It’s our anniversary so I booked us for dinner up at SingleThread up in Healdsburg. This is our third time (link to first time and second time) dining here and we had such an amazing experience when he ate last year. We had first dined here in February 2019 for the winter menu a few months after they first earned their 3rd Michelin star. Last year we dined here in May for the spring menu and this time we were here for the summer menu (which means we’ll have to come back some time to try the fall menu). The restaurant was already almost completely full but the time we were seated for our relatively early 5:15pm reservation.
There are 3 wine pairing options as well as an NA pairing. The regular pairing is $300, the reserve pairing was $500, and their yolo/legendary pairing was $1500 which, for better or worse, seems to be the price point for extravagant option at some restaurants (e.g. Addison in San Diego, The Grand Restaurant in Paris, etc.). We opted for one regular pairing and one reserve pairing so we could try a variety of wines.
First course was the usual array of small dishes presented on a woodsy setting and as we were dining a couple additional dishes were delivered including the caviar and potato dish as well as an oyster dish. All in all, there were a dozen bites for us, many included fish/seafood, a few were vegetable oriented, as well as the caviar and the wagyu. With so many bites, it became just a bit of a blur. They did clear dishes at least a couple times as we were eating this first course which we were a bit mixed about. On one hand, you don’t want to see a pille of dirty dishes as you’ve been eating, but having someone hovering about to pop in to clear dishes could be mildly intrusive (in a funny way, it made me think about when we eat dim sum and we have so many dished incoming that they have to keep on top of clearing).
I won’t go into every single dish, but some of the highlights included all of the tomatoes that had come from the farm that we toured earlier this morning, the little salad with the duck liver and apricots, the cucumber palate cleanser which was a play on sunomono (and was so layered with flavors that it practically ruins regular real sunomono for me…), and the wagyus. I had ordered one wagyu upgrade which gave us one A5 wagyu from miyazaki prefecture (i.e. the typical prefecture for A5 available in the U.S. unless you find some place like Niku Steakhouse that has a variety of wagyus) and the other being a U.S. wagyu hybrid. The U.S. wagyu had a more typical U.S. corn fed steaky flavor too it which is delicious and fatty in it’s own way and the A5 wagyu was more subtle with the fat being better integrated into the meat. Again, both were quite delicious in their own distinct ways.
For our second dessert, we had asked to go up the rooftop like we did last time. However, we didn’t realize that it had cooled off so much and it was quite cold. The area where they seated us had a non-functioning heater, but they did have some comfy blankets for us. They dropped off the dish of various desserts, but we didn’t really get much attention (we would have been happy to have had some after dinner drinks), but they just brought the bill by and made sure to remind us that we hadn’t tipped on our Tock reservation deposit and made sure to underline that also in the bill. It just felt like a relatively cold, abrupt end to our meal.
Overall service was competent and generally prompt. The somm was the most engaging who did take a reasonable amount of time to give some backgrounds on each of the wines. But somehow overall, service mostly just seemed perfunctory. I don’t know if it was them (restaurant was already in full swing by the time we arrived) or it was just us and our expectations (we didn’t recall the service being much better last year, so perhaps we just had extra high expectations after last year’s dinner here). The wines were decent and interesting with a few highlights, but it was a bit hit or miss whether or not we preferred the reserve wine or the regular wine (e.g. we preferred the Krug champagne and the Puligny-Montrachet from the reserve pairing, but preferred the Rothenpfad riesling and the Loupiac (over the D’Yquem) from the regular pairing). For the record, they use Zalto for all of their stemware.
Overall, we had a very enjoyable time, although it fell just short of some of the most magical dining experiences we’ve had (e.g. Addison and SingleThread in 2023, Saison in 2022, Quince in 2021). There was plenty enough to enjoy here to come back, but perhaps with slightly less lofty expectations next time.
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