Walla Walla: Wesley Walla Walla, Dinner at Brasserie Four

This is the first in a series of posts about our recent trip to Walla Walla over a long weekend. It covers Friday afternoon just after we arrived in Walla Walla from our drive from Bend and our evening dinner outside on Main Street.

We arrived in Walla Walla a bit too early to check into our room at the Wesley Walla Walla, so we detoured to a local brewpub for a beer and to kill a few minutes. After drinking our beers, we drove the couple of blocks to the Wesley, an 1875 frame Italianate structure just a block off downtown Walla Walla. As you will see over the course of several posts, it is a spectacularly renovated and important old home in Walla Walla.

The current Wesley with its twelve guest suites was originally one of the grandest homes in Walla Walla and has undergone a lot of change since it was built in 1875 and early 1876. The steeple, though an eye-catching feature of the current structure, was not original. The photo below shows the front of the house, currently facing northwest. Originally the house sans steeple faced southwest. At some point, now lost to history, the house was rotated 90 degrees to the north and before 1900, the steeple was added. President Rutherford Hayes stayed at the house in 1880 as it was one of the very few homes large enough to house the presidential entourage.

Then at some later time, the steeple addition was removed and over the course of time, one or more additions were added to the back (south) side, as evidenced today by a change in exterior trim on the back of the house. Then during a 2008 renovation, the steeple was rebuilt faithfully to old photos once again. The on-again, off-again steeple amuses me: it is quasi-Gothic in style, especially with its steep roof pitches and transverse gables, while the remainder of the house is quasi-Italianate. It represents an early form of remuddling, albeit a fairly tasteful one. No one can accuse this stately home of not having character.

The Wesley Walla Walla

We did not have very long to rest in our room before it was time to head to dinner, just blocks away, for our 5:30 reservation. It being a holiday weekend (Columbus Day), reservations were in short supply and later was not an option. At Brasserie Four on the corner of Main and 2nd, we were seated outside on a deck built over a couple of parking spaces.

It was a lovely evening to sit outside and enjoy the fall air, with the exception that the most entertaining activity on a weekend in Walla Walla would seem to be to get in your jacked up diesel pickup or tuned import sedan and rip down either Main or Second at a high rate of speed, but more importantly, as loudly as possible. Methinks the local constabulary needs to do a little traffic enforcement on weekends downtown.

Enjoying ourselves nonetheless, we ordered a cheese plate, rillettes, a slice of terrine, and for Ann, a steak frites, classic Brasserie dishes all. We enjoyed cocktails with the cheese and then ordered a bottle of wine. When I went to order one of the ten or so wines on the menu, the server told me that there was an entire wall of wine inside that I could also choose from.

Eagerly, I went inside to peruse the selection which was mainly French with a lesser amount of Italian wines. The shelves contained few local wines. I selected a bottle of SP68, a Frappato (with 25% Nero d'Avola) from an up and coming young Sicilian female wine maker, Arianna Occhipinti. Frappato is really light by itself; the addition of Nero d'Avola really gives it some body.

After dinner, it was getting dark but Ann I were not yet done celebrating. We were fixing to be bad and order another bottle of wine. Our server though we might continue to occupy our outside table, until she found out that it was rebooked in ten minutes. We went inside to inquire if we could get a seat at the bar and we were seated after a short wait of about ten minutes, a period of time that let me crawl through the wine wall and select another bottle of wine to have at the bar. We wanted something with a bit more oomph and so I selected a bottle from one of my favorite northern Rhône appellations, Crozes-Hermitage, the 2020 Rouge (100% Syrah) from Alain Graillot, one of the most respected producers in that region.

After drinking the wine and talking with the bar staff, servers, and other patrons at the bar, we reluctantly made our way back through downtown to the Wesley, taking a few pictures as we walked.

The dark gave us the opportunity to see the Wesley in a different light, especially the lit grounds outside the house. To the east of the house, the landscaping includes several walkways, patios, seating areas, and a hot tub. It was getting chilly at this point in the evening, so we retired inside to get ready for our wine tastings on Saturday.