A decade ago, Kyle and Katina Connaughton (pictured above) opened a restaurant in Healdsburg, California, with a simple but radical premise. They believed a fine dining experience could root itself entirely in the present moment; in what the farm yielded that morning, in the current season, and in the particular light of a particular day in Sonoma. Ten years on, SingleThread holds three Michelin stars and has expanded to Kyoto. It has become one of the most consequential restaurants of the 21st century, never drifting from its founding premise.
The Story of Today
“The story of today” has become the defining phrase of the SingleThread experience. Kyle says the restaurant didn’t consciously open with this ethos, but always embodied it. Each morning, Katina delivers her harvest from the 24-acre farm that supplies the kitchen. In doing so, she sets the menu’s emotional and seasonal temperature. “As a chef, every day I want to tell the story of the farm,” Kyle explains. “Katina is telling her story through her ingredients and flowers, saying this is what’s ready and in peak season.” The result is a menu that functions as a dispatch from the land. It is a record of time and place that guests enter into, not merely receive.
The Team
What surprises Kyle most over ten years is not the accolades, but the people. That includes the team who built the restaurant alongside him and Katina, and the guests who keep returning to deepen their understanding of it. Several core team members have been with SingleThread since its earliest days — some for seven, eight, nine, now ten years. “You start with a vision that came from us,” he reflects, “and then you bring together a team that layers in their own talents, abilities, and perspectives, creating something so much greater than what you could have ever imagined on your own.” On the guest side, SingleThread has built something genuinely rare in the modern restaurant landscape. It has attracted a loyal audience that returns not to repeat an experience, but to experience it differently. Season by season, year by year, going, as Kyle puts it, “a little bit deeper” each time.
Expansion
That depth also guides the restaurant’s approach to growth. When Kyle and Katina consider expansion, the first question is never about scale. Instead, they ask what a given project teaches them, how it sharpens their creativity, and how it ultimately makes SingleThread better. “We have quite a long criteria for even small things that we do that are outside of the restaurant,” Kyle says, “and the number one thing is really all about how that helps SingleThread become a better restaurant.” This philosophy inverts how most successful fine dining operations grow, outward first, quality second. At SingleThread, growth serves introspection.
SoNoMa
This thinking shaped the decision to open SoNoMa at Capella Kyoto, SingleThread’s first international venture, inside an 800-year-old historic neighborhood. The project came to them; they didn’t seek it out. Every stage of due diligence confirmed its rightness. Kyle consulted mentors and friends within Kyoto before committing. The resulting restaurant doesn’t import California to Japan. Instead, it holds the two cultures up as mirrors to one another, celebrating, as Kyle describes it, “the common ground that we have, which is seasonality, intentionality, warm hospitality, support of good food systems and the artisans and craftspeople whose story we tell every day through the menu.” The team exchange between the two properties has also become a form of creative cross-pollination. Cooks experience both terroirs and carry that dual fluency back to the table.
The Concept of Omotenashi
If there is a single non-negotiable at the center of everything SingleThread does, Kyle locates it in hospitality, specifically in the Japanese concept of omotenashi, the art of anticipatory care. “It’s really about thinking about the guests and saying this is our home and you’re in our home,” he explains. “This is a dinner party in your home.” The experience is not performance, and it is deliberately not theater. The guest is not a spectator. They are the reason for the conversation between chef and farmer, between sommelier and cook, between California and Japan. This stands in contrast to a certain strain of fine dining that asks guests to sit back and receive. At SingleThread, the hospitality moves toward the guest.
Posh and Punk
Katina has described their aesthetic sensibility as “posh and punk.” The phrase might seem paradoxical until Kyle traces its lineage to Vivienne Westwood. She moved from designing for London’s punk scene to haute couture without ever losing her edge or her honesty — something the duo deeply admires. That sensibility now extends beyond the restaurant. The Selvedge, their newest hotel concept in Healdsburg, channels the same idea: elevated but never precious, refined but always real. “We don’t want things to feel like luxury for the sake of luxury,” Kyle says. “We want things to feel very tangible, very personal, very human, and easy to connect with.”
That impulse to stay human may explain why the Connaughtons remain resolutely planted in Healdsburg amid international expansion and continued critical recognition. They first dreamed of building a restaurant in this town when they were 23 years old and newly married nearby. “Of all the traveling and different places we’ve lived in the world, in Japan and Europe, it is really truly our home,” Kyle says. The farm anchors not just the menu, but the moral logic of the entire enterprise. Growth will happen only at the pace of what the land can honestly produce.
Ten years in, the story of today is also the story of a decade. Two people planted something in Northern California wine country, tended it with discipline and genuine warmth, and grew something that will outlast its founding season by a long measure.
Photos courtesy of SingleThread
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FAQs
Q. What accolades has SingleThread received over the past decade?
A: SingleThread has earned three Michelin stars since 2019, placing it among a small group of top-tier restaurants in the US. It holds the AAA Five Diamond Award and has been recognized by The World’s 50 Best Restaurants—first as a “One to Watch,” and more recently ranking among North America’s best. The restaurant has received a James Beard Award for design, a four-star review from the San Francisco Chronicle, and sustainability honors tied to its farm-driven model. More recently, the SingleThread Inn was awarded three Michelin Keys.
Q: How does the farm influence the dining experience?
A: The 24-acre farm, led by Katina Connaughton, acts as the starting point for every dish. Ingredients arrive at peak ripeness and dictate both the structure and emotion of the menu, creating a direct line between the land and the plate.
Q: What defines SingleThread’s approach to hospitality?
A: The experience is grounded in omotenashi, the Japanese philosophy of anticipatory care. Guests are treated as if they are being welcomed into a home, with service designed to feel intuitive, personal, and deeply considered rather than performative.
