San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Transportive dining right now
SingleThread’s dazzling dining oasis in Healdsburg achieves the nearly impossible.
About a year into the pandemic, I had my first truly transportive, blowout outdoor dining experience.
The setup at SingleThread in Healdsburg is far beyond wood pallets with paint or a simple tent with chairs in a parking lot: This dining space featured Japanese trees nestled in ropebound wooden boxes with soft mounds of moss; they rustled in the breeze. Diners huddled over bubbling clay pots of broth and seafood, their cheeks moist with steam. A seat in this makebelieve room was as fine a perch as any from which one might consider how fine dining can stay relevant in this day and age.
The new concept is called Usuzan, the name an homage to a mountain near the rural fishing village in Hokkaido where owners Katina and Kyle Connaughton once resided. Hokkaido, the northernmost and chilliest prefecture of Japan, is known for luxuriating in the things humans need to cope with the winter: hot springs, skiing and steamy cauldrons of seafoodenriched hot pot.
While its format is consistent with the tasting menus that SingleThread presented before the pandemic, the addition of a hot pot centerpiece, with four options to choose from when you make your reservation, is new. The full experience costs $375$475 per person, depending on which hot pot you order for the table. The theme is expected to continue through the summer, which is great news. As outdoor dining experiences go, Usuzan is worth the trip.
Part of the credit goes to famed hotel and restaurant interior designer Ken Fulk, who filled the Michelinstarred restaurant’s parking lot with spherical ceiling lights and wooden screens. No patch of asphalt is exposed; there are no rough edges on the wooden beams, giving the tent the illusion of insideness. Lit with warm tones, with foliage that suggests the courtyard of an oldfashioned hot spring resort in the Japanese countryside, the space exudes a sense of nostalgia for the past, despite being conceived to meet our urgent present.
Infrastructural signs of the pandemic are subtle: There aren’t bottles of hand sanitizer at every table, but the general protocols of social distancing are built nearly invisibly into the space. Staff are diligent about masks, though not strict about asking diners to mask up before they approach to clear empty plates (which they do a lot, and very promptly). It’s a little awkward at first, but the staff are amenable to whatever boundaries you want to establish for your mutual safety.
What hasn’t changed is the very California thesis of the restaurant: That when the kitchen and farm collaborate, as chef Kyle Connaughton and head farmer Katina Con
naughton do, the result can be something sublime.
The first course is a collection of tiny bites arranged on a platform of flowers and branches from the restaurant’s farm. Each leaf is spritzed artfully, the drops of water akin to pearls beaded into lace. The plates that follow are mainly cold preparations of seasonal fish and seafood: dehydrated beet chips with trout dip, luscious coins of king crab meat tucked into lettuce cups, and raw oysters garnished with violet petals. It’s a delightful constellation of dishes that forces you to hunt within the foliage, like a farmer rummaging for strawberries.
From the hot pot options, I chose the Duclair duck for the table to share. The rich duck broth arrived, in custommade donabe pots from Japan, brimming with shiitake mushrooms, chunks of napa cabbage and farm greens. Slices of duck breast were placed in the center, their skin and fat rendered to a crisp. You get lots of little condiments to sprinkle on there, like spicy yuzu kosho and golden, toasty sesame seeds. It’s a meal so simple, it’s almost primal. Sipping on that subtly gamey broth — which took on both the slight bitterness of the greens and turnips and the earthy density of the sesame — made me feel like I was in some other place and time, outside of the strange reality of the present day.
Fine dining restaurants often have a showstopper dish to flex, like a whole duck or a giant steak. Here, it’s in dessert: an entire green and orange pumpkin ensconced in a mossy nest, its tender flesh roasted to concentrate its natural sweetness. A server deftly spooned out a mouthful’s worth into a green ceramic dish, where it sat beside a quenelle of burnt orange sherbet. This bittersweet penultimate note (before a mignardiselike course of Japanese sweets) seemed a perfectly poetic way to sum up everything the restaurant and its peers have gone through recently.
The experience rivaled fine dining meals I had prepandemic, a stunning feat in a time when the genre has been all but suspended. But that
The Usuzan experience rivaled fine dining meals I had prepandemic, a stunning feat in a time when the genre has been all but suspended. But that came as no surprise.
came as no surprise. Before Usuzan, SingleThread’s other pandemic pivots have similarly soared. The team was already versed in switching gears at a moment’s notice due to fire season, when the kitchen shifts to mutual aid.
When the restaurant did takeout, the staff made $85 to $150 meals for two that itched their intellectual curiosity and subsidized the restaurant’s donations of meals to Sonoma families facing food insecurity. Experiments included a dazzling array of dishes styled after home cooking in Kyoto, Japan: jiggly, homemade soft tofu with oaky, barrelaged ponzu sauce, salmon cooked in aromatic cedar paper and more. Other weeks, menus included grilled fish with lemony tabbouleh and dolmas, or chicken biryani with fresh parathas and onion fritters. It was fun, new and inspiring to see.
Indeed, when it comes to the art of the pivot, SingleThread has led the pack for the Bay Area’s fine dining scene. While the inperson meal is elegant, the addition of hot pot lends a delightfully lowbrow element that feels suited to the moment.
The meal recalled one of the things I miss most about prepandemic life: the total sensory experience of swirling a long pair of serving chopsticks in bubbling broth, fishing for morsels to toss into fellow diners’ bowls as we inhale the aromas of cabbage and Sichuan pepper together. You make new friendships and cement present ones easily over a pot of broth, making the intimacy of this meal an ideal setting for the sorts of casual relationships that have largely fallen by the wayside over the past year.
SingleThread’s artful embrace of the format, conducted in a safely cozy environment, felt like an ultimate luxury.