor is far from a novelty. “We hope to be able to not just take it out in the Bay, but out to sea, where we can really engage in some new and exciting work.”

This article was published in 7x7's April issue. Click here to subscribe.

Several people have emailed me to ask why no one at CT has posted on the George Zimmerman verdict. It’s a good question. I can’t speak for anyone else; as Chris said, we’re a loose-knit crew. I know that I’ve simply not felt up to the challenge. And not able to say anything as cogent as I’ve read elsewhere.

But this clip from 1968 of James Baldwin on the Dick Cavett Show seems apposite. (The Milton Friedman lookalike trying to get a word in edgewise is the Yale philosopher Paul Weiss.)