Photo below: Larry Mindel, Owner & former chef Christopher Fernandez. Chef Peter McNee who was sous chef is now the chef. (photo credit: San Francisco Chronicle photo by Chris Stewart)

I enjoyed an excellent repast, in a location idyllic for a restaurant—the Casa Madrona Hotel with windows that face onto the street and the bay beyond, and on the hillside above they tend an organic garden in a terraced plot overlooking the little town of Sausalito.
I was not surprised to find out that Poggio was the inspiration of Larry Mindel as it had all the earmarks to be one of his concepts, as I have followed his career from Ciao to Prego and on through the Il Fornaio years. In 1980, I was one of the three founding partners of the original Cruvinet Wine Preserving System and responded to an inquiry from his company, Spectrum Group; I met Mr. Mindel in his restaurant MacArthur Park in Palo Alto where I spent a few hours trying to convince him to buy a Cruvinet. He was very discerning, examining every aspect of the sales and technical data with more discussions continuing over the following weeks, before he finally bought one to test it in one of his restaurants. His company bought many more over the five years I was involved in Cruvinet.
As for the menu at Poggio (place in the hills) try any of the meat dishes cooked in the wood-burning oven, all pasta creations are also meticulously prepared and a marinated beet salad, with arugula and ricotta was as refreshing as it was well put-together.
We tried many different tasting glasses of different wines both large and small from their assortment. It was a good way to try different wines paired with each dish, similar to the Cruvinet without the machine. The wine list offers a good selection of Italian wines with many choices of well-known and some lesser-known wines in various regions of Italy and prices are realistic.