Celebrating the Best Moments of 2024

We started the year with a pretty heavy lift: moving our dining from Barndiva, where we had held court for the past 20 years (the last three with a Michelin Star), into the Studio space - aka Studio Barndiva - next door. Our hope was that a move away from a pricy prix fixe would enable us to return to what we love most about our particular brand of hospitality: a comfortable approach to inspired seasonality alongside community focused and expanded private eventing. The risks are formidable across the restaurant world right now, increasingly so if you are (small) family owned and operated, but we’ve had 20 years to learn that NOT exploring new ways to deliver what we are passionate about goes against our DNA. With a more accessible à la carte menu, with Chef David Morales at the helm, we were able to welcome back so many neighborhood friends in 2024 while offering our coveted barndiva space for indoor cocktails parties, cocktail classes, community forums.

We are greatly thankful to our local constituency for their support. We greatly appreciate as well all the recommendations we received from local businesses, our favorite hoteliers, and best of all, always, word of mouth.

Our hope for the coming year is to continue to up our game in our beautiful rooms and gardens, further enabling the talent we are blessed to have both BOH and FOH.

Wherever your journey takes you in 2025, we hope you find what you are looking for, with surprises along the way that delight and engage you. We hope you keep in touch.

For us - Jil, Geoffrey, Lukka- we hope to continue our journey in Healdsburg seeking satisfaction that has the bandwidth to explore, create, excel, with continual curiosity, building toward a definition of joy in all the things that matter most to us as we celebrate the art and craft of food and wine, the spirit and life style of wine country.

Here is our (very) short list of stand-out 2024 Moments - and a peek at the wonderful Humans that made them possible.

love.

Yes, it takes a village to design, plan, minutely schedule, then pull off a great, memorable wedding. Everyone involved has to bring it, starting with the couple who entrusts us to hear their vision and be forthright and creative about how to achieve it. Then, every single participant - whether working in our kitchens and on our event teams, or outsourced, sometimes at Barndiva for the first time has to embrace how precious time becomes: every moment of shifting light, circumstances, emotions, can affect the outcome. It all goes by in a flash - and while its pretty hard to take a bad picture here - we never forget we are just the frame, not the subject. We know families will pour over, and want to relive, every moment for years to come. So here’s to the talent we’ve seen behind the cameras this year, to the planners, the stylists, the floral designers, the musicians, the hard working rental agencies (a silent army you never see coming or going.)

Here’s to the couples who choose to share one of the most important days of their lives with us.

This is the first year Susan Bischoff has led our special event team with Jason, and she excelled. To the entire event team … Bravo.

Cocktail Class.

Scott Beattie’s legendary talents are matched by genuine love for sharing all he knows about the alchemy of plants, flowers, and both spirited and non-spirited elixirs. They were all on display this year as he was able to expand private cocktail classes into Barndiva through the year (previously they had been weather contingent). He also offered, for the first time, pick-up classes. We’ve now met fabulous groups of families, businesses, wedding adjacent, and hotel appreciations for staff with our Cocktail (equally N/A) Classes in 2024. Encore.

women who inspire.

Ok one of the fabulous creatures above is not officially a woman yet, and one lives Down Under where she’s inspiring generations of young minds through her prodigious output of artistically significant and culturally relevant children’s books - but what we’re celebrating here is human passion of a female variety that is not location dependent. They brought what we needed most this year: intelligence, curiosity, and bravery for embracing with agency the world as it is, and as it could be.

I would like to thank my partners in Conversations Worth Having - Dawnelise Rosen, Amber McInnis, Susan Preston and Zem Joaquin of Near Future Network - who found time in their incredibly busy lives to help create a series around the future of sustainability that is achievable.

Our Wine Director Emily Carlson brought to bear her special passion for education and support of Women in Wine in 2024 - with Bâtonnage we hosted a Women in Wine symposium, with Alice Sutro of Sutrowine she helped launch ‘Snatch that wine list’ (aka tips for talking to somms) to empower women ordering wine in restaurants. And yes, the prevalence of women wine makers at The Pink Party and Fête Blanc - and on our wine lists in the restaurant - was not an accident. Emily is a woman with a mission we support.

Across all our public events we derived great joy and energy from seeing women in such numbers enjoying the company of other women’s accomplishments.

@sommelierforthepeople ; @sutrowines ; @susienotserp ; @franelessac ; @.am.ber.ini ; @deappletree ; @philo.flora.flowers; @batonnageforum; @alexsarovich

Conversations. Very Worth Having.

