Boonville Hotel’s Prodigal Son

While California yields some of the world’s best produce, the bounty before me at the Boonville Hotel was the best of the best: The poussin, its skin bronzed and succulent meat stuffed with onions and lemons, rested on the plate surrounded by new potatoes, morels, tight curls of fiddlehead ferns, and a scattering of herbs from the hotel’s garden. The complex aromas of summer engulfed the table, but the scent of just-picked basil dominated like the intensity of fresh-cut grass.

Earlier this year, chef Perry Hoffman brought his talents to Boonville, a remote town of just over 1,000 residents, accessed by 30 miles of twisting country roads on Highway 128 north of Cloverdale and about a two-and-a-quarter-hour drive from San Francisco. The two draws: time with family and cooking, which meant he would take over the kitchen of his uncle’s Boonville Hotel. Hoffman is from a large family—nine of his immediate relatives live