The SingleThread Story - Katina and Kyle Connaughton, SingleThread

Josiah: Today we're back with Katina and Kyle Connaughton, the founders, owners, and leaders of SingleThread, a farm, restaurant, and inn that's received practically every top accolade a hospitality business could receive, including three Michelin stars, three Michelin keys, one of World's 50 Best Restaurants, #2 in the world on Le Liste, Five Diamonds by AAA, and Five Stars by Forbes Travel Guide. Yesterday, in part one of our three-part mini-series with them, we heard about the life experiences that were formative in their journey to their work today, and in this episode, we're going to be talking all about SingleThread and their unique perspective on hospitality that has led to all the recognition they've received as being one of the best in the business. Stay tuned to hear Katina and Kyle's thoughts and insights on the power of place, the link between farming and fine dining, innovation in the culinary world, the role of education and storytelling in heightening the guest experience, and much, much more. 

Josiah: We're sitting here in Healdsburg, and I'm curious for you, Katina, if you could speak a little bit more about the power of place and land. Of course, I think this is true around the world. Place shapes us, right? But I wonder if you could speak specifically to how this place kind of shapes the work that you are doing now.

Katina: Yeah, this place really makes my heart beat in a way that no other place could. And we have the great privilege to be able to travel quite a lot. And that was always a dream of mine. But to know that all roads are leading us home here to Healdsburg is just truly exceptional for us. I think one of the big pivotal moments for me coming here was when Kyle and I would go to, we'd come to visit, and we'd go to the farmer's market on the weekend, and we would have conversations with the farmers and start to make those connections, a human connection, and we could see just how passionate people were here, how they really threw themselves wholeheartedly into what it is that they do and what they believe in. And that was so infectious; it was something that we really just wanted to be a part of. And so the agricultural community here, the makers, the craftsmen, and all of the people who create this beautifully textured and colorful community just create this beautiful fabric that, of course, is the foundation of Healdsburg itself.

Josiah: And Kyle, I wonder if you could speak a little bit about what you observed over the past 10 or 15 years because you had some roles where you were leading innovation at some of the best restaurants in the world. And what were you seeing then? And then what did you observe change as it relates to doing what you're doing today?

