New Year New Opportunities for Studio B

Healdsburg is justly famous as a mecca of fine dining these days, and Barndiva is proud to have been a part of that evolution, just as we are truly honored to have been awarded a Michelin Star for a second year. But this community has always been about more than fine dining for us. It is also a motherlode of single owner shops and galleries, makers and creators, neighbors, and friends – all of us surrounded by magnificent, verdant countryside.

If the past few years have taught us anything about keeping this landscape truly healthy so we can all thrive, we need to gather more to talk and listen, the better to protect what we love about this singular community. And who knows, these conversations might eventually have a ripple effect.

So it is that one of our resolutions this New Year is to focus on extended use of Studio Barndiva to foster more ongoing community conversations. First up in the newly branded Studio B is an afternoon celebrating four remarkable women whose food journeys have a great deal to teach us.

Tanya Holland is a new friend of the barn, a restaurateur, magnetic TV & podcast host and cookbook author of bestsellers like “Brown Sugar Kitchen.” She has just released a fabulous new cookbook called “California Soul,” something she has in abundance and is gracious enough to share.

Jennifer Reichardt is the winemaker/owner of Raft Wines always a star at The Pink Party and Fête Blanc – and she also has a new cookbook, “The Whole Duck,” which draws its recipes from her family owned business Liberty Duck – a valued purveyor of Barndiva’s since the day we opened.  

We have admired Elizabeth Falkner since her Citizen Cake days, long before she went on to open four more acclaimed restaurants in San Francisco and New York and became an international presence as a TV personality and consultant. She now adds filmmaker to her impressive resume with the release “Sorry We’re Closed,” a timely film she directed about how the pandemic has adversely affected small restaurants throughout the country.

Healdsburg’s Duskie Estes hardly needs an introduction — the former owner of beloved restaurant Zazu and The Black Pig Meat Co with husband John Stewart, she is an iron chef, a brilliant speaker and mentor to many. Duskie has transformed Healdsburg’s non-profit Farm to Pantry in ways that are having a profound impact across the state on how to address food insecurity by strengthening our faltering food distribution systems.  

That these four women are successful business owners, Top Chefs, Iron Chefs, Food Network Stars, winemakers and authors isn’t beside the point – the take away for us is how they are all using their considerable personal successes to fuel conversations about definitive ways to support farms, restaurants, and organizations that care as much about people as the food they source, serve, and distribute.

In the final days of December, we hosted a sold-out dinner for the late Sally Schmitt’s Six California Kitchens with Sally’s family, friends of our Philo family for many many years. Winemaker Phil Baxter gave a toast that night I have thought about often since. It was after a cooking class with Sally in 1999 that his parents decided to uproot their lives and come live and work in the Anderson Valley. “That single experience, Phil explained, “that connection to the Schmitt family, is the pure reason why I am living in Anderson Valley and doing what I do today.”

We are all looking for pure connections, especially those that provide direction to our lives. We all know they are rare. But as we try and build our businesses around meaningful lives in these most difficult times, trying to feed necessary personal notions of success that will keep us going, it is essential we form more inclusive, expansive definitions of what it means to be part of a “family.”  Cooking and serving food and wine to the public we are ever mindful of farming practices and conscious sourcing; we try to honor connections to our purveyors and our work force. But you, our customers and clients, are the other side of that equation. Taken altogether, in good faith, in an environment where kindness matters, this is the family we have chosen.

We hope you are able to join us on January 22nd in Studio B, and meet these four remarkable women. We will be sipping Alma de Oakland cocktails and Raft wine, nibbling bites Chef Erik Anderson has prepared from California Soul. The authors will be talking about and signing their cookbooks, we’ll hear about and preview a bit of “Sorry We’re Closed,” and Duskie will inspire us about the vital mission of Farm to Pantry and what they have planned for the new year. If you are unable to be with us we encourage you to go out and purchase ‘California Soul’ and ‘The Whole Duck’ cookbooks at your local bookshop, seek out Elizabeth’s Film “Sorry We’re Closed,” and to find and support – with whatever resources you can manage – a non-profit food distribution network where you live.

FOOD NEWS: Chef Erik Anderson’s Winter Prix Fixe Menu

Maine Lobster from our January 4 menu

Photo: Chad Surmick

We are thrilled to present prix fixe menus this winter the better to showcase more of Erik’s prodigious talents. The menus will also enable us– including our chefs – to spend more time with our guests. The prix fixe will reflect exciting seasonal changes every week*, and can be enjoyed by vegetarians from start to sweet finish. Wine pairings are optional – a chance to dig through the cellar for gems and wines we love from lesser known vineyards. This week’s pairing from Barndiva’s (and soon to open Maison Healdsburg Wine Bar) Jade Hufford.

Starting this Janurary there will also be Bar Menus ~ come in for a Scott Beattie cocktail and share something unexpected.

We’d love to see you.

