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.

PRINT_Ben and Molly wedding_courtney stockton photography-747.jpg

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!

Comment

80% of all species living on earth are anthropoids, they are the largest phylum in the animal kingdom. These include bees, ants, spiders, butterflies, and moths. Live on a farm and they are happily your daily companions, going about their business, as you go about yours. Though I was admittedly once a diehard city girl who would quickly default to ‘is this a predator?’ toward anything unknown (whether it walked on two legs or crawled on four) I’ve come to love the muck and tosh of farm life. Yes, it has taken me years to stop killing spiders – who for the most part do not bite – but I now marvel at the beauty to their balletic grace, the cunning in their designs for living.

And I am not squeamish. Or so I thought, until one sunny winter day just after the recent torrential rains when Dan, Nick and I began to tackle the ¼ acre of ‘treasures,’ aka trash, that had grown to fill a neglected corner by the front gate. A few minutes after we started, Dan lifted the edge of a rotting tarp and a family of centipedes scurried out, followed by a score of creatures, all webbed feed and slimy exoskeletons. I jumped back, fully creeped out. Dan, on the other hand, was positively joyful. He immediately set about transporting them, giggling like a child as he ran the ten feet to the edge of the forest where he deposited them to a new life. It went on: Beneath a pile of warped ply from some long forgotten project he found blue tailed skinks “beautiful!”; in the grassy muck around an old stove, several alligator lizards. Then beneath a stack of rotting ply, for Dan, a treasure trove of “three species of Salamander!”

Revulsion is the act of stepping back from something, it is generally instinctive, rather than rational. Like all forms of prejudice, it usually comes from ignorance. As the sun crept beyond the canopy of trees casting us in shadow, it was hard to miss the difference between what Dan and I were experiencing. If I have learned anything in over three decades dry farming organically up here on the ridge it’s that while insects may make strange bedfellows, they make grand partners in building the layers of biodiversity our farm has needed to survive and flourish. Why then, do most of us treat things that crawl out from under rocks- arguably where we all started - differently than those that float from flower to flower? We anthropomorphize some creature and not others, easily finding connection to ‘anything with a face,’ but repulsed by slithering snakes and slimy bug eyed creatures. Even within a species most of us hold to established standards of coherent beauty. Why else do we more frequently ooh at the butterfly, ignore the dusty moth circling the porch light on a summer night?

Dan is still, happily, the director of our big farm programs in Philo, though he now delegates from London most of the year, coming back to do a big push in winter and again in fall. He is especially wonderful at reminding us to always take a closer look at the impact our lives up here have upon the surrounding ecology of this ridge; reminding us that as form often follows function, so too beauty is in the eye of the beholder. This trip he gifted us with the knowledge that its often the unseen life on the farm, that over time contribute essential layers necessary to healthy biodynamic structure. These creatures happened to be feasting in the dump, but it is the feces of arthropods which are the basis for the formation of soil aggregates and humus, which physically stabilize soil and increase its capacity to store nutrients. Ecosystem engineers.

As for all those piles of trash we’ve kept around that we no longer have hopes of someday using, we are going to take another look at them before we pay someone to haul them off to yet a bigger trash pile we just can’t see. Before he left he urged us to listen to a John Little Podcast - John, who founded the Grass Roof Company.Co.UK (@grassroofcompany), in 1998, has been a seminal force in both macro and micro thinking around fly-tipping (dumping) and how it adversely affects biodiversity.

If you are in the least bit curious how to come to meaningful terms with all the junk that invariably surrounds us - how to cultivate your living situation in ways that encourage and protect wild life so it might thrive alongside you, how to cultivate plants that will more easily adapt to our changing climate, I recommend spending some time with this gentleman. Choose any podcast that strikes your fancy - and look at his website. John Little is a marvel rethinking how we live, especially in cities and towns, where every day we pass refuse in both private and public spaces that could be transformed to be pleasurable, have purpose. He grows things in unimaginable places, with very little resources beyond his ingenuity and vision - even top soil has a relegated place in his world. His work in the private and public spheres offers imaginative and inexpensive ways to create remarkable gardens and landscaped installations. So much to learn here.

And yes, upon much reflection, the skinks were pretty awesome.

There is breathtaking beauty everywhere you look in Anderson Valley this winter, and it’s easy to see while passing vineyards which are dedicated to cultivating more than grapes. Handley Cellars Vineyards, always a Barndiva Family Favorite, is particularly stunning. And check out a recent @barndivahealdsburg post about Navarro’s remarkable annual approach to sheep season, captured during a joyful visit with the incomparable Sophia Bates.

Finally, We’d be remiss in closing this newsletter failing to mention how pleased we were with the turn-out for our Book & Film Event on Sunday January 22, which launched Studio B in 2023. It exceeded our expectations. Thanks to the help of Copperfields Bookstore the authors sold a great many books and fully half the sold- out audience stayed for the end of Elizabeth Falkner’s documentary “Sorry We’re Closed” which resumed after a probing, and frank Q & A about the state of the restaurant industry. A difficult conversation at times, it was a necessary one for anyone who loves dining out and is having trouble getting their heads around why and how it has become so expensive. We were proud to have helped facilitate it. Hopefully, there will be more to come like this for Studio B!

Our thanks to Heather Irwin and the Press Democrat ( @pressdemo, @biteclubbeats) for advance publicity for the event; to @shoplocalhealdsburg, @heatherfreyer, @jillkd, and our good friend @alexisconis for their IG follow ups - which we are admittedly dreadful at - so many reached out to say they were sorry to have missed the event but wanted to attend the next one!

And of course Big Love to our incredibly talented divas - Tanya Holland (@mstanyaholland, #californiasoulcookbook) who started the ball rolling, Jennifer Reichardt (@duckdaughterjj, #thewholeduckcookbook), Elizabeth Falkner (@cheffalkner, #sorrywereclosed) and the inimitable Duskie Estes, who guided the Q & A so deftly. (@farmtopantry).