Kyle: Yeah, well, you know, I came up cooking in Los Angeles, and I worked in Japanese restaurants and non-Japanese restaurants a lot. And it was a really like a lot of product based, you know, seasonal, you know, type of cooking. And that was really where the beginning of that, the influence that had really started up here in Northern California with places like shaping East and stuff had come, you know, down to Southern California and was really about the seasons. All these different cultural influences found their way into the cuisine of European, Asian, Mexican, and South American inspirations. And so, you know, California is such an amazing place to cook because we don't have a lot of the great cuisines and cultures of the world. This long lineage of heritage has defined the ways in which the cuisine needs to be made. We have this really amazing cross-cultural style of cooking that everyone defines in their own way. but it's all really based on the seasonal produce from here. I then go to Japan to work in another, you know, culture where seasons and the reverence for the seasons and, you know, everything is really a reflection of what is happening. And then when I went to the UK, you know, to head up the R&D kitchen for The Fat Duck, it was a really, it was a very different thing entirely where it was more about the sort of underlying science of the cooking and how you could leverage that. It was about the multi-sensory aspects of the dining experience. It was about narrative and storytelling and sort of theater, you know, almost there. And it was about innovation, and it was about how to look at the functionality of ingredients and all these different things to like leverage ways to create this much more kind of, you know, dishes and food that told a story that had a meaning that had this kind of interesting sort of scientific take and you know this more avant-garde you know kind of approach and it was really an exciting time in food and which is why we made the move and decided to leave Japan to go and do it because it was just like on this cusp of this movement that was just starting off, you know, which turned into what we've now looked back on and call the modernist cuisine movement. And it was a really, really exciting time in food that, you know, you have, you know, obviously cooking and cooking traditions are an unbroken chain that's been going on since, you know, the beginning of of time of us putting food into fire. And so it's kind of rare that you have these like little snippets of time where there's such rapid innovation. And if you think about like, you know, great art movements and things like that, where all of a sudden, you know, a group of artists gets together and they just sort of like really, really move things like pretty far, pretty fast. And that was what was happening in the early 2000s in food restaurants like El Bulli, us at the Fat Duck. You know, Alinea, a lot of places in Spain, you know, they were, it was a small crew of people, but they were all sort of like pushing innovation. Then there became these forums and formats. It's also kind of like the beginning of social media time and, you know, people writing about food and sharing food in a much different way. So, people were really actively following the conversation for the first time in real time. It wasn't just about a magazine coming out months later or someone bringing back a menu. You were able to, like, you know, kind of really show in real-time, you know, what, what was happening. And it was a super exciting time, but it was about completely different things. It wasn't so much really a focus on, you know, like the seasonality and the farming and the agriculture, and it was really fun to do. I learned a lot, and it was an exciting time. And when I kind of came to look at this position to run this food lab that, you know, the R&D kitchen, a restaurant, you know, at a restaurant that was just getting its third Michelin star. No one had, and that wasn't a thing that existed yet. R&D chefs at restaurants, development kitchens for restaurants, you know, that was something that was like in the food manufacturing world or like a big, you know, a big, you know, a chain restaurant or something like that. So that was new. And so when I came it was like, this is the position. And I just remember saying something really exciting is about to happen here, and I just want to be a part of it. And I got this really amazing opportunity to take that role and even just started to define what it meant to do that kind of work. And it was such an exciting time, and I learned a lot and did everything from menu development to TV programs to going around the world and doing these, you know, like showing here is the techniques that we're developing, and You're kind of putting your stamp on that in the books. And it was just a lot of fun and a lot of innovative things. I did that for five years, but we always just knew that we wanted to be here. We wanted to be in Healdsburg. Katina was farming and gardening and also cooking and doing, you know, these things. And we were just talking about, and eventually, we were like, we just need to move to Healdsburg and figure this out. And, uh, you know, we just came here without jobs and investors and a project or anything. It was just we had to steep ourselves. And as she came in here and started working as a farmer and doing all of her coursework, and it really started to come into focus, it actually just changed my mind, not only like back to where I had started but just to a completely new place where, you know, it had been my role for five years to like come up with innovative ideas and make them happen and realize them. And then when I came here, and we started working together, I actually really realized that you know, now my role was to really follow Katina's lead and for her as the farmer and us to talk together about what we wanted to grow and how We wanted to grow it and what kinds of ingredients were inspiring to me. And then she was growing those. But now, as a chef, what I'm doing is telling Katina's story through the dishes. And what we do at SingleThread that we say that we do is tell the story of today. So every day on our menu, which doesn't have any signature dishes on it or anything, that's always changing. Every day, that's a reflection of what Katina sees on the farm. What she's harvesting, what's ready, what she's excited about, what's happening. And my role as a chef is really just to take the hard work that Katina and her farmers do for months and months and months For the produce that I have for just a few hours because we have a harvest every morning, you know, and serve that you know to the guest it really has completely changed this idea of innovation and how the language of how we serve our food is really to tell her story.

Katina: That's how I felt when I met you, by the way. Just as you did when you started working at the Fat Duck, but you didn't really know what exactly was going to happen there. And so when I met you, I didn't really know what was going to happen. I just knew something exciting was going to happen, and I wanted to be a part of it. And at 15, somehow, I had the foresight to make that decision, and it was the best decision I've ever made.

Josiah: I love that. So my background is more in the lodging part of the hospitality ecosystem. So you'll have to forgive my ignorance, but it seems to me from my vantage point, coming more from the lodging side, a lot of the attention and conversation in the culinary world seems to be what you both maybe arrived at from your own stories and your own passions. And that is a focus on the land's food systems. You both invest, well, especially Katina. You and your work and your teams are investing so much in education, and what you're doing at the restaurant is so education-focused. Is this a fair assessment to say that the conversation has moved here versus just the experimental sort of food science side of things?

