You bought your ticket to Single Thread a month ago. Tonight, you arrive at the restaurant, right on the main street running through Healdsburg, California — but unlike the other fine-dining destinations that pepper wine country, there's a distinct feel that California comfort blends here with Eastern influences.
Checking in with the host, you can see through a window into the kitchen right in front of you, and on your left, an atrium with herbs, flowers, and citrus trees. But instead of heading into the dining room, you’re diverted into an elevator and brought up to the roof. Among greenhouses and planters, drink in hand, you’re invited to decompress before settling into a lengthy dinner. Over a conversation about your dining preferences, you learn there's a Japanese word for the sense of warmth you've been experiencing: omotenashi. The sun sets over vineyards.
Now it's down to the dining room. After that conversation on the roof, the kitchen tailors the tasting menu around you. It's definitely American, but there are dishes cooked in Japanese clay pots (donabe); it's California — and the restaurant has its own farm — so you expected the local produce. The menu almost reminds you of kaiseki. As the night draws to a close, you're thinking about your cozy hotel room, just a floor above the restaurant. It's been a good night.
The restaurant landscape of 2015 is familiar territory. Even casual observers are familiar with buzzwords like fast-casual and ticketed reservations — hallmarks of a year when the dining world was preoccupied with making food more accessible. The restaurant landscape for 2016 is still largely unknown. But among the 2016 hopefuls is Kyle Connaughton, a chef many don't know by name, and his wife Katina, a farmer. In a quiet corner of Sonoma County, these two are building Single Thread Farms Restaurant & Inn, and it's the biggest opening of the upcoming year.
Here's why:
Because fusion is, in fact, the way we want to eat.
Techniques and flavor profiles from around the world are borrowed grab-bag style and applied to hyper-local ingredients.
While the term is still maligned, much of America's contemporary fine dining is "fusion." It's roasted avocado with epazote at Napa's Restaurant at Meadowood, marrying California produce with a key Mexican herb. It's a mille-feuille at NYC's Momofuku Ko, which looks and feels French but is spiked with matcha powder and trout roe. It's Saison's uni over a vegetable-soaked piece of toast, a Japanese-meets-California umami bomb. Contemporary fusion means techniques and flavor profiles from around the world are borrowed grab-bag style and applied to hyper-local ingredients.
Kyle's menu at Single Thread will push the envelope, playing with cultural fusion that is a fundamental part of Kyle's culinary identity. Kyle's time working as a young cook in Los Angeles, where he spent his teen years, was a mix of working in Japanese restaurants and doing pastry at a hit list of the most influential LA restaurants of the '90s: the legendary Spago Beverly Hills, Suzanne Goin's Lucques, and Michael Cimarusti's Water Grill. Kyle liked the precision and science of pastry, but he and Katina had their eye on Japan. There were apprenticeships. There were Japanese lessons with language tutors. And then there was Michel Bras.
Bras is the highly acclaimed French chef known for creating plates that look as if they were composed in nature. Since opening his eponymous restaurant in Laguiole, France in 1992, Bras has pioneered dishes like his famous gargouillou, a classic French stew re-imagined as a stunning plate of sautéed vegetables, herbs, and flowers. His influence can be seen in the current fascination with foraging and vegetables on tasting menus. And in the early 2000s, Bras needed multilingual chefs to work with him in Japan. "I loved Michel Bras and his cuisine," Kyle says. "That always would have been a dream of mine — to work for him — but I was so Japan-focused and not France-focused. To get to do his cuisine in Japan was amazing."
It’s hard to think of a Western-born chef better versed in Japanese cuisine than Kyle Connaughton.
The benefits of a French working schedule, at least to Kyle, meant time to simultaneously work at some of Hokkaido's finest restaurants, focusing in on different specialties like kaiseki, sushi, and soba. It's hard to think of a Western-born chef better versed in Japanese cuisine than Kyle, who just co-authored a book on donabe — the Japanese clay-pot cooking tradition.
The menu for Single Thread isn't finalized yet, but Kyle and his crew are working on intricate dishes — like an "Aged Breast of Duck Smoked Over Grape Vines, "Ibushi-gin" with Sunchoke and Purple Chingensai" — that express this collision of ideas. The Japanese chingensai (bok choy) comes from the farm. The smoking occurs in an Ibushi-gin donabe smoker, and instead of wood, Kyle is smoking the duck over grape vine cuttings. True to Kyle's experiences, California aesthetics, French and Japanese technique, and modernist rigor will all come to bear.
Because we expect innovation in fine dining, and Single Thread has the muscle to do it.