Our mission to explore and share ways we can all live more lightly on the ground brought to Healdsburg strategic innovators that were a joy to get to know this year. To celebrate their ideas and accomplishments (thus far) working to positively offset the profound affect climate change is having on all our lives.

We promise a return of CWH in early 2025. Stay tuned!

@gaeastar_ ; @swaythefuture ; @nearfuturesummit ; @cruzfoam; @biomimicryinstitute

@variant3d ; @apparelimpactinstitute ; @nearfuturenetwork ; @marcizaroff ; @Maya.eshom ; @orrickcareers; @farmpreneurs_ ; @earthseed_farm ; @ecofashion.corp ; @am.ber.ini; @littlesainthealdsburg ; @scottbeattiecocktails; @gaeastar_; @hotelhealdsburg ; @flyinggoatcoffee ; @swaythefuture

Fêtes, mon amour.

Maybe it was (finally? hopefully?) the end of Covid affecting our group social lives, maybe it’s ‘just’ these troubling times, but we witnessed a palpable desire to gather again as community in 2024. There was also a shift in the way we came back to acknowledging and celebrating the unique joys living and working in this magnificent wine shed. We loved that folks gathered for our three big wine Fêtes mad happy to be here (see previous blog for the third, winter’s ‘Sparkle Party’). Hug, Laugh, Sip, Munch, Talk, Repete. Even some dancing with abandon.

To all the wineries who participated - we love you guys. For many our wine parties are a yearly tradition, but they are also an introduction to some of our hardest working and most talented winemakers. For all the fun we have at them, we take planning very seriously. Led by Emily Carlson with support from Cathryn, Charles, Scott and our entire event team The Pink Party, Fête Blanc, and the Sparkle Party were sell-out events that celebrated achievement across the Sonoma and Mendocino counties in singular, almost all regeneratively farmed vineyards.

slo flowers. incandescent joy.

We were an apple, fig, chestnut, and pear orchard farm with a prodigious floral program long before we were Barndiva. It’s not something we’re likely to forget because it’s the reason we got into restaurants and events in the first place. From the early years when I drove our dry farmed apples down to Los Angeles, where I had been part of forming the first Food Co-Op board in Santa Monica, through the years we lived abroad and sold our fruits and nuts to restaurants like Chez Panisse and Wolfgang Puck in San Francisco, we have grappled with how hard it is to survive as a small organic farming enterprise.

This year our floral program was run by Misha Vega, a marvel of a woman and a brilliant partner for the challenges we continually face dry farming on a remote ridge. Misha has been instrumental in creating many of our breathtaking floral displays as well as many of our weekly arrangements. Coming in the Studio door and having your breath taken away by the colors, forms, scents of our mountaintop farm is our way of saying hello, thank you for coming.

This year we continued to tout the abundance of local seasonal floral farmers. The reasons to do so are compelling: Commercial flowers are chemical dependent; shipping them is harmful to the environment, to humans, while it’s no contest which are more beautiful in every way.

@dragonflyfloral ; @frontporchfarmers ; @longertable ; @singlethreadfarm ; @filigreenfarm; @gild.the.lily_ ; @philo.flora.flowers (Mischa’s new website for her floral wedding consulting)

and last but never least….

IF you follow us on @barndivahealdsburg, read the blog, or receive one of our infrequent Mail Chimp mail outs about an upcoming events you may have noticed that while Chad and I photographed the hell out of this confounding yet beautiful year, we backed off publishing images of the many beautiful plates of food coming out of our kitchen. Rest assured how we source and conspire to enrich our lives through what we eat when we dine out is still very much the heart of everything we do. But nothing can substitute the sensory experience of being here. We look forward to seeing you in person in 2025. Let us know when you come to dine that you read the blog or follow our adventures on @barndivahealdsburg. We look forward to your visit.

As Always Eat the View!

travel towards a common paradise

We travel in spring not least because age has lent greater understanding of Lao Tzu’s message “to be worn out is to be renewed.” Returning to Stockholm and Copenhagen afforded us great art and food, while time spent with our family in London, Sussex, and Gloucestershire was filled to the brim with ambling walks and resonating talks through fields, meadows, and forests filled with wildflowers and animal life, alive with all manner of sentinent being.

