SINGLETHREAD FARMS, HEALDSBURG, CALIFORNIA

Healdsburg in California’s Sonoma County wine country has always been a popular weekend destination for NorCal natives, especially in the last five years as chic, boutique lodgings and stellar places to sip and dine at have proliferated. But when restaurant, farm and inn SingleThread opened in late 2016, its refined, Californian kaiseki-style tasting menu began to draw well-heeled gastronomes from much further afield.

Guided by omotenashi, the Japanese style of hospitality that anticipates a guest’s every need, husband and wife team Kyle and Katina Connaughton, who’s chef and farmer at SingleThread respectively, have designed the experience as an elevated extension of their own home (which, incidentally, is a block away).

The dinner experience begins atop the two-storey, white-pillared building at sunset, with champagne and views of the town’s pretty, tree-lined streets, the Mayacamas mountains and beyond. Diners are then gradually welcomed to the first-floor, 52-seat dining area for the first of 11 courses: a series of light bites, beautifully arranged over a moss-and-flower-strewn piece of driftwood. They’re designed to showcase this moment in Sonoma, particularly on Katina’s two farms — the surrounding rooftop garden and a five-acre plot in the nearby San Lorenzo vineyards — each day.

Menus are inherently seasonal, but dishes might include guinea hen with matsutake mushrooms, and black cod ‘Fukkura-san’ with leeks, camomile dashi and brassicas, accompanied by a standard and reserved pairing anchored by back-catalogue California producers, although à la carte global selections are well represented. Meals start at US$353, with wine pairings from US$200.

“Each course is important, conveying something individually; this is the moment when something can be really small, but you can pack something impactful into one or two bites,” explains Kyle, who developed his signature East-meets-West style of cooking at Wolfgang Puck’s Spago Beverly Hills, Michel Bras Toya Japon and The Fat Duck in England. “It’s also part of a large narrative. Like the structure of a novella, there’s an ebb and flow to how things build up and come down.”