Remembering Sally Schmitt

The Philo Apple Farm, looking towards Hendy Woods and Greenwood Ridge

We talk about farm to table a lot these days without understanding the back breaking, thoroughly unglamorous hours of work it takes to accomplish anything close to that profound connection. Or, for that matter, loom to sweater or clay to vase… instead we covet power and the goodies that come with money and recognition as proof of some notion of success that increasingly seems to come and go with the season. But the deeply felt rewards of following your intuition and putting in the time and work because you care was Sally Schmitt’s genius, and clearly something she taught her children. In her case it came in the form of taking honed traditional values and making them ‘true’ to her own time and her family’s ongoing needs. It’s very old fashioned to think of character in this way - in the sense that True North is philosophical as well as directional. Sally Schmitt didn’t set out to be a trendsetter for so many of the things we’ve come back around to valuing today - she lived those values. And it was bloody hard work until it became easier. 

Sally, who passed away peacefully at The Apple Farm on March 5, was the formidable mother of my good friend Karen Bates who moved to Philo with her husband Tim the same year, 1984, that we bought our farm on Greenwood Ridge.  Whenever I saw Sally after she and Don had sold the French Laundry to Thomas Keller and re-located to Anderson Valley, first to Elk and then the Apple Farm, I was still hopping on planes from London every summer to get my family back to our ‘work-in-progress’ farm. Always in her apron, moving slowly but with purpose, she’d stop and break into a beatific smile when she saw me and the kids. I like to think this was because she knew I loved her family, but it also just might have been that she knew I connected all my crazy dots about life in a way that also revolved around family, creativity, hard work. Our backgrounds could not have been more different except that I had a mother for whom nothing was impossible if you believed it was the right thing for you and your family. So. A kindred spirit. 

In interacting and observing the world Sally built with her children over the years, I saw how much it centered around family, and food. Specifically food that exemplified Brillat-Savarin’s ideal that all great dishes must ultimately come down to satisfying ‘le goût du revenez-y’ – the taste you come back to. Savarin never established where this longing started – in childhood perhaps – but it has always rung true. And Sally’s cooking nailed it.  

The last time I saw Sally for any length of time was at her granddaughter Rita’s splendid wedding to Jerzy. Never the social butterfly and moving more slowly by then, she was happy to watch her family celebrate around her - she did not move far from her chair that day – and I took the opportunity to keep her company. We talked about the whole pig we roasted per her recipe at Barndiva for Grandson Perry’s wedding and the extraordinary dancing at Grandson Joe’s wedding at The Apple Farm years before that – Joe’s sons now running wild in the orchards below us. At some point I remember her turning in her chair to look me straight on and ask how things were going “at that barn of yours in Healdsburg.” I shook my head, said something like “I may have bitten off more than I can chew,” expecting some pithy Sally response like “take smaller bites.” What she said, simply, was ‘You know what you are doing.’ I didn’t fully. Not that day, and not now – do any of us? We hope and too often our hubris allows us to think we know, but do we? 

But thinking back now it wasn’t that she thought I “knew” in the sense of planning for a tomorrow that might never come, especially in the crazy world of hospitality and restaurants, but in Montaigne’s sense that “the greatest thing in the world is to know how to live to yourself.” Staying true, somehow, to that indefatigable North Star even as it moves across the sky of your life, through loss and success, joy and sadness. Just willing to put the work in.  

There’s a wonderful line in Richard Powers The Overstory – one of many in that great book – that seems applicable here: “As certain as weather coming from the west the things people know will change. There is no knowing for a fact. The only dependable things are humility and looking.”

I’ve had trouble learning humility. My mother warned me of this. But as a woman in a man’s world, being fierce was – as I saw it and built my life – the only way forward without being compliant to anyone’s version of the status quo, or, crucially, becoming complicit in supporting values that were morally reprehensible. I am still learning to lean into humility.  But I do know it starts with looking. 

I am not in the habit of making predictions but here’s one I am sure of: Six California Kitchens is going to be a classic. Troyce, yet another talented grandson, has done a magnificent job melding the old photographs of Sally’s life with images of dishes she and daughters Karen and Kathy cooked and styled at The Apple Farm.  There is no spiffy cookbook artifice here - gorgeously photographed dishes you can’t hope to recreate - just wonderful recipes, and the story of one remarkable woman’s life.

If you find yourself heading up to Anderson Valley and can cage a reservation to stay at The Apple Farm to experience a real small family farm, do not hesitate, and try to talk to Tim about apples. The extremely talented Perry Hoffman, now working with his Uncle Johnny at the Boonville Hotel can cook you dinner there - the best Anderson Valley has to offer. And don’t miss stopping off first for some wine and cheese at Pennyroyal Farm, where if you are very lucky you may get a glimpse of granddaughter Sofia if she’s not off on some mountain above Navarro tending their sheep.

Life is not easy to get through unscathed, but the trait of character that gets one through it – at least to the extent you are satisfied with the life you’ve led at the end of it - is something I’m pretty sure Sally Schmitt figured out.

What a legacy. RIP Sally.