EDIBLE: Christopher Kostow earns spot as one of PBFW's brightest.

It wasn’t challenging enough for Christopher Kostow to keep Napa’s Restaurant at Meadowood at the apex of West Coast food and wine. Or to earn three Michelin stars for six years straight. Or to harness concept, garden and root cellar to convert an absurd ambition (“make the food better, more delicious, more relevant, more singular, more personal”) into an transcendent expression of what dining can be.

Now he’s transforming one of Napa’s most beloved properties, the former Tra Vigne, a magnificent stone building twice the size of Meadowood – with 5,000 square feet on its primary floor alone – into a concept called Charter Oak, most daring in its three – or four-ingredient simplicity, designed to draw people several times a week rather than for a rare several-thousand dollar dinner.

Only this major Napa culinary move is less of a challenge than it is a necessity.

Kostow needs to do it for personal, intellectual reasons, to give himself and his team room to grow. When you’re one of the youngest chefs to ever earn Michelin’s top honor, the universe gets bigger than stars.

As his team revamps the property’s old stone 1800s sherry building to hold all manner of preserved goodies, adds a private dining room and styles the open kitchen and grill to work as an R&D space for both Charter Oak and Meadowood, he is using food festivals to ready the group on the new flavors and family-style format.

Which means he’s enjoying duties as one of Pebble Beach Food & Wine’s Lexus Culinary Masters as much as ever. In the group he’s the young savant among legends like DanielBoulud, Masaharu Morimoto and Michael Symon.

For March 31’s opening night reception he’s teaming with Katiana Hung, his chef de cuisine at Meadowood who’s taking the helm at Charter Oak. At Casa Palmero Saturday, he teams with his restaurant director at Meadowood and partner at Charter Nathaniel Dorn on an exclusive New Napa Experience dinner.

More on Pebble Beach’s whirlwind blitz of tastings, seminars, parties and playtime on the blog, where the full version of this interview appears.

I heard a recent tasting for Charter had heads spinning. What will stick from the tasting?

The whole process is workshopping. We won’t know till we get there. Some of the service elements, some of the table side stuff are things we don’t know how to master yet. It can be easy to sketch out, but you don’t know how people are going to interact with the format and each other, and it’s all in the minutiae. We want to get that right before we charge people.

What’s most surreal about how far food has come in the last decade?

You have a lot of smart people doing a lot of very different things. There’s talent everywhere – fast casual [dining], casual, high end – and a smarter and more dynamic group of people in the industry overall. But in the end it’s still about doing the work, and sometimes that gets lost in all the dynamism.

What do people misunderstand about what three stars mean and what they take to achieve?

To achieve them there needs to be some sort of point of view, a singularity in it, and you need to be doing everything well. I don’t say we are doing everything well all the time, but we are singular in our point of view, and we execute it really well. Sometimes a fancy place executes really well, but they don’t have a real identity. Or you have a garagiste upstart, where the ideas are great, but the execution isn’t there. It’s also the service, the cocktail program, the wine: You need all of it and it all needs to make sense together.

What do you miss about the early days?

It was more pirate shippy. More emotional. More off the cuff. We were more like a teenager.

What are you most eager to do with the new Charter Oak concept?

The opportunities to let our team do its thing. Watching Katiana Hung in our workshops, seeing her grow and create and get better has been the best part.

I like something you said about Charter Oak: “I want to start over… no one ever complains that they want more technique or chefy-ness.”

I want to purchase perfect product, cook it simply and get out of the way. Simplicity is the hardest thing. At Meadowood we have all the requisite artifice and technique and it’s very beautiful. I want to do the antithesis.

Can you tease out the difference between casual and simple?

In New York, our team’s doing ham with this great farm we’ve found, grated horseradish and cured butter. That’s our dish. We’re finding out if we’re courageous enough to serve stuff that simple.

What do you like most about the Charter Oak property?

The light is amazing. And the courtyard and its interplay of trees and brick.

Favorite new (or rediscovered) technique of the moment?

Steaming.

Favorite recent ingredient discovery?

White endive.

Ethnic food fetish?

I live in Napa, so unfortunately, it’s just a lot of white people’s food. Ramen.

Most annoying trend?

The race to bottom – this focus on who can be the most casual, the more you show you don’t care.

Is it harder to get to three stars or hold onto them?

Harder to get them, I’d say, since once we got them, we don’t think about them, and just keep doing what we’re doing.

~ QUICKBITES ~

• Bay of Pines (920-3560), the wildly unique downtown Monterey restaurant with the pirate ship bar, marine murals and organic cocktails and food, is reopening March 19 after a number of months dark. More on the blog.
• Water + Leaves (238-9999) upscale craft tea and coffee bar is now open on the water at Fisherman’s Wharf in Monterey.
• Wharf Marketplace (649-1116) has brought back fresh fish offerings with assist from Monterey Fish Company.
• The Anxious In-N-Out Wait of 2005-16 had a breakthrough this week: Its officials, long wary of touching off any deeper angst, had declined to give me anything but vague opening targets. Now they’ve finally furnished a tentative open date: March 27, Easter Sunday.
• The Monterey County Visitors and Convention Bureau has a new website at www.seemonterey.com designed to be mobile-first and more user-friendly, with new trip planning tools.
• Hotel Carmel, from the people behind La Playa Carmel, is actively overhauling the former Brophy’s to be a watering hole of some kind, though that won’t be finished until after the hotel remake is done next month.
• When the chef is Irish, that bodes well for a St. P’s feast. That’s the rare case locally at Edgar’s of Quail Lodge (620-8910), where Chef Kenneth Macdonald asks $18 for a spread of corned beef and cabbage, potatoes and Irish soda bread (to complement the Guinness stout, Irish whiskey and Irish coffee).
• Santa Lucia Highlands Wine Artisans does a tasting for industry and media types 1-4pm Monday, March 21, also at Quail, in the Peninsula Ballroom. Email dave@santaluciahighlands.com.
• The artichoke cupcakes, fried hearts and artichoke po’ boy at the Pezzini Farms and its neighboring Choke Coach (241-2587) sound so fun and festive, but at $4, $6.50 and $6.50 are overpriced for what you get and how long you wait.
• Show me a better happy hour than Hula’s Island Grill in New Monterey (655-4852) and I’ll show you an ugly otter pup.
• Henri Matisse: “Creativity takes courage.”