Celebrating 20 years on July 14!!

On July 14 we will celebrate a Milestone it’s fair to say we never envisioned achieving - 20 years since the day we opened Barndiva. Over the past two decades we’ve been a local bluesy Bistro Bar, a fine dining Michelin Star Restaurant, hosted thousands of wedding related parties and significant community events, celebrated artists, and worked to strengthen the bonds between farmers and chefs (even helping create a web-site for them). We’ve worked through multiple fires and inventively and safely stayed open through the pandemic. We’ve had the joys of seeing many of our staff grow their families and cherished past employees go on to create wonderful businesses of their own.

It’s been an exhilarating, challenging, frustrating, marvelously engaging life… And on July 14, from 4-6, we're throwing a party to celebrate.

If you are able to come raise a glass with us we will fill it with new versions of the Barndiva cocktail classics, "On the Beach with Fidel" and "Steamy Windows," along with remarkable wines made by vintners who once upon a time polished a glass or two here at the start of their careers. The Chefs will be grilling and the soundtrack will be curated from a 20 year playlist of our favorites. And of course, floral arrangements galore from our farm and some of our slo flower friends.

We know this newsletter goes out to many who live far away, so if you cannot join us on the 14th, please know you have our gratitude. In some way, large or small, you have made this journey with us. Loyal customers, wedding families, farmers, vintners, artists, The City of Healdsburg, and most especially past and present employees - we simply wouldn’t be here without you.

It’s an elusive but significant connection we long to make over food and drink and when it works, that moment when everything comes together, it hits all the high notes of a diva moment . We have never stopped striving for that moment - but even when we miss, we’ve felt the love. Thank you.
 
Follow the link 🥳 to join us. The $10 ticket will go in support of a game changing new nonprofit that builds farm communities -- something that's always been close to our "Eat the View" hearts.
(100% will be donated to FARMpreneurs}  

We hope you can come! 

Of the thousands of images I’ve taken from the day we opened on July 14, 2004 of every aspect of this world we’ve created, at the end of the day what has meant the most to us as a family are the people we have worked alongside, through the good times and bad. This is a stressful industry, with hundreds of moving parts. It takes tremendous effort - physically and emotionally- to stay the course and be true to a vision, especially one as idiosyncratic as Barndiva’s. What has always pulled us over the swells when they got too high has been the dedications of relentless kitchen and front of house teams. When you see the joy of a food or drink moment that has truly landed, especially if that day is significant in a families life, you know why what you do matters.

This no means a complete rogues gallery, just some of the memorable moments we have shared on our way toward writing the barndiva story over the years.

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Coming July 5th ...
Cocktailing in the Gardens begins!

We are excited to be expanding our wine and cocktail menus
so they can be enjoyed in the gardens even if you aren't joining us for dinner

View the expanded cocktail and wine menu, here!

Studio Barndiva is open for dining Thursday - Monday from 5pm.
Walk-ins are welcome, reservations are encouraged.  

We book parties! 8+? Contact us here.

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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.