Mid-Summer delights

Mid-August and while we are well aware the living ain’t always easy for much of the world, truth be told our cocktails, salads, cold soups and fruity desserts are exploding with summer’s juices and gorgeous life affirming color in our little corner of the world. Dining in the gardens is always wonderful to see - especially for families with children and couples with dogs.

Early in the evening more than half our guests still opt for Studio dining - cool tunes, air con, flooded with farm florals - but as the sun drops the best place in Barndivaland for a drink and a shared snack is on one of of the couches in the garden next to the edible flower beds we grow for the bar program, for scent, and guest delight.

We are a casual fine dining restaurant with the emphasis on fine dining. This means we truly prefer guests reserve for dinner so we come to every service on point. We welcome walk-ins for dinner - you just risk a wait without a reservation. The bar fills up nightly - and have also designated two Jordy Morgan sculptural hi-tops for drinkers. Even when the dining room is rocking we can manage shared plates - Our house made white bean hummus with garden crudites and a fresh green herby citrus oil, mounds of onion baji crunchy with salt and served with a coriander and mint chutney, and our notorious goat cheese croquettes- a barndiva favorite since the day we opened can always be ordered alongside a cocktail or a glass of wine.

The whole point of our move back to the Studio was to be able to accommodate this style of dining, inside and out; being able to offer dinner parties to larger groups; playing our B&W silent films on the barn wall, sharing our playlists, lighting the candles. Celebrating every season in our inimitable style and- for you as well as for us - just having a bit of fun enjoying a night out in Healdsburg.

By the time you read this the farm figs served the past few weeks on the heirloom tomato salad will be gone -they are fragile, and their season short. But tomatoes this year? Not to be believed. And Erik’s and David’s whipped mozzarella salad with fresh basil and crunchy croutons is the perfect carrier for all that summer tomato goodness. Barndiva farm fruits up next: comice and asian pears.

Brief too will be the fresh corn season and we celebrate it with a wonderful Erik Anderson chilled golden corn soup. The bowl arrives with a dollop of glorious Jimmy Nardello pepper jam made with a hint of sherry vinegar. The soup is poured table-side, and you just give it a stir -the better to re-discover the piquant ‘jam’ with every velvety spoonful. This is a dish that truly resonates with the season. It is topped with a tangle of crisped corn silk and a few petals of sweet garden thyme.

As for sweet endings: we’ve known Simon Mendoza since he was a boy. His father, Abel is one of Barndiva’s most valued chefs who has been with us for many years. Abel (and for a time his talented wife) have navigated every stage of our journey, while the kid, it turns out, was watching and if not taking notes, taking note of the parts that intrigued him. Turns out he has the talent and the chops for pastry. Simon is now turning out some of the best sorbets and ice creams in town - which I know is saying a lot. He’s baking as well: we were dreaming of a galette this summer and Voila, Simon has delivered. It’s a peach galette for now, soon to shift into pears and apples as they ripen here at the farm. His sorbets this week: raspberry, mandarin, mango. Ice Cream flavors will come and go with the season, except for vanilla which is sublime. Leave room for desert and celebrate young talent! Eat the view!

New Year New Opportunities for Studio B

Healdsburg is justly famous as a mecca of fine dining these days, and Barndiva is proud to have been a part of that evolution, just as we are truly honored to have been awarded a Michelin Star for a second year. But this community has always been about more than fine dining for us. It is also a motherlode of single owner shops and galleries, makers and creators, neighbors, and friends – all of us surrounded by magnificent, verdant countryside.

If the past few years have taught us anything about keeping this landscape truly healthy so we can all thrive, we need to gather more to talk and listen, the better to protect what we love about this singular community. And who knows, these conversations might eventually have a ripple effect.

So it is that one of our resolutions this New Year is to focus on extended use of Studio Barndiva to foster more ongoing community conversations. First up in the newly branded Studio B is an afternoon celebrating four remarkable women whose food journeys have a great deal to teach us.