Kyle: Yeah, you're saying from an industry perspective Yeah Yeah, you know, well, you know, just speaking about the kind of the area of, of, you know, the fine dining world and in the kind of three Michelin star, you know, world, you know, the change that we've seen, you know, and there were this, we're talking about this modernist cuisine kind of era where it really was about like innovation and avant garde and, what is the sort of theater of it going to to be and it's not like that that just went away and that just says like in the rear rear mirror but what's really interesting is a lot of the things like the techniques and the kind of storytelling and the multi-sensory aspects has just been sort of like absorbed into just like the normal sort of like lexicon of everything we do it's just become this sort of like more ubiquitous thing and it's just sort of like come into the background where it was it was during that time very much more like out in your base and performative and now these are kind of like you know core things and it's kind of interesting because there's these like techniques that were just developed you know, for me, it just feels like yesterday, but you know, within the, in the early two thousands, brand new techniques and the ways to use new ingredients and sort of functionality and things and new innovations and technology that we were kind of responsible for moving maybe from a laboratory setting into a kitchen setting. And, you know, you have these young chefs who are in their early twenties, and they intuitively already know how to do it and everything. And I'll be like, oh, wow. You know how to do that. Like, where did you learn how to do it? And it's like, do that. Where'd you learn about that? And they look at me, like if you would have said to me, where'd you learn about omelets? Where'd you learn how to scramble an egg? For them, it just kind of feels normal. And I'm like, that was only invented 15 years ago. But for them, it might as well have been 100 years ago. So that's how it just shows you how fast things kind of just get assimilated into what we do as chefs every day. But, you know, to answer your question in terms of like the direction of restaurant and hospitality is a lot of those, you know, things and concepts and a lot about, you know, fine dining outside of like the really creative modernist world. You know, it was a little bit more about luxury for a certain period of time. It was about getting ingredients flown in from all over the world and right this new world that everyone was in where you could get, you know, produce sent from the other side of the world and, you know, fish and lamb and right like the way that stuff could just move around so easily. We take for granted that that's just a given, but that's relatively new actually, right? And it's sort of like the last hundred years or less that that's actually possible to happen. And so, you know, there was this kind of luxury, like, oh, well, that's what luxury is: getting the caviar from here and the truffles from here and the foie gras from here. And that was kind of seen as fine dining where the restaurant itself could exist anywhere. It was just about bringing the things and the people, you know, together, whereas now and where we are now and where things are moving, And things have moved and certainly what we're a part of is that it's really a focus is on authenticity. It's about the place. It's about the representation of the place and its time within that place, the sort of seasonality and the locality, you know, of it. And that's what. Our special experiences for us that we're really passionate about. You know, to visit, whether it's in Japan or France or wherever it may be, is this, they say, like, this experience could only exist within that place. You couldn't pick it up and move it somewhere else. And it wouldn't be, you know, would not be the same. And, you know, that it's an authentic representation of the place where we are. SingleThread could not, in Healdsburg, and where we are, they, Those two things, cannot separate, from each other. And, uh, you know, like, I mean, obviously Healdsburg can, could separate from us exists without us, but what we are is such a reflection of where, of where we are. And so people have to come to it. So many things in our life now come to us, right? So you have to come to that, that experience. And there's the journey of that, the anticipation of that, the movement. Towards that and then actually being in and experiencing is like that that's what the experience is all about. That's so compelling to me, though.

Josiah: And I hope this has staying power I believe it has staying power because I feel like there's so many things that are digital and virtual and there's something about a Sense of place. Is that the essence of the beauty of travel? Sure.

Kyle: Well, yeah as those things move in that direction it I don't want to say it's counter to but it's more of the balance of exactly that movement of those things and

Josiah: So Katina, I feel like this is a good segue into your work, which I'm fascinated by. I know almost nothing about it. I had a vegetable garden as a kid, and I had tomatoes, carrots, and peppers. And I think that was the extent of it. And I had a lot of fun doing it, but I don't know that much. I'm curious, you, you kind of build a career in this, you work in Japan. Now, then, you come here to Healdsburg, and I wonder if you could walk us through the origins of the farm. Where do you start? It feels like such a complex operation today. How did it all get started?

Katina: How did it all get started? Well, it got started.

Kyle: It started with building the initial farm, right? We did. Two years before we even opened.

