- [Kyle] The caviar dish is a dish that highlights a small lettuce that we grow that's called Salanova. (upbeat music) - This is Michaelangelo. He's one of our externs
here and he helps clean the Salanova lettuce for
our caviar course every day. - First we're gonna take
out the outer leaves here and we're gonna save these for a puree that goes
into the Salanova dish. As we get closer to the
middle, we're gonna stop when we get to these medium-sized
leaves as we're gonna save these for a garnish on the Salanova dish. The bigger leaves, medium leaves, and then we have the
parts that actually go in the middle of the dish. - [Andrew] You can see how much faster he is at this than me,
he does this every day. I feel like you've done three in the time that I've done one, Michael. - I've gone from thinking about caviar where it's a star of
the show and to dishes like this one where it's really
the seasoning of the dish. Like this is really about the greens and a lot of the flavors on that. So we have puree of the Salanova. We have the fresh Salanova
and all the different greens. Rather than being a caviar dish, this is like a vegetable
dish that has caviar. (lively music) This is my wife, Katina. This is her farm. It's about seven minutes
from the restaurant and we grow most, not
all, of our produce here. - So it's a little bit
later in the morning. And we come out here and just gather all of the items that the
kitchen has requested. So these are just really
beautiful petite summer squash with the blossoms attached. The kitchen is often fond of these. - These are the first
tomatoes of the season. We have not tasted these tomatoes yet. I'll bring some of these in and we will get them on
first course tonight. - [Katina] Yeah, that's great. - So great. We start harvest at 5:00 AM every day. And then every day at
11:00 AM, everything comes in from the farm and
basically gets used that day. (smooth music) It is at 9:00 AM here in
the Single Thread kitchen. This is Marley Brown, she's the head chef for the restaurant. We are starting to make breakfast, sending breakfast up to the rooms. The first chefs arriving
and they're getting the the day started. They're building the fire in the hearth, they're making breakfast
for the guests in our inn. So this is a very traditional
style of Japanese breakfast but we do our Sonoma version of it. So what's growing from our farm, what's in season here, but all
kind of the classic elements of all the side dishes and
fruit and pickles and rice. This is the first of many donabe
that you're gonna see here. This is our main cooking tool. We'll see that in the service tonight. So this is salmon that's
marinated in a saikyo miso from Kyoto, cooked in cedar. So this is homemade tofu,
different styles of pickles all coming from farm vegetables,
a lot of components here but this is a Sonoma take on a traditional Japanese breakfast. These are the beautiful squash blossoms, all of the flats of all the greens. So rather than the farm cutting that, we actually have the chefs come out and clip all of their
own garnish for the day. This is shiso. - This is the first of the
season, aka shiso, red shiso. It makes umeboshi a
really beautiful color. So we're gonna start
working on that today. It's super exciting. - We're really a restaurant that's driven primarily by what's coming from the farm and what the vegetables are. And so we have different
zucchini, different squash, and basically we're highlighting all the different parts of the plant. - So these were just
harvested from the farm. They just came in this morning. This is for our squash sashimi. Right now Chef Darius
is shaving this to make really beautiful ribbons
that are gonna get cut into nice size and then get ribboned out onto the sashimi dish. We're trying to create
a chrysanthemum flower. So after they're all ribboned out, we compress them in a kombu
dashi with fresh herbs. So this is the madai
for our sashimi course. We typically scale it, starting
at the tail and working up towards the head after
it's scaled, we break it off the bone and then salt
cure it with a little kombu. - So this is all very classic
Japanese fish butchery. This is really about precision
because all the way down to the final slicing and getting
each one of the slices to be exactly the same is
really important for not only how the dish looks, but how it eats. It all impacts what ultimately
the guest experiences. No pressure, Julian. You know, I think like
a lot of restaurants we're very timing oriented. So when in the guests walk
in, they walk up to a window and we hand them a welcome beverage. The chef who's slicing the
sashimi that's doing the sashimi course is standing
right in front of them. So when they walk up,
he's now then slicing for their second course. Our farmers are working for months sometimes like a year on
a product and we serve it that night. So it's a kind of our responsibility as chefs to like showcase
the hard work of the farmers. - So this is what I was thinking for the squash blossom
for the sashimi dish. - Yeah. It's great. - Yeah, I think this would be really nice. Let's give it a go for tonight
to see how it works out. - Okay. That's great. And then we also have the
squash blossoms that we use all of the, the belly and
the tail and the collar of the fish that we kind of
make that into a moose, stuff into the squash blossoms
and then tempura fry that. So you're getting all
the parts of the fish and all the parts of the
squash plant all on one dish. It's jubako, which
means the stacked boxes. So the sashimi sits underneath. This sits on top. There's the raw part of
the fish and the squash on the bottom. And then the cook part of
the fish and the squash on the top. We do a lot of cooking here
in Japanese earthenware called donabe, something
we're really passionate about. So right now it's a steamed black cod. We wrap it in leaves from a, a green that Katina grows called
komatsuna, it's a Japanese green. We, we uh, we wrap the fish in that. Then we wrap it in the like
it's basically the hulls of the outside of the bamboo tree. - So this is the final step of the process here before
it's ready for service. So Chef Dakota here is taking bamboo skin which he soaked in hot
