Team

Tyler Rodde & Curtis Di Fede, Co-Chef-Owners – Tyler Rodde and Curtis Di Fede first discovered their mutual love of pure Italian cooking when they met in the kitchen at Oliveto Restaurant and Cafe in Oakland, CA.  In 2010, they returned to their roots in the Napa Valley to open Oenotri, a southern-Italian restaurant featuring a daily-changing menu of rustic dishes built around the freshest local product available.

Reflective of the chef-owners’ passion for handcrafted food, Oenotri offers a menu with more than 20 different types of house-made salumi, an array of handmade fresh and dry pasta as well as exclusive olive oil sourced from within the Napa Valley.  The restaurant’s pizzas are baked in a 100-percent wood-burning oven, imported from Italy.  When first installed, the oven needed to be brought to temperature slowly over the course of two weeks and so, as their first project in Oenotri’s kitchen, Tyler and Curtis slept in the partially finished restaurant every night to make sure the flame did not go out.

Today the chefs’ vision for the restaurant continues to grow and expand.  Tyler and Curtis have joined other local chefs in preserving and managing the gardens surrounding the now-closed Copia Center for Food & Wine in Napa and have also launched their own exclusive 4-acre culinary garden.  These two projects provide an ever-increasing portion of the produce featured each day on Oenotri’s menu.

Tyler and Curtis have established Oenotri as one the Bay Area’s premiere venues for Italian cuisine as well as an essential component of any Wine Country itinerary.

 

Jessica Baron – Oenotri Farmer - Jessica Baron comes to Oenotri with a thick clod of farming experience in the treads of her boots. After studying agriculture at UC Santa Cruz and farming for three seasons at a ranch-camp for children in the mountains of Northern California, she returned to the San Francisco bay area where she grew up, and began work for Marin Roots Farm. It was here, selling at farmers markets, that she first realized the fun of providing chefs with the produce that they love. With this in mind she started a farm in Point Reyes Station where she spent a year and a half growing produce directly for local restaurant Osteria Stellina.

Jessica now manages Oenotri Farm, which provides up to eighty percent of the restaurant’s produce. She collaborates with the chefs to grow unique and delicious varieties and to harvest each crop at the peak of its flavor. Napa’s warm summers and mild winters allow the restaurant to serve farm-fresh vegetables all year long, so with each meal at the restaurant, you get a taste of the farm!