Katina: We were building the restaurant and the first farm together in tandem. So we really wanted to develop a relationship with the farm and the kitchen even before the restaurant had opened. And we had the great fortune to be able to do so. In fact, the core team that we opened SingleThread with, and we still have some of that team with us, would actually come and work out on the farm with us and help be a process or be part of the process of building that first farm. So that was their their wonderful foray and the mark that they made in the chapter of agricultural beginnings with SingleThread. But where does it start? I mean, it's like we're talking about technology, I think. I'm pretty far removed from that. I am really guided by nature. I'm paying attention to it. We are taking our cues from it and really letting it dictate to us what our moves are. We're part of an ever-changing, shifting climate right now. Our number one job is just to adapt to that. Everything is changing around us and beneath us, but it is our job to be focusing in, honing in on those even subtle nuances and making sure that we allow them to inform us as to what our next moves are so that we can be the most responsible stewards of the land as we possibly can be. But it starts with a big dream and I think a lot of ambition to get your hands dirty.

Josiah: You said you wanted there to be a connection between the farm and the kitchen. What did that look like in terms of what you wanted to be growing on the farm? Was there an initial scope of we have to start here?

Katina: Yeah, I think so much of our influence was from our time in Japan and the agricultural just influence that we had there, whether it was the vegetables themselves, the farming techniques, the land to which they were grown. However, we initially focused on a lot of really unique varieties from Japan, particularly from the Kyoto region called Kiyoyasai. And I think that was really where we started to build our repertoire. And from that, we just kept continuing to build out really unique finds. There's nothing more exciting for us than bringing in a harvest bin full of just beautiful vegetables into the kitchen. It stokes the fires of creativity unlike anything else. Creativity is not linear, so while chefs can order from, you know, an availability list. It's not quite the same as having that interaction with them in real time with that product. But we were also just so influenced by our fellow farmers. I mean, we're here amongst these incredible farmers and we never want to grow 100% of what the restaurant utilizes because we are in this really beautifully supportive agricultural community. We also need each other. We lean on one another when there is a fire or a flood. We rely on our fellow farmers to kind of carry us through it. So it's a big part of community as well.

Josiah: Well, I'm just thinking about that connection. The goal from the outset was to have the connection between the farm and the kitchen. I'm curious what that connection looks like today, because my understanding is there's a lot of education that takes place for your guests each night, where you're informing them. How do you think, I'd love to hear from both of you, maybe starting with you, Katina, in terms of how do you, I guess, have that information flowing between the two parts of your business?

Katina: That does rely on technology, actually. We do use Slack for that, and the kitchen will come out. We've got a lot of chefs who will come out every week and connect one-on-one with their product. But we are offering information to the kitchen in real time each and every day so that they are completely aware of what is coming in, what is going out, what is at its peak. And because we're only seven minutes apart, the farm and the kitchen, we're able to really just create a very strong connection amongst us. And so I feel like we've got a very strong dialogue that we've been honing for almost eight years now.

Josiah: When I love it, and I think practically it seems that the connection is very direct because what your team is selecting down to the tomatoes or the actual produce that they're bringing in makes its way to the kitchen, right? So there is this through line from a just practical production perspective where everything doesn't start in the kitchen. It's starting up at the farm.

Kyle: Yeah, I mean, the farm is the start of the kitchen. Like, it often like sort of looked at or talked about in this sort of delineated way, but they're not. The sort of the end steps at the farm are really the first steps of the kitchen. So, you know, when the kitchen is every night before they leave at midnight is putting in their farm order for the next morning. You know, sending that over. So when the first farmers are coming in at five, 6am, they're reading that communication and they're like, okay, this is what the kitchen needs today. And they're making a plan for harvest and they're delegating those tasks out and everyone's going out into the field and they're kind of going to areas to that they specialize in and they really know. And they're out there, Katina or any one of the farmers is out there, they're selecting, right? When you just get produce delivered to you on the back, from the back of a truck, you know, onto your loading dock or, you know, you go to a grocery store, right? You know, you're in, you know, you've got something contained in a box, you know, you're given what you're given and you sort of like utilize it and maybe some of them are at their peak ripeness and some aren't or, You know what whatever the case may be but you know, the farmers are going out there Let's take for example the strawberries right now, you know, they're going through Berry by berry and saying this one's ready. This one's not this one's ready. This one's not you know, they're going through and selecting based off of what the we're looking for in ripeness or tomato or whatever the case may be is like They're hand selecting, they're thinking about, this is going to be cooked today, served today. Is this a reflection of what we want it to taste like? They're not just like, all right, well, I'm just going to harvest this plant and then I'll move on and harvest the next plant. This pepper is ripe. This one needs to turn and get a little more sun here. And they're just like going through and making passes as different, uh, you know, fruits and vegetables sort of like ripened. And then they're bringing that in. They're sort of like doing some processing and some cleaning and you know, whatever it is that they need to do. And that's coming to the chefs and there's a handoff, um, you know, there, and then the chefs take it the rest of the way. So, you know, they're already doing so much of this, like culinary work out at the farm, that's really, really important for how we start our day. And we kind of take for granted as, you know, chefs that we just get everything like essentially perfect and ready to go.

