FEATURES | CALIFORNIA
Dustin Valette Keeps Setting the Family Table
The Sonoma County chef has built restaurants and a wine label around the idea that dinner can give people a place to belong.
By Mei Chen | Oct. 23, 2026
The Matheson kitchen
AUTHOR BIO: Mei Chen has worked for nearly a dozen start-ups in as many years, taking her to several West Coast cities. While she’s sure her current day job is permanent, she also has her eye on Carmel.
Every night, Dustin Valette’s family gathered around a large table to talk about their day. There were four children in a 975-square-foot house in Geyserville, California, and dinner was the part he looked forward to most. Then, when he was 12, his parents separated. The table, as he understood it, was gone. A year later, he started cooking professionally. That’s when he discovered a way to keep setting it.
“I realized that I couldn't have those family dinners back. That larger table was lost forever,” Valette said. “Though I could recreate them for others. I could give to strangers and people that I have never met what I so longingly desired to have myself.”
That is a lot to ask of a restaurant, but it helps explain the business Valette has built in Healdsburg, the Sonoma County town where his great-grandfather once operated a bakery. After working in kitchens from Napa Valley to Hawaii, he returned to become executive chef at Charlie Palmer’s Dry Creek Kitchen, then opened Valette with his brother, Aaron Garzini, in 2015. The Matheson and its rooftop restaurant, Roof 106, followed in 2021. Valette and The Matheson have earned Michelin Guide recognition; his wine label brings together some of California’s best-known winemakers. Now, with the Valette Wine Lounge project bringing those businesses closer together, he is finding another way to turn the family meal into his life’s work.
Valette
Long before there were restaurant reservations to manage, there was the close coordination required to live with five other people in a small house. Valette remembers the arrangement fondly. Space was limited; affection, in his telling, was not. “The values I learned as a kid have carried me throughout life,” he says. “I look back on my childhood and think how blessed I was.”
Some of that education happened outside. One meal he still remembers began with harvesting abalone at Salt Point on the Sonoma coast. They cleaned the shellfish, added garlic, butter, and chardonnay, and wrapped everything in parchment and then foil. The packets went into the coals of a bonfire. When they opened them, the smell of toasted garlic, butter, and steaming wine escaped into the night. A baguette toasted over the same coals finished dinner.
It was good seafood, wine, and bread, cooked where they happened to be. The details have stayed with him through a career that would supply considerably more equipment.
At 17, Valette left for the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, New York. He describes the move as the moment he learned he could leave a small town and trust himself to manage what came next. “It was at 17 that I jumped in and never looked back.”
His training took him through Thomas Keller’s Bouchon in Napa Valley and Hoku’s in Honolulu. At San Francisco’s Aqua, he became executive sous chef under Laurent Manrique. He later led the kitchen at VOX Restaurant & Wine Lounge in Henderson, Nevada, before returning to Sonoma County for six years at Dry Creek Kitchen. There, he built relationships with farmers and other producers that would help support a restaurant of his own.
Coming home carried a particular purpose. He wanted to apply what he had learned elsewhere to the place he knew best. “I didn't come home to settle down,” he says.
In 2015, he and Garzini opened Valette in the building where their great-grandfather Honoré had operated his bakery. The brothers could pursue their own careers in a place that already belonged to their family’s working history. Valette’s delight in that arrangement comes through more clearly than any business plan: “Me and my brother like when we were little kids.”
The cooking shows what happened between childhood and that reunion. Day boat scallops arrive en croûte with white sturgeon caviar and Champagne beurre blanc. Local producers get specific billing: Liberty Farms duck, Preston Farms olive oil, and honey from Hector’s Honey Farm. French technique provides the structure; Sonoma County supplies much of what goes into it.
With partner Craig Ramsey, Valette expanded in 2021 to The Matheson on Healdsburg’s plaza. Downstairs is fine dining built around seasonal ingredients; upstairs, Roof 106 serves wood-fired pizzas, small plates, and cocktails. The two restaurants give people different ways to spend an evening in the same building, depending on whether the occasion calls for a tasting menu or a pizza.
Wine has been part of Valette’s thinking since well before he put his name on a bottle. In high school, he recalls grilling steaks and drinking Silver Oak cabernet while his friends drank Coors. His eventual collaborators at Valette Wines include Jesse Katz, Bob Cabral, David Ramey, Tom Rochioli, and Michael Browne. The Wine Lounge is his next effort to bring the food and wine together, with the hospitality of a restaurant informing the tasting experience.
The restaurants have multiplied, and dinner now comes with a wine business attached. But his explanation for wanting to feed people still reaches back to that crowded house in Geyserville: “It was the thing I looked forward to every day.”
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