Floyd and Connie’s

Stephanie Butler and Nick Dorgan met at the French Culinary Institute in New York and cooked at Delfina and 20th Century Café in San Francisco before they landed on the Mendocino Coast. Locals first met their food at pop-ups – first out of their own kitchen, then on Sunday and Monday nights in the dining room at Café Beaujolais, where the reservations went in minutes. The restaurant is named for Nick’s grandparents, who farmed Christmas trees in upstate New York, and it took six months to turn a long-empty harbor building into the room it is now: deep green walls, a working woodstove, hardwood floors, vintage art, and windows onto the harbor, the Noyo Bridge, and whatever seals are loafing below the deck.

The menu is American in the way a good diner is American, then quietly better. Snacks run from marinated olives and sour cream and onion bread to smoked fish dip and a cream of tomato soup worth ordering twice. Mains change often, but the hanger steak with fried potatoes, the crispy steelhead trout, and the “cowboy chicken” have become the regulars’ orders, and there is always a chef’s special from that day’s catch. The bread is from Hard Head Bread, baked that morning in Fort Bragg. The drink to order is the Icebox Martini, which arrives very cold and very correct.