At SingleThread, one of just thirteen three-MICHELIN-Starred restaurants in the country and an OpenTable Icon, the menu changes constantly. It is a dialogue that begins at the Healdsburg restaurant’s 24-acre farm nearby. “With everything with a dish, we are looking to say, ‘What is the agricultural story here?’” chef and co-owner Kyle Connaughton says. “When you come to dine with us, you’re experiencing that day, that moment in time, what’s happening on Katina’s farm.”
His wife and restaurant co-owner Katina Connaughton oversees the farm, but there’s no top-down approach to creating the day’s menu. Kyle isn’t deciding what to make in the morning and then going to find the produce at the farm to create those dishes.
Instead, he and his team visit Katina and her team at the farm several times a week to see what’s available. The kitchen crew might like a particular type of tomato this season and ask the farm to grow more of it next year. The farm might be curious to experiment with a particular pumpkin variety, grow a small amount first, and ask the kitchen to test it out before growing a larger batch. “You’ll have a conversation, and you’ll see the result of that conversation a year later,” Kyle says. “It constantly makes it fun and exciting.”
It’s this level of thought and detail that made the Japan-influenced restaurant an instant success after it opened in December 2016. Kyle and Katina had been prepping the dining room and farm for two years at that point. Kyle embraced his long admiration for Japan’s cooking techniques—he notably worked for famed chef Michel Bras in Hokkaido—and Katina leaned on her expertise in sustainable farming, which she studied while the couple lived in Japan.
The accolades soon poured in. Former San Francisco Chronicle critic Michael Bauer awarded the restaurant a four-star review in 2017, two MICHELIN Stars followed in 2018, and the restaurant has held on to its coveted three-MICHELIN-Star status since 2019.
The farm and the menu created from it are central to the restaurant’s legendary standing, so we’re taking you behind the scenes to see how it’s all done.
Read on to see how a dish comes to life at SingleThread, and make a booking on OpenTable.
Produce is the star
What makes SingleThread’s agriculture-first approach so exciting are the unexpected combinations. Because of Northern California’s long summers, you might find things like tomatoes, strawberries, and pumpkin on the menu all at the same time. Plus, you’re not just going to see a fruit at its plumpest and juiciest—you might also get to taste it in a different form before it’s fully ripe.
The restaurant will show you what this means right off the bat. Each meal at SingleThread kicks off with the hassun course that’s presented on a floral board and features small bites of what’s currently in season on the farm. It’s also a teaser of what might come if you return for a meal a few weeks later.
“It’s a way that we can test new ideas and dishes especially with an ingredient that’s just coming into season,” Kyle says. That means you might have a bite of the very first tomatoes on the first course and come back to find it as the star of a dish a few weeks later when it’s even riper.
“We are looking at what the farm has and saying, ‘Here are the different products, and in the different forms they come, and how can we create a dish utilizing those in the way that nature is presenting them to us?’” Kyle says.
The anatomy of a dish
This hyper focus on making produce the hero coalesces even more as you go through the courses. A recent strawberry moriawase course best shows off this approach. The dish is inspired by sashimi moriawase, the Japanese dish composed of different kinds of fish.
At SingleThread, that translates to tuna from Baja California, a local halibut, and squid from Japan all served with three different types and stages of strawberries from the farm. Green or unripened strawberries are lightly pickled, the white or alpine strawberries nod to the plant modern strawberries were bred from, and the juicy red strawberries show off the finished product.
The red strawberries are next-level because half of the strawberries are plucked when they’re green, allowing the plant to put in all of its energy into less fruit. “It is very similar to what grape growers do to make great wine,” Kyle says. “Because we have all of these different parts of the plant, we like to create dishes in a way that highlights and shows the different aspects and products of the agricultural process.”
Why it’s always exciting to keep going back
SingleThread turns eight in December, but to Kyle it feels like yesterday. “I still feel like SingleThread is so young,” he says. “Things still feel very new, and we are constantly changing and evolving.”
You can’t blame him, given how frequently dishes change. “Even throughout the night it might have a little bit of change,” Kyle says. “If 40 of something came in one size and 20 in a different size, that might change the dish throughout the night.”
All of this is what makes SingleThread a one-of-a-kind restaurant—it’s not that you’ll find the restaurant completely throwing out the menu and starting from scratch, but it’s more creative, new iterations on a dish. Even from one year to a few years out, you might find exciting but recognizable changes. A plum tree that didn’t fruit last year produced an abundance of tiny prune plums this year that are being dried for the winter menu.
“It is the cycle of the same ingredients, and so you get to see how you reimagine them each year,” Kyle says. “That’s why it’s really fun to watch the progression that happens.”
Tanay Warerkar is a content marketing manager at OpenTable, where he oversees features content and stays on top of the hottest trends and developments in the restaurant industry. He brings years of experience as a food editor and reporter having worked at the San Francisco Chronicle, Eater, and the New York Daily News, to name a few.
