Chef/owner Charlie Soule's upscale, intimate restaurant deliciously combines style & romance in the cozy dining room managed by brother Steve Soule since 1985.
Soule uses natural, free range, and organic meats and poultry whenever possible, local,seasonal produce and only the highest quality of ingredients in his dishes, which are prepared with love and respect. His passionate culinary skills create twists to traditional dishes and infusing them with influences from around the globe.
Voted Best Place to take a Date for 15 years in a row, the romantic setting combined with the innovative menu make dining at The Soule Domain a memorable experience.
A word from the chef:
I am proud to call myself a chef, and even more thrilled that I still cook on the line 5 nights a week. My station is sauté, and yes the pans are still flying, the flames are jumping, and no matter what your skin color the burns will hurt like hell.
Yes, we source the best ingredients within a reasonable price range, but the real excitement for me is in the teamwork and production every night. We know our challenges, but cooking just as fast as you can, staying caught up on our tickets, don’t make a mistake that you have to go backwards to fix, don’t fall behind, cook with detail, efficient precision! Try to have a perfect night though its close to impossible, make sure every plate is arranged properly, respect the ingredients.
When I started cooking in the late ‘70s I enjoyed the competitive nature of it and if you ever read Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential that explains everything about my early career. My favorite meal is anything that is executed the way it is planned, prepared with conviction, love and passion. I have been blessed with fantastic crews over my 4 decades of ownership, but none as solid as the people in the kitchen I have now who have raised the roof on their level of effort, loving their families, meanwhile sacrificing holidays and weekends because they love to cook, Thank You!
Coordinating this effort among not just my 3 kitchen partners but with the floor staff is my job, we are all putting max effort into an experience that will please our customers, and I get to feel like Joe Montana winning Super Bowl’s on most nights, that’s right, we are winning championships!
Every night comes to an end and no matter how difficult the night may have been our staff knows that we love and respect them just the same as before, and will start the next day full of fresh anticipation.
Another of my great joys at work has been building the wine list, traveling to our beautiful wine country and learning how much work goes into every bottle, searching out producers who share my beliefs and mirror our small business plan, with respect to the environment and to their people…plus who doesn’t love a great bottle of Pinot?
Soule Domain
My wife Rachelle gets to work full time psychiatric listening to me trying to make decisions, analyze nights, food, staffing, service, budget, maintenance, you name it she’s heard about, offered her heart felt advice, and deserves a lot of credit for our success & my well-being.
It has been my blessing to work with my brother Steve for the last 25 years, all the successes we’ve shared, the sweat, emotion, toil, as well as the disappointments…its manual labor , hard work , we’ve done it together and I am a lucky man.
My family has been my support group from the very beginning, the rock if you will. My parents, aunties, uncles, cousins, step kids, & kings beach friends have all encouraged me to be who I am, been there for me through thick and thin, never doubting or questioning, just family love (and they like good food).
This is my story and I’m sticking to it. I think that after 33 years of being a chef/owner we are pretty damn good at what we do, because, that’s what we do. We’re all getting older & we are not sure how long we will continue to do this.
Charlie Soule
Owner & Head Chef | June 2018