San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Little Saint
I really wanted to like Little Saint. On paper, it has as much going for it as a thoroughbred racehorse. Opened this past April, the ambitious Healdsburg restaurant comes from the Michelin star-winning, World’s Best 50 Restaurants-placing SingleThread team. Its menu of entirely meat-free delicacies is built in collaboration with its own farm (plus SingleThread’s newly expanded farm), and its position in the heart of Wine Country gives it access to some of California’s best food and wine producers.
When you dine outside, whether in the main dining room or the upstairs lounge where indie rock star Phoebe Bridgers performed a surprise show two weeks ago, you do so amidst the quiet rustle of gently swaying eucalyptus tree branches. Little Saint’s 10,000-square-foot space — once the award-winning Shed — is filled out with a myriad of concepts, including a coffee bar stocked with beans from indie roasters and a retail section featuring perfect piles of summer squash and pottery.
So why doesn’t it work?
But first, I should clarify — Little Saint may be technically vegan, with no animal products involved, but its serving staff hesitate to use the word when you ask, preferring “plantbased” or “vegetable-forward” instead. This is the soft-footed approach favored by peer restaurants like San Francisco’s Wildseed and food tech companies like Impossible Foods, which are careful not to spook skittish meat eaters who don’t want to be seen in public making too much of a lifestyle choice. You don’t live it per se — you’re just “based” there sometimes. Save for co-owner Laurie Ubben, a philanthropist and animal rights activist, most of the people involved are not vegan.
To wit, these days, “plant-based” operates as a signal that these businesses are aimed at omnivores who relish meat but may want to eat less of it for environmental or health reasons. “We’re not necessarily trying to convert people to become vegans, but we’re really trying to say, this way of eating can be really enjoyable,” SingleThread chef and owner Kyle Connaughton told the Robb Report.
Unfortunately for the mission, the restaurant stumbles on achieving even its relatively modest aim of enjoyability.
The dinner menu is divvied up into three categories: “From the larder,” “From the fields” and “From the wood oven,” which roughly move from the smallest dishes to more substantial, starch-heavy ones. Committed to a casual style, the format emphasizes family-style eating.
The kitchen staff, led by former
Chef de cuisine Bryan Oliver at the vegetable-forward Little Saint.
Stuffed chard greens (with beet merguez, tomato sauce and sunflower seeds) at the Healdsburg restaurant. 25 North St. (at Foss Street), Healdsburg. 707-433-8207 or www.littlesainthealds burg.com
Hours: 6 a.m.-9 p.m. Monday and Thursday-Sunday; 6 a.m.-6 p.m. TuesdayWednesday.
Accessibility: Good access to tables. Elevator access to upstairs lounge. Heavy doors at entrance. Gendered restrooms.
Noise level: Moderate
Meal for two, without drinks: $80-$100
What to order: Corn dip, zucchini tempura
Meat-free options: The full menu is vegan.
Drinks: Full bar.
Transportation: Street parking.
Best practices: Go for snacks in the upstairs lounge.
Shed chef de cuisine Bryan Oliver, utilizes a variety of cooking techniques to pull as much flavor as they can out of fruits and vegetables. Nuts and seeds are ground into creamy sauces and spreads, root vegetables are dehydrated to generate a meatier chew, and nearly every dish includes a swirl or dollop of some acidic salsa verde or conserva. A wood-fired oven in the center of the open kitchen pumps out mottled discs of lavash and cast iron pans of biryani.
But whereas the food at SingleThread is admirable for its delicacy and precision, Little Saint’s approach is like loading activated cashews into a shotgun. Though the restaurant purports to celebrate seasonal produce the same way others might celebrate steak and pork belly, the heavy-handed seasoning obfuscates the ingredients and confuses the palate. It comes off like overcompensation.
During my visits, too many of the dishes I tried were marred by chaotic flavors. Juicy blanched romano beans ($15) were mere bystanders in a brawl between an anchovy-less, yet aggressively seasoned creamy Mayfair dressing; tart sumac-flavored breadcrumbs; acidic grape tomatoes and grated horseradish. A cucumber and Tokyo turnip salad ($17) was also
blown out with too much acid from a Thai-style nam prik dressing that made its accompanying pistachio puree taste muddy. You come away from it all craving the quotidian purity of ants on a log.
In a family-style meal, you don’t expect to eat the entirety of a dish; it’s more like speed dating, where each encounter has a few moments to make a memorable impression. But even the brief dalliances I had with these dishes were too much.
The over-complication of things was made even more dramatic in a carrot dish I tried in the late spring. The thick, cigar-size roasted carrots ($16) were literally buried under a heap of shaved red cabbage and puffed rice, blanketed by black ash. When I fished out a carrot, it was mostly raw. And this was the best of the dishes I tried that night.
One of the menu’s showstoppers is a biryani ($41) meant for two, and I had high hopes for this, given its advertised turn in the wood-fired oven and the proliferation of vegetarian versions in the Indian Subcontinent. It looked the part, covered in golden brown curls of fried onions, plump pickled raisins and tiny pink rose petals. But underneath the basmati rice was a bland layer of sweet corn and mixed mushrooms, with the latter depressingly limp and chewy, having steamed in the oven as they cooked.
But there were some bright spots to my visits where everything — the ambitions, and the space that houses them — clicked.
The upstairs bar just opened for service a few weeks ago with a small menu of bar snacks, like heirloom popcorn dusted with toasted nori ($7) and eggplant dip ($8). The balcony on the west side of the building looks out over Foss Creek and gets blasted with sunshine as it moves through the golden hour, making it an especially nice spot to sit.
Here, the food is simplified to fit the setting, and that’s why it works. You could really taste the sweetness of the corn in the creamy corn dip ($16), which was served in a cast iron pan with thick, griddled pieces of levain from stand-out Healdsburg bakery Quail & Condor. And a plate of zucchini tempura ($17) had a bang-on fry and two delicious sauces served on the side: a perky kumquat sauce inspired by peppery Japanese yuzu kosho and ranch made of creamed cashews.
During the daytime, the coffee bar and cafe are open with simple menus: the former with a few vegan pastries and the latter with a grain bowl of the day ($17) and pre-made salads ($7 or $13) in a deli case. Little Saint feels more like the community space it aspires to be then, and you can comfortably stretch out on the front patio or downstairs lounge area with a coffee and cake.
That said, the grain bowl, which was mostly rice with about a third of a cup of root vegetables and greens served on top, seemed very pricey for what it was. This indicates another challenge that Little Saint is clearly grappling with, and it’s one that vegan and vegetarian communities have solved in various ways for millennia: protein. Oakland’s Millennium makes full use of traditional plantbased proteins like tempeh and tofu to round out its menu; Lion Dance Cafe loads its noodles with spicy peanuts and yuba. If anything, if you’re feeling full at the end of a meal at Little Saint, it’s probably because you’ve filled up on carbs more than anything else. A scant number of dishes on the current dinner menu have close to a decent amount of plant-based protein in them.
That fact is yet another blow to the restaurant’s goal of appealing to meat eaters, especially those who feel like they need animal products at every meal in order to feel satiated. For a concept that seems fully mindful of the compromises it’s making in the name of popular appeal, this seems like a strange oversight.
As it is now, I’m not sure if Little Saint is going to convince anybody to eat more vegetables.