This brief but highly recommendable list is to give thanks, and point vigorously towards the gardeners, writers, artists, chefs, farmers, hoteliers that gave us so much pleasure the past three weeks. We travel to renew friendships and make new ones, but really, we travel for beauty, in all its forms. It’s a huge gift to be alive. Travel is a magical handshake with the world just outside your door wherever you are, every minute of every day. The name of our two favorite art exhibits, The Time is Always Now, and Trust Memory over History, really says it all.

Wherever your plans to travel this season, Carpe Diem.

Tokyorsbar (Prunus x yedoensis) in bloom alongside Lake Brunnsviken, Stockholm. The Bergius Botanic gardens consists of large systematic sections, a wetland, an orchard, trees and shrubs from all over the world. It also holds Victoria House and the Edvard Anderson Conservatory.

Firelei Baëz’s Trust Time over Memory exhibit at the Louisiana Museum. Maps and fragments of book pages emerge from beneath sumptuous lavers of paint “reminiscent of persistent ghosts of the past, haunting the present moment.”

Stages in the life of a Liu Chao Yu Ye, Nelumbo Nucifera, white lotus variety, Edvard Anderson Conservatory, Bergianska Trädgarden (Bergius Botanic Garden), Stockholm.

Firelei Báez, ‘How to Slip Out Of Your Body Quietly’; Trust Memory Over History, Louisiana Museum, Copenhagen

The standout art for us in London: The Time is Always Now, Artists Reframe the Black Figure, at the National Portrait Gallery, curated by Ekow Eshun, brilliantly showcasing the work of artists from the African diaspora.

In Copenhagen, three stunning exhibits are running alongside the permanent collection at the Louisiana Art Museum, a 30 minute drive from the city along the waterfront. This was art acutely attuned to this moment in history. We were able to spend the day at The Louisiana Museum, wandering from room to room, across the sculpture lawns, lunching beneath enormous Calder mobiles. I’ve long been a fan of @louisanamuseum. Exhibits included an extensive and stunning Chaïm Soutine exhibit of his magnificent portraits, and rooms filled with the mixed media art of Roni Horn spoke to the power of self reverential influences that now invade our waking and sleeping lives. Most thrilling was the premier European exhibition of Firelei Báez, an Dominican-American artist who overlays explosive color and figurative form on colonial maps which speak truth to power: “Confronting historical concepts we have for too long taken for granted.“

Amy Sherald portraits, and far right, Nathanial Mary Quinn, all at The Time is Always Now, National Portrait Gallery, London

Roni Horn, In Dialogue with the Film, Louisiana Museum, Copenhagen

Roni Horn, The Detour of Identity, Poured Glass, Louisiana Museum, Copenhagen

Chaim Soutine, The Groom, or The Bellboy, Louisiana Museum, Copenhagen

Detail, Untitled (Drexciya) 2020, Firelei Báez

Writer Olivia Laing’s new book ‘The Garden Against Time: In Search of a Common Paradise’ chronicles her response to the pandemic through the restoration of a walled garden in Suffolk which she wisely considers alongside an investigation of real and imagined paradises- a sub-text I find particularly relevant right now. Her talk with Internationally recognized garden designers ( and Daniel Carlson friends, lucky chap) Dan Pearson and Jonny Bruce was the initial reason for our visit to The Charleston Festival, a summer-long celebration of talks and workshops on all things gardening- historic, visionary and possible.

Opened this year by Queen Camilla, long a patron of The Charleston Trust (Bloomsbury in Sussex), it is held on the grounds of the home and gardens of that indefigable Bloomsbury couple Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant. A guided tour of their house reveals every corner of the lives they supposedly once lived there, and shared intimately with their Bloomsbury Brethren - Virginia and Leonard Woolf, E. M. Forster, Lytton Strachey, Roger Fry, and as I learned on the tour, John Maynard Keynes, apparently looking out a second floor window to the pond when he conceived ‘Keynesian’ economic theory. That depressing tidit aside, you can’t help but love these guys, obsessed as they were with philosophical questions, literature in transition between the wars, and the coming impact of modern art. The rooms feel haunted, as well as curiously small for a couple with so many friends with such varied appetites. Virtually every surface is inlaid or overpainted, rooms are chock full with books and canvases. From 1907-1930 they talked, drank, painted, coupled, decoupled, and lived a life of the mind no longer imaginable.