tea water to help bring out some of the more
floral elements to it. Now he's wrapping each individual piece of cod like a little parcel. So it's ready for steaming in the donabe. - So we're looking for this to steam getting bubbles around the side here the reason why we're
doing two different ones we want this to be really really clean aromatically in front of the guests. So this is kind of like the workhorse to
do all of the cooking. And we serve that at the table. We really kind of opened up the table so the guests can get
all the aromatics of the of the fish and actually see
the way that it's cooked. We like to try to introduce
guests to this type of clay pot cooking. Last we're serving this with sauce that's made from grilled bones of the cod mixed with the
cell tooth, from the farm. And we also serve this
with the raw pea salad. - These are the depths
that we got in this week. You can see that there're
still a little bit wet. - Our sort of like main course dish and the only place where you actually see like land animal is the duck dish. - So we like to age 'em a
week after they come in. You can see up here, these
are the ones that came in the week before that
we like to get our ducks in a row and have 'em face the the fans so that they get
the most air flow here. And then every morning,
Blake here, our meat cook he takes the ducks that
he needs for the evening. And then he's gonna go and hang them in the
hearth for them to render. So from here, Blake's gonna hang 'em up. It's gonna allow the fat from the ducks to render a little bit. But also it's gonna
allow the ducks to take on some of that almond wood flavor. They looked super dry right
now, but as the fat renders they'll get nice and glossy. Throughout his prep day Blake
will be rearranging the ducks. so they all get an even
amount of render on the skin. And so that we're not actually
cooking the ducks here. We're just trying to,
again, render the fat and take on some of the
smoke from the hearth. - So it's two o'clock in the kitchen. The way that Chef Kyle and
Katina designed this kitchen is it's designed this way
very specifically to where you can see we're not
hiding anything at all about this time, everyone's
rushing to finish their final projects so we can move on
to the next phase of our day. It's cleaning into breakdown. We have a large breakdown list. Everybody has their own
activities that they do from scrubbing the top counters to polishing all of the
stainless steel in the kitchen. - It's taken us a while, but
we've finally got our system down for, for cleaning
it down efficiently. Everybody knows that they
need to get all their mise en place put away around
just five minutes before and everybody can get right to their job so we can get this done in 10, 15 minutes. - One of the reasons why
we do a full breakdown and completely reset the kitchen is because we are open kitchen, full transparency for the guests. - What Chef Kai here is working on is one of the 10 items that we have
on the hassun for today. It's an homage to a Kyoto-style sushi. Kai always gets mad at me because I eat all his pesto
rice, it's super tasty. This is one of those projects
that has to get done daily. He starts by laying out
the pickle kohlrabi sheets, some of the bachelor's buttons
that we get from the farm and you start to see
the layers come together and then he is gonna roll it
really tight and let it sit so that it firms up and then
he is gonna slice into it. And there's a beautiful
cross section of the flower, the fish, and the pesto rice. - So it's 3:30 PM and it's
time to open the kitchen. Things are moving. Things are moving. These are the, the tables here. So we know how many guests are coming in and what table they're gonna be on. First dish that we serve at SingleThread the changes every day, right now it's called Late Spring in Sonoma. This section here is like
really gonna start moving because every guest has 10 dishes. And so in the first
seating, it's eight guests. So that's 80 plates they have to make. 15 minutes later you probably
have to make another 60 15 minutes later, another 60. So our first seating is at four o'clock but since that dish is
ready on the table, when the guests arrive, it's just
nonstop until the last seating. So, you know, they're
gonna make just here alone 700 plates tonight. In Japan, in the traditional kaiseki menu. There is a place in that
early on in the menu that's called hassun, which
kind of serves a similar purpose which is really very, very
seasonal and small bites to sort of tell that, that story. And we just kind of like
expanded on this theme. This is what's happening on our farm. It's a collection of
all these dishes of like what is actually, and it's
peak season what's coming in. And we begin to tell that
story about the farm. Timing is super critical here
that they get, we fall behind by five minutes in one seating, and that will compound all night. Adrian's leading the station here. You doing anything in particular with tomato's what we brought in? - [Adrian] We can add it to the share. - Yeah. That's what's on the share. Yeah. Yeah, there we go. Sometimes decisions just made on the fly. He can see all the
guests that are coming in at what time and what all of
their dietary restrictions are. So he's got all of his
mis en place laid out for all the dishes that he's making and all of the different substitutes. Basically, he's just set
up with everything here, all the fish, all the shellfish all the vegetables, all the
garnish, all of the sauces. I, I don't know that there's
really any restaurant that's doing that many
things, you know, that fast putting it out, that
many plates that quickly. Okay, you'll be fine. (Kyle laughs) The dish really starts with the floral like it's as much a visual dish as it is about the ingredients on there. So we're telling a visual story of what's happening out in nature. Also when guests are
coming to like a three Michelin star restaurant
or something, they worry that it might be like very
formal and sort of tense. So I wanted guests to walk
in and sort of shed all of that and just dive
right into that experience. This, the way that it's built is different for the dishes are different