Tanya Holland is a new friend of the barn, a restaurateur, magnetic TV & podcast host and cookbook author of bestsellers like “Brown Sugar Kitchen.” She has just released a fabulous new cookbook called “California Soul,” something she has in abundance and is gracious enough to share.

Jennifer Reichardt is the winemaker/owner of Raft Wines always a star at The Pink Party and Fête Blanc – and she also has a new cookbook, “The Whole Duck,” which draws its recipes from her family owned business Liberty Duck – a valued purveyor of Barndiva’s since the day we opened.  

We have admired Elizabeth Falkner since her Citizen Cake days, long before she went on to open four more acclaimed restaurants in San Francisco and New York and became an international presence as a TV personality and consultant. She now adds filmmaker to her impressive resume with the release “Sorry We’re Closed,” a timely film she directed about how the pandemic has adversely affected small restaurants throughout the country.

Healdsburg’s Duskie Estes hardly needs an introduction — the former owner of beloved restaurant Zazu and The Black Pig Meat Co with husband John Stewart, she is an iron chef, a brilliant speaker and mentor to many. Duskie has transformed Healdsburg’s non-profit Farm to Pantry in ways that are having a profound impact across the state on how to address food insecurity by strengthening our faltering food distribution systems.  

That these four women are successful business owners, Top Chefs, Iron Chefs, Food Network Stars, winemakers and authors isn’t beside the point – the take away for us is how they are all using their considerable personal successes to fuel conversations about definitive ways to support farms, restaurants, and organizations that care as much about people as the food they source, serve, and distribute.

In the final days of December, we hosted a sold-out dinner for the late Sally Schmitt’s Six California Kitchens with Sally’s family, friends of our Philo family for many many years. Winemaker Phil Baxter gave a toast that night I have thought about often since. It was after a cooking class with Sally in 1999 that his parents decided to uproot their lives and come live and work in the Anderson Valley. “That single experience, Phil explained, “that connection to the Schmitt family, is the pure reason why I am living in Anderson Valley and doing what I do today.”

We are all looking for pure connections, especially those that provide direction to our lives. We all know they are rare. But as we try and build our businesses around meaningful lives in these most difficult times, trying to feed necessary personal notions of success that will keep us going, it is essential we form more inclusive, expansive definitions of what it means to be part of a “family.”  Cooking and serving food and wine to the public we are ever mindful of farming practices and conscious sourcing; we try to honor connections to our purveyors and our work force. But you, our customers and clients, are the other side of that equation. Taken altogether, in good faith, in an environment where kindness matters, this is the family we have chosen.

We hope you are able to join us on January 22nd in Studio B, and meet these four remarkable women. We will be sipping Alma de Oakland cocktails and Raft wine, nibbling bites Chef Erik Anderson has prepared from California Soul. The authors will be talking about and signing their cookbooks, we’ll hear about and preview a bit of “Sorry We’re Closed,” and Duskie will inspire us about the vital mission of Farm to Pantry and what they have planned for the new year. If you are unable to be with us we encourage you to go out and purchase ‘California Soul’ and ‘The Whole Duck’ cookbooks at your local bookshop, seek out Elizabeth’s Film “Sorry We’re Closed,” and to find and support – with whatever resources you can manage – a non-profit food distribution network where you live.

FOOD NEWS: Chef Erik Anderson’s Winter Prix Fixe Menu

Maine Lobster from our January 4 menu

Photo: Chad Surmick

We are thrilled to present prix fixe menus this winter the better to showcase more of Erik’s prodigious talents. The menus will also enable us– including our chefs – to spend more time with our guests. The prix fixe will reflect exciting seasonal changes every week*, and can be enjoyed by vegetarians from start to sweet finish. Wine pairings are optional – a chance to dig through the cellar for gems and wines we love from lesser known vineyards. This week’s pairing from Barndiva’s (and soon to open Maison Healdsburg Wine Bar) Jade Hufford.

Starting this Janurary there will also be Bar Menus ~ come in for a Scott Beattie cocktail and share something unexpected.

We’d love to see you.