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!

A Season to Sparkle

Barndiva and Stay Healdsburg’s Sparkling Soirée, November 17

It was a big community driven week-end for us, and boy did we need the hit of friendly faces and the sense of the joy that can be found in creative accomplishment. On Saturday evening we helped stage the True West Film Center’s annual fund raiser honoring actor Steve Zahn which raised over $200,000. True West will bring much needed eclectic film-going back to Healdsburg, as well as launch educational programs for students, when it opens 2025.

On Sunday we put on our fancy duds and hosted Barndiva’s first ever Sparkling Soirée with Stay Healdsburg to officially launch Healdsburg’s ‘Season to Sparkle.’ We didn’t know what to expect until 200 Healdsburg habitués arrived on a drizzly cold evening ready to party, then boy did we ever - Sparkling Soirée was so much fun we are considering making it annual. When Stay Healdsburg’s Jessica Bohon first approached us a few months back about co-hosting the kick off-party for the City’s run up to the Holidays, she was looking for the secret sauce that makes our parties, especially spring’s Pink Party and summer’s Fête Blanc so popular. She was asking the right question. But what indeed goes into making a party great?

In truth we are almost too blessed with where we live when it comes to making wine the only reason you venture out to a public event. Sure, If you are visiting Healdsburg the opportunity to meet a winemaker or taste something out of the ordinary from a purveyor off the beaten track is catnip. But we’ve lived in Sonoma and Mendocino County for 40 years. Even if you are relatively new to wine country chances are someone in your immediate family or good friend makes great wine.

A plethora of factors go into hosting comprehensive collaborative experiences, especially when it comes to wine. Different terroirs, different hands, including those of the weather gods.

Rule #1 if wine is at the heart of your event: only invite winemakers and cellar masters who know what they are talking about, and truly love what they make and sell. Our ‘Sommelier For The People’ Emily Carlson is pukka on this, with personal relationships to winemakers she admires, and a curious mind (nose and palate) for new discoveries. Emily is relentless in her focus on the where and how the grapes are farmed, who is farming them. For Sparkling Soirée she was keen to showcase a smaller group than our bigger outdoor collaborative wine events. She wanted to guide guests through unique tastings that would leave them more discerning to what makes a great bubbly as we head into the season where, if our luck holds, we will be drinking quite a few of them.

We were thrilled to welcome our great friend Alexis Iaconis (above left) of @brickandmortarwines and sparkling icon Joy Sterling (above right) of @ironhorsevyds who were joined by an exciting group on Sunday evening which included @almafriawines; @amistavineyards; @bansheewinesguys; @breathlesswines; @cartographwines; @comstockwines; @crusewine; @gloriaferrerwinery; @kokomowinery; @lambertbridge; @orsifamilyvineyards; @drinkseppi; @trailmarkerwineco; and for a taste of Anderson Valley @handleycellars; @roedererestate; @scharffenbergercellers.

Rule #2 Take your inspiration for the look and feel of the party from the season - whatever the ‘reason’ or focus of the event, you can’t go wrong because It’s in our DNA to feel the seasons changing and want to follow where the weather is heading, even if we do so unconsciously. November is about seeking warmth, and scratching the itch of anticipation. The year is almost over and whether it was good or dreadful you can find myriad of reasons to raise a glass to it’s ending. This year, coming out of contentious election season, virtually everyone who stepped into Barndiva on Sunday was in the mood to find joyful relief in seeing old friends, open to the possibility of making new ones. The energy was just so much fun on Sunday night. Remember fun?

Rule #3: give your guests a reason to engage. For us this is where party games or ‘experiences’ come in that take you a step deeper into what you’ve come to celebrate. We love our scent boxes for wine events - they are mysterious and sensual and essential when it comes to expanding your knowledge of bouquet, but for Sparkle we added a Riddling Rack Game - no riddling, no method champenoise, no great bubbly people! (exception would be the wonderful pet nat we tasted). Lily Zarat, a lead server in Studio B who is studying wine walked anyone game through the technique, (its all in the wrist), then started the stop watch. How fast can it take to turn 12 sparkling wine bottles 45 degrees to the right? (a professional Riddler can turn 30,000 bottles in a day). The winning time was 2.9 seconds.