Ever since Ferran Adrià introduced diners to his taller — the locus of research and development that took place during elBulli's annual six-month hiatus — the idea of culinary research and tasting menus have been linked in diners' minds. In this context, culinary research applies the scientific method to cooking, using experimentation and repetition to figure out how and why recipes work the way they do.
And while many of the most progressive restaurants use research as an inherent part of the menu development process, for the past few years, restaurant groups with distinct culinary labs or test kitchens — the Fat Duck, Noma, Momofuku, and Mugaritz — have dominated the conversation. These in-house culinary labs function as dedicated research facilities that actively support menu development. Tasting menus are where savvy diners are looking to see the results of these processes, be it unfamiliar flavors, new techniques, or new ways of dining entirely.
Innovation is an area in which Single Thread is poised to excel. In 2006, Kyle left Michel Bras in Tokyo to join Heston Blumenthal in the UK, taking a position opening the Fat Duck Experimental Kitchen, where he was the head chef of research and development. Many of the Fat Duck's most iconic dishes came through the Experimental Kitchen, like "the Sound and the Sea," which includes an audio component; and the Mock Turtle Soup, part of a Mad Hatter's Tea Party set-up, in which a gold-leafed consomme jelly pocket watch dissolves into a soup. "That took a year to develop," Kyle says. "It was very technical. We explored every little tiny thing." In the five years Kyle spent at the Fat Duck, the restaurant maintained three Michelin stars, a permanent spot on the World's 50 Best List, and published a lauded cookbook for which Kyle did extensive research and recipe testing.
In 2014, three years after leaving the Fat Duck, Kyle co-founded his culinary research group Pilot R&D, partnering with culinary scientist Dr. Ali Bouzari, chef Dan Felder (formerly Momofuku Culinary Lab's head of R&D), and lawyer Dana Peck. Pilot has worked on some top-secret projects for restaurant groups and major food companies from its Healdsburg home base.
At Single Thread, Pilot will function as the restaurant's development arm and culinary lab. When I visited in September, Kyle's chef de cuisine Aaron Koseba was using Kyle and Katina's home kitchen to test out a few dishes in donabe, but Kyle explained the development process using ice cream as an example. Pilot will create different versions — tweaking the total amount of solids, raising and lowering fat content, increasing and decreasing sugar levels or using alternative sweeteners. A blind taste-test of the samples will lead to an in-depth discussion of each option. The pastry chef might be asked to create additional dish components to taste a finished plate. Kyle puts it this way: "When you're responsible for service, you don't always have time to look at things at that granular level."
"When you’re responsible for service, you don’t always have time to look at things at that granular level."
But Pilot does, as evidenced in how much work is behind a deceptively humble course of satsuma-imo (a Japanese sweet potato) dumplings with speck broth, white Alba truffle, and gingko nuts. It sounds simple enough, but Pilot developed a new technique where the speck is dried in ceramic beads for two weeks so it can be shaved like katsuo bushi, the Japanese smoked and fermented bonito that's at the heart of good dashi. The team then turns the dashi-like speck stock into a fondue. The diners might not see the work that those ceramic beads did, but Pilot plans to release them as "a new project and product" in 2016.
The idea of culinary research also ties Single Thread to the larger Bay Area, known for being a hub of innovation and tremendous fine dining. According to chef Chris Kostow, of the three Michelin-starred wine country destination Restaurant at Meadowood, "I have long believed that there does not exist on earth a geographic area with more talent and entrepreneurialism, especially in high end, than the Bay Area," he says. "Kyle will only help further this point."
Because we're sick of "farm-to-table," but have never been more enamored of its spirit.
"Farm-to-table" has become such a cliche it can induce a knee-jerk eye-roll from seasoned diners — the writing of farm purveyors on a chalkboard, the lengthy spiels from servers, knowing the provenance of the chicken's breakfast. But really, that's just a branding problem: Vegetables have handily become the stars of the tasting menu. In bountiful California, exquisite produce has been at the center of a high-end meal at least since Alice Waters opened Chez Panisse. The ultimate sign of the vegetable's reign in fine dining: René Redzepi's Copenhagen restaurant Noma — the perennial World's 50 Best favorite that's largely credited for sparking the current interest in Nordic cuisine, foraging, and lichen in general — is closing so it can reopen a warehouse large enough for an urban farm.
Vegetables have handily become the stars of the tasting menu.
American diners have never cared more about where their food comes from or the farms that make it happen. This is especially true at the highest-end restaurants. At Blue Hill at Stone Barns, where chef Dan Barber serves one of the country's most sought-after tasting menus on a working farm north of NYC, diners are excited to sit in a manure shed (sans manure) and truly see where there dinner was grown. Another leader is Manresa, the newly-anointed three Michelin-star Los Gatos restaurant. Chef David Kinch's diners don't necessarily see the farm like they do at Stone Barns, but the farm is everywhere on the plate (and in the press).