Josiah: I love it. I would love to hear you talk a little bit about how this translates into the experience of people dining in the restaurant in terms of education. How, um, how does that look? Is it all the interactions, how the dishes are introduced? Where does that information transfer happen?

Kyle: Yeah. I mean, we, well, we're, um, you know, as I said, we do what we say is tell the story of today to our guests. So they come in, And through the flowers, which Katina grows, or things she gathers from the wild, or from some of her other friends who are amazing floral growers, and growing that floral material with the same integrity that the vegetables and all the things that you eat are grown. She's telling this visual story in the way that she's directing all the floral arrangements or doing them herself. And certainly through the ingredients and a lot of the presentations and how we bring floral and agricultural material into the way that we present things, you know, we're telling a visual story. We're telling a, you know, a taste and flavor story. And then we're telling an actual story, a true story, you know, in the, in the dining room through the way that we're serving it and in the dishes themselves. And so, you know, everything is about steeping the guest in this moment, in the moment in time. So you may have heard the phrase in Japanese, Ichigo Ichie, which is a very famous phrase, which means like one chance, one encounter. It's to really like steep you in this moment and say like, hey, we can come back to this restaurant. But it's not going to be the same meal. We're not going to be the same. Maybe we're not going to be the same with people. Even if we replicated to come, OK, the four of us will come back here again six months from now. Everything will be different. And that experience will be different. And we're different people under different circumstances. So it's really an appreciation for, and that's, I think, what good hospitality is. It's about creating a moment that cannot be replicated and really making you feel on a conscious and subconscious level that you're sort of experiencing something very, very special within that moment. And you're sort of like appreciating subtly the impermanence of things. And that's kind of the beauty of the art of food is that It's not like a recording of a song or the painting of a painting or the sculpting of a sculpture that can live on. It's like you are taking it in at that moment, and that moment is fleeting, and you just keep the memory of it, but it's very sort of ephemeral, right? It's just sort of gone, and that becomes really the beauty of it. And so we want to bring them into our environment. We're bringing them into our home. This is not a performance. kind of broadcasting the Broadway play at you. You know, this is the experience of the guests and we're sort of like setting the stage and we're bringing all these things that we do, but we're also really kind of creating an environment for you to disconnect and then reconnect with the people that you're dining with and have this experience together. And the story that we're telling in amongst that is our agricultural story, a story of the artisans and the people involved. and making everything because, you know, what, what we do, right, the guests only experiences this little part of the iceberg that sticks up above the water, which is the final experience. But everything that's interesting and meaningful to us and to all of us who are involved is all happening under the water. So what's happening, you know, farming and the land and how Katina is taking care of the land and the soil and the growing and the varieties and where they come from and these artisans and these craftspeople and the artists and the sustainable seafood fisheries, right? All of this like important cultural work and environmental work and hard work and just plain old hard work, right? It's all happening below, um, below the surface so that the guests can really, um, you know, and enjoy, and they should be able to just relax and enjoy that. But often there's a lot of important things that are going on. under the surface and we can't give you all of that. I mean, we could teach a university course on that to have to sit through that much information, right? But we're just giving them a sense of that in feeling and to ask questions and to dig a little bit deeper. And we're always looking for ways that we can bring guests deeper into the story because for us, those are all those really beautiful moments. It's like what happens underneath the surface that allows us to do and provide for the guests. So they're just getting these glimpses and this sort of sense of it.