Rule #4: Whatever the season you are mining for inspiration, great parties give people a reason to dress up, down, sideways. The point being, If enough people show up wearing something they feel good in, the space around them starts to resonate with shared energy. Our Pink Party is conspicuously pink, Fête Blanc trends a subdued elegance. Sparkle turned out to be the most enjoyable dress up party of the year. It didn’t matter whether you dragged a cape from the back of the closet ( quite a few of those) went out to find the perfect item to set the upcoming season ablaze (many more), or made your ensemble as our Conversations Worth Having partner Amber McInnis did (above right). Everywhere you looked Sunday glimmered with finery in the candlelight. ( Hotel Healdsburg’s Circe Sher, above left, got the memo)

#5 Great parties need great Florals displays, subtle fresh scents. While this is a no brainer easy for us in springtime, summer, and early fall when we can party in the gardens surrounding ourselves with what we grow in Philo or sourcing from our many friends in AV and around Sonoma County, its chilly out now, and pretty bare in all our gardens. For Sparkle we filled the barn with white orchids and mums, pale ecru roses, black pussy willows, and a range of silvery green branches -huckleberry, arberry, abelia,-our farm manager and special events florist Misha Vega foraged from the farm.

Rule #6: Great parties need perfect lighting, especially if you are inside where sunlight and shadow cannot do their magic. Years ago I did an install for Barndiva after a stupendous Perrier Jouët champagne event that left us with two dozen of the Maison’s famous Japanese anemone bottles designed by art nouveau pioneer Emile Galle in 1902 for their Belle Époque Curvée I could not bear to recycle. My trusty PA K2 scrolled the names of infamous champagne drinkers (men and women) I would have liked to raise a glass with once upon a time, or still do. For Sparkle Party 2024 I pulled them out of the world so high and we danced a parade of them, with thin black candles interspersed with potted white orchids, along the bar. Guessing who the names referred to was part of the fun. (who wouldn’t want to raise a glass with Kiki de Montparnasse.. Orsen Wells? Lukka Feldman?)

#7: Music is mood. We were of two minds for Sparkling, with two buildings in play, each with tastings. Two rooms to decorate as well. Barndiva’s great friend Pamela Joyce, herself an incredible singer, recommended Jeanette Isenberg @jeanette@acoustic-resonance.com to indulge our fancy for a Bridgerton inspired violin and cello welcome to Sparkle in Barndiva, which we wanted to feel more elegant. But over in the studio we pulled out a funky NYE playlist Isabel Hales put together back in 2014, which played alongside her silent NYE compilation reel of famous film parties pre 1940’s. A looser vibe as we knew the crowd would eventually drift over there to settle, which is exactly what happened toward the end of the evening. We also loaded the Studio up with even more candles than we have for our regular dinner service, hung our cradle to cradle decorations which will stay up through the holidays, and let it rip.

(Above, center, Jessica Bohon, the driving force behind Stay Healdsburg, our co-hosts for The Sparkling Soirée, with Healdsburg Mayor David Hagele).

A quick word about food. It circumvents our rulebook because it is always present at Barndiva, first and foremost. But for large parties that focus on wine, food should not be the star, its a support player. We are known for elegantly plated Hors d’oeuvres that are delicate, delicious, with flavors that don’t linger on the palate.

Food should never compete with what you are tasting in the glass; it’s also good if what you serve has proteins that absorb alcohol. We are extremely proud of the dishes coming out of Chef David Morales kitchen this year. For Soirée we passed our infamous goat cheese croquettes with lavender honey, the Studio’s popular Crispy Chicken with green chermoula tahini dressing, Ora King Salmon with egg yolk jam, and Black truffle Grilled Cheese squares with American or gruyère on sliced brioche. Last, but never least especially at the Holidays we sent out boards with our Potato Latkes with sour cream and Chef Erik Anderson’s wonderful Piper Caviar.

And so it flowed. Winemakers poured, the Barndiva kitchen sent out platters of delicious bites, we sipped and sashayed, sparkled, hugged and laughed. All in all, it was a much needed, simply wonderful evening. When all is said and done perhaps the most important ‘rule’ for throwing a great party is to invite everyone to participate. Life is a temporary adventure that involves all our senses. There is always reason- and a profound need- to celebrate that!

