San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Goodbye to the idealism of Shed
Healdsburg’s ambitious restaurant and store is closing
The first time members of the Sonoma County Farmers Guild arrived at Shed — the combination grocer, restaurant, cafe and garden store in Healdsburg — to meet in its upstairs event space, they thought they were at the wrong place.
“I just remember the looks on everyone’s faces. They’re walking in and looking up at these beautiful vaulted ceilings with all this perfect, pristine architecture and clean floors, and they have manure on their boots,” said Evan Wiig, the founder of the local group of mostly organic farmers that was invited to meet in what Shed’s owners called its “modern grange” for free. “It was quite a convening of worlds, but that was really what the Shed was about.”
After five years as an anchor of downtown Healdsburg’s shopping and dining scene, a time when it earned honors for its restaurant and design, Shed will close its 10,000square-foot facility on New Year’s Day and turn into an online-only business, with limited hours later in the month to sell its inventory. The main reason for the closure, according to Cindy Daniel, who owns the complex with her husband, Doug Lipton, is financial, spurred by a slowdown in visitors after the October 2017 wildfires.
“After that happened, we haven’t seen the growth that we still need as a 5-year-old business,” said Daniel. “We don’t feel like we can sustain that both financially and emotionally.”
Yet anyone who has visited or dined there has to wonder: Was Shed always too good to be true? The farm-to-table fantasia had the quality of an art museum gift shop — a place to devour with your eyes but be careful with your credit card. It sold ceramic casseroles that cost as much as an Ikea couch and Japanese rubber “paddy” boots that would fit in on a city street as much as a muddy field. It had a menu full of house-fermented shrubs and a whole room devoted to a DIY grain mill. At first, it seemed almost like a “Saturday Night Live” spoof of the Bay Area aesthetic.
Despite the gloss of conspicuous consumption, however, supporters say Daniel and Lipton’s devotion to quality and to buying from local farmers was deep and authentic, and that ethos attracted a range of visitors, including locals and farmers — who were offered a discount.
“A lot of people looked at Shed and said, ‘Ah, it’s some chichi place for rich people to hang out,” said Wiig. “At the same time, they were using their money in a way that truly did redirect those resources where they should go, which is into the pockets of the farmers and into the pockets of their employees.”
The original idea was to create a place “that highlights and acknowledges this amazing history we have as an agricultural region,” Daniel said.
She and Lipton have lived in Healdsburg 25 years, and they wanted a place locals would like but that was different from the T-shirt shops and candy stores most travelers find in small towns.
“What can we do so this doesn’t just become the ubiquitous Wine Country town?” she said they would ask themselves.
Chef Perry Hoffman, who until September was culinary director at Shed, where his cooking earned three stars from The Chronicle, says the company spent around $800,000 a year on produce direct from farmers, cutting big annual checks to husbandand-wife farming teams. “We made their season. We made it work,” said Hoffman, who is concerned for those farms’ business with Shed’s closure.
He loved having access to all the items in the store that were sourced within a 10- to 30-mile radius, such as dairy products, preserves, pickles, grains and charcuterie.
But the focus on buying so directly and making things in-house could be exhausting, he said. The kitchen staff would prep 400 different items a day for restaurant dishes, deli foods, pastries and other specialty food items.
“No corner was cut for any product,” Hoffman said. “You can still only charge so much for that for people to support it.”
Kyle Connaughton of Single Thread, the Michelin threestar restaurant a few blocks away, said the couple’s “incredible, ambitious vision” isn’t to blame. A friend of Daniel and Lipton’s who participated at events at Shed, Connaughton has seen how the local business community is still experiencing a downturn since the fires, with people telling him their sales are down 20 to 25 percent.
“It seems like the fires were a long time ago, but it affected people’s plans,” Connaughton said. “People didn’t plan their weddings here.” Sonoma County tourism was on an upward trajectory before the fires. Hotel occupancy has stayed fairly normal throughout 2018, but a lot of that can be attributed to people who were displaced from their homes, first responders and contract workers in the area, according to a report from the Sonoma County Tourism Board.
But Daniel doesn’t want people to think other businesses won’t make it in Sonoma County just because hers didn’t.
“The things we focused on were just creating something that would be interesting, that would support farmers, that would be beautiful and where it would feel good to be there,” she said. “It was so much a dream that Doug and I shared and just put out there.”
From Jan. 9-27, the store and coffee bar at Shed will be open 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. Wednesday to Sunday. 25 North St., Healdsburg.
Tara Duggan is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: tduggan@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @taraduggan
“No corner was cut for any product.”
Chef Perry Hoffman