With Single Thread, the farm has been baked into the concept since Kyle and Katina first started dreaming about owning their own place. Katina's interest in farming piqued while the couple lived in Japan. "I would go out foraging," she remembers. "I met a lot of people who would take me out to their farms and it was really where I fell in love with nature. Growing up in Southern California suburbs, I hadn't really experienced that before."
When Katina and Kyle drove me out to the farm this fall, their five acres were still a work in progress. The first thing that hit me, though, was not the greenhouses under construction or the beds being laid, but the view. Nestled on a ridge near the Russian River, the views of mountains and vineyards are quintessentially Sonoma — it is breathtaking. Katina walked me through her plans to restore an apple and pear orchard that had laid fallow for years; she's tending 100 olive trees that will eventually be used for making olive oil; she'll grow flowers that will be cut and displayed at the restaurant. Katina, who studied sustainable agriculture, is insistent on creating a farm where she can properly rotate her crops and responsibly use water. She offered me figs right from the tree that tasted like cantaloupe as we talked about all the work she and her team needs to do.
"The restaurant is based off Katina and her team in the farm and what they're producing," explains Kyle. "My relationship as a chef with my farmer is: That's my wife. This is our life and our conversation." Katina plans to provide the restaurant with specific produce requests as well as her own experiments, including with seeds brought over from Japan: various onions like negi, root vegetables like kintoki carrots and kabu, eggplants, lily bulbs, and greens. She is trying to grow myoga (ginger) along the river.
"We would not grow everything, nor would we want to."
As Katina explains it, her farm will be focused more on these specialty requests than on providing every possible vegetable Single Thread might need or use. "We live within this amazing county and community of farmers who are so incredible at what they do and what they grow," she says, acknowledging that Sonoma feels more agricultural than nearby Napa County. "We've had a lot of local farmers offer us land to grow certain crops that maybe we're not able to. We would not grow everything, nor would we want to."
These experiments and surprising plantings will play out all over the plate. A dish called "Sea Urchin from the Sonoma Coast with Roasted Puree of Potato, Negi Milk Custard, and Passmore Ranch Caviar" features a Japanese potato variety that Katina is growing on the farm, and she is growing the negi as well. Kyle and his team have been taking kayaks off the Sonoma shoreline and diving for sea urchin. The potatoes are roasted in a Fukkura-san donabe, pureed in a Pacojet with diastatic malt powder, and then siphoned onto the dish.
Interestingly, the farm itself will not be on the itinerary for diners. It's not about showing diners how it's done or making the farm into a stage set. In making the farm part of the restaurant's DNA but not its setting, Katina and Kyle are connecting to the prevailing attitudes in Sonoma dining. Cindy Daniel, co-owner of the James Beard Award-winning Healdsburg restaurant Shed, explains that dining in Healdsburg is inherently tied to its agricultural output. "That's part of what we were after when we opened Shed," she says. "Not to make Healdsburg a dining destination, but to focus on the bounty we have here, and to be food-centric in a way that supports the wine focus that was already here."
A deeper hospitality experience is part of the value proposition of high-end dining, and Kyle and Katina are going all-in. Single Thread houses a five-room inn above the restaurant. And while the couple has never run a hotel before, they have a set of helping hands in one of their investors, Plan Do See, the prominent Japanese hospitality brand behind New York's Michelin-starred sushi destination Sushi Azabu and the lauded Oriental Hotel in Kobe, Japan. "We're very influenced by the Japanese omotenashi," says Kyle, referring to the famously guest-focused service style. Translated as "to entertain guests wholeheartedly," omotenashi is a spirit of selfless hospitality, anticipating needs without having to be asked. But more than that, the couple wants Single Thread "to be an extension of our home," Katina says.
With the inevitable delays and setbacks of the opening process, it's hard to say for certain whether the restaurant operators that have next year as their targets will meet that goal. Except for the most corporate of restaurant groups, this is just how it goes.
Kyle and Katina still have so much to do. More crops to be planted, a dining room and kitchen to construct, a rooftop to finish. If all goes according to plan, the inn and rooftop will open in January. The Connaughtons want to get the restaurant open in early 2016. The holidays could slow down construction, and if an El Niño winter brings California some much-needed rain, that could also cause delays. Even so, the hope is to be done with soft opening by the beginning of February. Katina sighs happily, "It's a process, but it's one we've been dreaming of for so long now."
Hillary Dixler is Eater's senior reports editor
Patricia Chang is the photographer for Eater San Francisco
Editor: Erin DeJesus