Our thanks to all the friends, neighbors, and visitors to our fair town who showed up for The Sparkling Soirée, with a special shout out to our winemaking friends who participated.

The buck, and pretty much everything else for a party like Sparkling Soirée, stops here. On the far left, Susan Bischoff, Barndiva’s event director; next to her Emily Carlson, our fiercely talented wine director. On the far right Scott Beattie, our Beverage Director in character as Dom Perignon, the French Benedictine monk often credited with ‘inventing’ Champagne. He did not- the first sparkling wine thought to have been intentionally made was in England. He did, however, apparently say “come quickly, I am tasting the stars” the first time he tasted sparkling wine. We agree.

We hope to see you over the holidays - throw a cocktail party with friends in the Barn, book dinner in the Studio, or just slide in for a drink and enjoy our cradle to cradle Christmas decorations. And don’t forget: Sunday Dec 8 the entire property will be open for a Makers Market! Your wonderful no crap Christmas or C2C Chanukah starts here this year!

All Photos: Chad Surmick, All Copy, Barndiva 2024

Barndiva + Near Future

Barndiva Gardens, Sunday August 11, 2024

Ah the youth of it all: four gorgeous Ask Me What I’m Wearing models, above, rocking it in great thrifting outfits. We also saw original crocheted creations, lots of classic tees and pretty summer frocks, Stella McCartney, and head to toe prima alpaca from a cradle to cradle company a stone’s throw from where we all gathered on Sunday. When we asked everyone to ‘dress in your happy’ for our third Conversations Worth Having, The Future of Fashion, we had no idea what to expect. How delightful that style and comfort merged into an elegant insouciance -  If a chorus of 'I feel pretty" had spontaneously started up in the gardens, no one would have been surprised.

Clothing is performative on so many levels, but for anyone who remembers early childhood dress-up it can be a simple reflection of joy, and that's what most of us felt on Sunday. Clothes are our second skin, after all. The interest in this event would seem to indicate that many of us are curious how to continue to feel at home in that skin, without doing harm to the planet through our clothing choices.

Conversations Worth Having is the brain child of four friends who have deep ties to this community: Jil Hales, Dawnelise Rosen, Susan Preston and Amber McInnis. It is a labor of love for the four of us, and it is with love we would like to thank Near Future Summit’s brilliant Zem Joaquin for choosing and moderating our panel of game changing speakers. We’d also like to thank three artists who generously shared their talents and time: Maya Eshom, who brought her fascinating Textiles on Fire to the garden; Naomi Mcleod, who carved the large rubber stamp for our ‘Animal, Vegetable, Oil’ game, (without which our clothesline would have looked like a slightly psychotic garage sale), and Manok Cohen, who ‘dressed’ our mannequin in antique handkerchiefs (remember those?). And thank you to prima alpaca designer Sandra Jordan for bringing multiple samples from her showroom on Eastside Road to give away. Jennifer & Jeanne Marie - cheers for donating an entire case of your Rue de Réve Rose Apéritif for our cocktail.

And most of all, Thank You, gorgeously turned out community! So many beautiful mothers and daughters! Not all our ‘green room’ images made it into this blog but please contact us if you posed for Chad - we will send you photographs!

Barndiva weddings are the norm in the gardens this time of year; we have built our business around and love hosting celebrations of all kinds. But gatherings like Conversation Worth Having strengthen our mojo in a most crucial way because they build community. Future of Fashion has been quite a journey, so it was especially gratifying to see that all the time and research we spent wrapping our heads around how best to engage with that community played out so beautifully on Sunday. There is a nominal ticket price for CWH, but no one is ever turned away.

Above: Zem Joaquin with Marci Zaroff of EcoFashion Corp; Lewis Perkins of The Apparel Impact Institute; Garrett Gerson of Varient3D, and Liam Berryman of Nelumbo. 

Lewis Perkins, above right, is the president and CEO of the Apparel Impact Institute whose mission is to verify, fund and scale new fashion programs that can help decrease carbon emissions.

Marci Zaroff, above left, has been a leader in supporting regenerative farming practices in the production of clothing with a lazer focus on understanding the impacts of chemically grown cotton. Though less than 3% of the world’s agriculture is cotton, over 20% of the world’s harmful carcinogenic chemicals are used by the cotton industry producting them. Her numerous organic, toxic-free fabric and clothing companies produce beautiful, durable, zero waste fashion. Above, she is previewing a Tee Shirt she developed in creative partnership with Billie Ellish for Target. Next up for Marci is seeking funding to turn pineapple waste from Costa Rico into fabric.