and the hoards are different. The floral is different. So every, every day, but
every everyone is different. So you kind of have to work
with what the floral team makes. We really like this idea
of the sense of time within the place, because we
are driven by our agriculture. We're very, very sort of in tune of exactly what's
happening seasonally. And so we want to express
not just the season, it's spring, but this
is specifically today. And that dish allows us to really do that from the beginning. Yeah, I'm happy. I love it. I love doing this. We do it every day for every guest. So we just love to start out this way. One kinmedai on the board. Fire round two for two, two. So I just fired. What's gonna be the warm bites. So we call it round two. So this is part of the first dish. This is the warm components all the warm bites from the first dish. So 10 cold bites, three
warm bites for every guest. So these are eggs from
our farm, savory custard on the bottom of sabayon
that we make from the eggs. This is the IU trout with rhubarb. - [Andrew] We call it the,
the Loch Ness Monster. - And then these are malted potatoes. And on the bottom's kind
of a mixture of mushrooms and a little bit of
glazed porcini on there. - After the ducks have been hung and they get all, they got all sweaty which kind of pre-renders the skin almost. We'll just clean 'em up, get, get 'em off the crown into breasts. One breast is about two portions and then we'll start cooking 'em once the service starts rolling out. My buddy, Mike, here
is also breaking ducks. - So these guys, Chef Mike
here, and Chef Blake are duck racing. You know, we like to
have a little fun here but also be productive and
efficient at the same time. - We really want to just kind
of like show off the duck. We roast some over the
open fire and right now we're serving them with
beets and kohlrabi, our very first potatoes
that we're getting, some of the Japanese greens that we grow, and sort of something
unique that we did this year was actually serve them with strawberries. - It's 6:30 PM. All guests are in for the first turn. We're into dessert land now
and final course of the menu. - Our final dish, we
always do a, a grains dish. So it's rice koshihikari rice. It's cooked in the Kamado-san Donabe. It's a rice cooker clay pot. And then we are gonna pour into that a, a little bit of egg as well as some chive and almost kinda like
set that like a risotto. You have to cook the egg
and it has to heat through but you have to stir very
quickly, incorporate air in there and make sure that you
don't overcook and scramble. We have three chefs that all they do is cook out
of clay pots all day. So it's like a really
great like learning curve for them to come because
it's a technique that you really have to to learn. Once it's hot, it retains its heat. It's not like a metal
pot where you can shut off the heat quickly and the
temperature will go down. It stores it. So you have to really like catch it on the the arc of the curve. And no, not when it's
hot enough, it's too hot. You kind of have to
catch it on the upswing and then cook the porridge
on, on the downs swing. So this is why we're
looking for this like really creamy risotto like texture. On the bottom grilled
spinach from the farm, acidic sauce we make from wild noori that comes from the Sonoma coast, braised kombu, and yeah
this is the kombu that we use for making the dashi. These are little jellies that's made from a Japanese sweet potato
vinegar. It's called beni-imo. This is a wild anago coming from Japan. Some of the radishes and
turnips from the farm. So it's traditional to serve
the Japanese rice courses with broth and pickles. In our case, we have the pickled
vegetables in, in the rice but this is the broth that we serve. Things are going well,
things are moving along. We had about five more
hours of service left, but yeah, everything's looking good. Finish a build on 36 please,
till 10, no raw pea one. You have 33 and 16. Something to be said about things being infinitely complex
within their simplicity. So the more simple and straightforward a process is the more you need to go sort of deep in defining
that nuance of it. We have something fun. We only have five inn rooms here. So we do an inn room menu. So we have a few different options. These guests have ordered a shabu-shabu, but our sort of unique take on that is is we use all different
vegetables from the farm. Chef Andrew starting to slice some really beautiful Wagyu beef. - [Andrew] It's fun because
it's, you know, obviously a five Wagyu but I feel
like the real star of this are the vegetables from the farm. - The guests are gonna
cook this dish themselves in this simmering water. Very, very simple
shabashabu. Swish the wish. Just adding a little bit of shero tamari, white tamari, as well as
some really nice sake. And then they have a
burner in front of '''em. They're gonna just simmer it up. I'm not trying to be the
most like cutting edge, avant garde, you know, chef in the world. I'd rather be known for the
people that we like graduate through here and what they
take out into the world. The cuisine for me is
important, but beautiful food on the plate is not the
point of what we do. It's the result of what we do. It's the results of bringing
all these pieces together. It's the results of our agriculture. It's the result of mentoring. It's like the result for the guests but it's not the end all and be all. We really want guests to
leave with this appreciation. And my hope is that people do leave and think a little bit more
about the kind of food choices and things that they
make in their daily life. Well, it can mean just having more of appreciation for
locality and seasonality. It can mean about shopping
at a farmer's market, making that connection with the farmer. And even too, with our dishware we work with all these
incredible artisans. So even have an appreciation
for seeking out a potter or you know, someone's whose
work you really like and just like supporting that artist. If we don't support artists and artisans and craftspeople and farmers,
like those things will die out and then they're not coming back.