The talk we’d come for, “An Ordinary Paradise,’ was guided by Jonny Bruce, followed by a short but pointed Q & A. I have not yet read The Garden Against Time, but Laing more than held her own with these two rising stars of the international gardening and landscape world. Both of their remarkable careers to date have been at the heart of an ongoing re-consideration of Gertrude Jekyll’s Magiot line between the formal and wild. It’s exciting to watch a fuller understanding of the possibilities that Fergus Garrett has been espousing for decades at Great Dixter, where both Jonny and Daniel Carlson, the guiding light of our journey here at barndiva farm, have spent formative years.

For information on Festival of the Garden which will take place 18-21 of July, go to Charleston.org.uk. Dan (@daniel.carlson.co) and Suzanna Grant are teaching a workshop Friday July 19th “Gardening for Beginners.”

Follow in real time the life of an ‘ordinary’ paradise, Dan Pearson’s farm in Devon, @digdelve; for his many impressive ongoing installations, which include recreating Harold Nicolson and Vita Sackvillle-Wests never completed Delos at Sissinghurst, @coyotewillow.

To keep up with Jonny Bruce, a remarkable writer and brilliant plant consultant we hope to see in Northern California again soon, (among his many exciting projects, he continues his guardianship of Derek Jarman’s garden at Prospect Cottage) @j.bruce.garden.

Preceeding our time at Charleston, Dan and I enjoyed a ramble through the private walled garden at Knepp Estate - the 3,500 acre re-wilding / love child / groundbreaking life project of Charlie Burrell and Isabella Tree, which they embarked upon in the mid-1990’s. Its various parts are known as Knepp Wilding Estate, Knepp Castle, Knepp Safari (which makes sense given the size of the project, which controversially re- introduced rare breeds back into the land - you would need to go on safari to see it all).

Here’s the thing about re-wilding: even If your interest in gardening begins and ends with a consideration of no longer mowing your lawn, how we relate to all that’s alive and buzzing in nature - i.e. do we kill it in order to seemingly control it - is an essential conversation to be having right now. The Knepp garden restaurant under the direction of Chef Ned Burrell does wonderful things with the regenerative farm’s animals and produce. Wild range meats we bought at Knepp’s shop adjacent to the restaurant, which we cooked through and devoured at our VBRO house in Firle, was exquisite.

Given Englands historic and ongoing obsession with all things gardening, re-wilding is unsurprisingly a galvazing subject right now. Trying to envision any worldly paradise is no ordinary task, but considerations of Dante aside if we mere mortals are to seek it in this lifetime I am on team Olivia in believing it will be found - can only be found- in the ordinary.

@kneppwilding, @kneppwildingkitchen, @kneppregenfarms, @ned_burrell96, and of course @daniel.james.co for his passion, inspiration, and guidance.

All Images in Eat the View copywrite Jil Hales. Above, off the lanes near Lukka and Dan’s cottage near Tetbury, Gloucestershire; below, fields and gardens near our VRBO house in Firle, near Lewes, East Sussex. Thank you for sharing Anna - your gardens are lovely.

One of our favorite hotels in the world is Ett Hem, which means ‘at home in Swedish.’ All we can say to that is ‘as if.’ Ett Hem defines a quality of hospitality that extends to every piece of an experience you can have here through its art, design, stunning lighting, and ever present in the most delightful and delicious ways, food and drink. Ilse Crawford was the original inspiration for the design ethic back when the hotel was one building, but it is owner, Jeanette Mix, is the force of nature who ensures every vase is full, every candle lit, in room after room and gardens that overflow with moments of delight. The hotel is now two co-joined buildings with original windows and exteriors that date back to 1910. Situated in an elegant residential neighborhood, the truly impressive cross trained staff are unfailingly engaging, informative, and honestly dedicated to the mission. The tasting menu at Ett Hem proved to be our best meal in Stockholm, served in the heart of the open kitchen. @etthemstockholm

In Copenhagen the best dining was found at the Flo Campbell and Michelin Recommended Restaurant Frank, @restaurantfrankcp; @michelinguide; the most memorable at Marv & Ben celebrating life, love, and the joys of travel with new friends Robert and Sam.

We are still huge fans of Sessions Art Club in London, @sessionsartclub.

Hand carved ash vase by the artist, framer, and cabinet maker Emanuele Maria Marchi, a gift to Barndiva from the artist. He can be reached for commissions @ema.marchi

Arne Jacobsen’s Petrol Station, designed in 1938 for Texaco, as a new standard model. Now a class A historic monument, it was never put into production. Skovshoved at the northern outskirts of Copenhagen, Denmark