It's been a fixture next to Highway 29 just North of Napa for as long as I can remember, but the big red hen atop a barn that marked the site of a cheap mexican eatery and the ramshackle Red Hen Antiques cooperative (page 38) is about to come crashing to earth, as over ambitious hens tend to do.

In this case, the hen's owners' ambitions to sell the place were to blame. The antique store is no more, and the cheap'n'cheerful Red Hen Cantina has morphed from a cheap mexican into an expensive Euro-Cal restaurant called Zare. Yes, it's yet another Caliterranean restaurant in the Napa Valley that could be related to all the others. Mediterranean-inspired main courses cost the typical $20-$30 and are of the gourmet quality that diners in these parts have come to expect. The wine list is pretty impressive too, though again that's nothing new for this part of the world.

There are a couple of things that makes Zare stand out from the crowd, however. One is that it occupies a sprawling building with all sorts of nooks and crannies in which to get lost. In this sense, its former Cantina roots are still evident, however well the new owners have papered over the cracks (literally) with classy furnishings. Another remarkable thing is how errily quiet the place can be, although this might be down to the sheer size of the dining space. On a Friday evening in early March, for example, Bistro Don Giovanni across the highway (page 46) was hopping and had a line of expectant diners snaking out the door while Zare felt almost deserted.

The third, most important, aspect that differentiates Zare from the crowd is that it will soon be demolished (no jokes about how fast Napa Valley restaurants come and go).

The new owners of the old Red Hen complex have plans to demolish the rambling buildings and bring us another themed shopping and dining experience in the form of a mini-mall (all done in the best possible faux-historic taste, of course) with two restaurants, one of which will be the resurrected Zare. Expect it all to happen some time in 2007.