Garrett Gerson, center, is founder of LOOP, a flat bed knitting softwear-driven production system that is hyper-local, zero-waste, and customizable, making it a financially viable option for new designer start-ups. Among his many projects with LOOP are 100% post waste trainers which I can attest - as I was wearing a pair - are beyond comfortable. Next up for Garrett is exploring how to use LOOP fabrics on furniture, with the hope of bringing zero waste furniture production currently off-shored back to the US.

Liam Berryman, above right, is Founder of Nelumbo, a locally based start up that relies on a platform technology that applies morphology, shape, and structure to surfaces. Nelumbo’s use of materials science - Metamaterials - uses only ‘clean ingredients’ to design ‘coatings’ for a variety of different materials - metals, textiles, fabrics. This micro nano texture surface acts as water or oil repellency, has anti microbial properties, and contains NO PFAS or ‘forever chemicals, which shed into the environment and onto anyone wearing clothing that has been sprayed with them.

The range of ideas and projects our panel shared were by turns mystifying, exciting, technologically complex. In thanking Marci, Lewis, Garrett and Liam on linkedin and IG for making the journey to Healdsburg, Zem wrote: “While there is still clearly never-ending work to be done in materials, textiles, and the manufacturing industries, the four bad asses from last night’s illuminating discussion give us hope.”

Continue the conversation by following them: @nearfuturesummit; @ecofashion.corp; @varient3D; @nelumbo.us; @apparelimpactinstitute. We also highly recommend @ellenmacarthurfoundation.

CWH is about engaging with information in ways that make them memorable and hopefully habit changing. We presented two interactive installations for Future of Fashion that focused on touch and smell for their impact. The Animal, Vegetable, Oil game was about testing one’s fabric knowledge through touch. We know from having emptied out the furtherest reaches of our closets for this ‘game’ that all our wardrobes hit the oil bleeper more often than we had thought possible. Which means if we can’t pass those items on someday they are destined to end up in landfill or incinerated, contributing to all our Co2 nightmares. This game was to address how obtuse labels can be, as well as misleading. Even if accurate, the fabric content label will say nothing about the labor used to make an item of clothing or the use of resources - think water - needed in its fabrication. And don’t get us started on synthetic color, or PFAS’s sprayed on to finish any item that needs to combat weather or water.

Our other interactive experience by local artist Maya Eshom was called “textiles on fire.” What a gift this woman is to this community! Maya is fabric obsessed - but the object of her interest is not making or wearing clothing but setting it on fire, one small piece of it at a time. In learning how different materials smell when they are incinerated, we were curious if it might affect the way we think about what we put on our bodies so close to our skin. We know….we don’t shop with our noses any more than we make clothing decisions based solely on touch but both installations brought physical sensation and memory into play. What do you base your clothing purchase decisions upon?

Above, left: On the bar with Buck a mannequin ‘Dressed’ by local artist Manok Cohen in handkerchiefs from the 40’s, 50’s, 60’s found shortly after the death of a beloved aunt years ago, neatly folded into a small satin covered box ready to be lifted out one by one and carried with her into the world. Handkerchiefs have a long cultural history of use by men and women. Knights tied their lady’s handkerchief on their helmets before jousting or going into battle, ladies used them to assess romantic intent, for hundreds of years they served humankind mopping up sweat, staunching blood, absorbing tears. Whether elegantly embroidered or simply made they were a useful, reusable part of everyday life. Within one decade they were gone.

The mannequin and the feather and fedora hat display on the bar made the same nostalgic point: styles change, as they should, but our currant race to the bottom in producing clothing and fashion accessories cheaply, with no thought to how their production may affect the health of the planet, doesn’t reflect craft, durability, or personal style the way it once did.

Above, right : the Susan Preston painting ‘Woman as Verb,’ graced the wild grasses behind the panel.

Dawnelise Rosen, Jil Hales, Amber Mcinnis, and Susan Preston thanking the panel, contributing artists, and last but never least, the community who came our for CWH3.

All Images in this Eat the View, Chad Surmick

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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