SingleThread’s £50 book distills the art of hospitality

By Grace Kim

SingleThread, the three-star Michelin restaurant in California’s Sonoma Wine Country, is the subject of a multi-volume book published by DK Alpha and priced at £50. The volume covers the restaurant’s kaiseki dining, 24-acre farm, five-room inn, relationship with nearby ranchers, ikebana instruction, kitchen-garden diagrams and recipes.

The title names a restaurant, but the publication treats dining as part of a wider system. Kaiseki is a Japanese dining format in which multiple courses combine into one continuous experience, and SingleThread’s proprietors, Kyle and Katina Connaughton, call themselves “storytellers.” The book follows that idea by placing the meal alongside the places, people and practices that support it.

SingleThread operates as more than a dining room. It includes a 24-acre farm and a five-room inn, and it works closely with nearby ranchers who rear the meat the restaurant uses. Those connections explain why the book moves beyond recipes. It documents a chain running from cultivation and animal rearing to the service of a ten-course meal, with hospitality carried into the inn.

The contents make that breadth explicit. The publication includes the restaurant’s wisdom and history, instructions for ikebana (Japanese flower arranging), planting diagrams for the kitchen garden and a number of recipes. One entire section concentrates on the negi onion. That detail signals the volume’s granular scale: the everyday ingredient receives attention within the same framework as the restaurant’s larger methods.

The volume also makes substantial demands on a reader. It assumes plenty of time and inclination, rather than serving as a quick reference for midweek cooking. Its range rewards repeated attention, much as SingleThread’s courses form a single long sequence. The difference is that readers can decide when to open it, which section to follow and how long to stay with a subject.

Access is the clearest advantage. A visit can require joining a waiting list that runs for months, and a ten-course meal costs a minimum of £500. The review says the experience can feel “like being held hostage.” The book gives readers unlikely to travel to Sonoma soon a less demanding point of entry into the restaurant’s thinking.

The photography strengthens that case. The review describes the images as stunning, and they let readers move between the restaurant, farm, garden and inn without booking a table or a room. Their visual continuity matters because the publication presents hospitality and farming as linked activities. A reader can encounter the garden and the meal within the same volume, making the restaurant’s ingredients and methods part of the explanation rather than mere background.

What does the book change for readers?

The practical change is control over pace. A diner encounters courses as part of a designed progression; a reader can dip in and out at leisure at home, following one section or staying with the negi onion for as long as they wish. The book does not reproduce the £500 meal, nor does it need to. It offers a way to understand the decisions behind that meal and revisit them outside the pressure of the dining room.

That distinction also clarifies the publication’s scope. Its sections range across hospitality, farming, flower arranging and cooking rather than concentrating on recipes or travel. It uses those forms of knowledge to explain how SingleThread operates as one connected enterprise. The proprietors’ description of themselves as “storytellers” becomes a structural principle rather than a marketing label: the book carries the restaurant’s narrative through several forms of knowledge.

The strongest case for the volume is access for readers who cannot visit soon. The photography supplies visual appeal, while the diagrams and instructions supply practical detail. Readers can study the garden, the flower arranging and the handling of a single ingredient without waiting months for a table. What they cannot get from the pages is the pacing and immediacy of the meal, which makes the book useful rather than equivalent.

The practical test is whether the linked lessons on farm, garden, flower and food change how readers understand hospitality. If they do, the volume has done more than preserve a restaurant’s reputation: it has made the operating model inspectable at home. SingleThread, DK Alpha, £50 (hardcover).