Kyle and Katina Connaughton at SoNoMa

From Healdsburg to Kyoto: SingleThread Comes Full Circle

10 Minute read

07 Apr 2026

David Morris

Journalist

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At SoNoMa in Kyoto, Kyle and Katina Connaughton bring the philosophy behind SingleThread into a more focused, hyper-seasonal expression shaped by place.

At the height of cherry blossom season in Kyoto, when the city feels suspended between peak beauty and quiet impermanence, Kyle and Katina Connaughton have opened SoNoMa, an intimate 12-seat counter inside Capella Kyoto in the historic Miyagawa-cho district. Their first project outside the United States arrives not as a declaration of expansion, but as something quieter and more personal. For Kyle, who spent formative years cooking in Japan, the restaurant marks a return to the place that shaped his earliest understanding of seasonality, craft, and hospitality.

“This was something that really found us,” he says.

Set just steps from one of Kyoto’s traditional geisha districts, SoNoMa unfolds as a highly controlled, deeply considered experience. Guests sit at a counter where each course is composed in front of them, the room calibrated to feel both minimal and immersive. The scale is intentional and the experience is precise. Where SingleThread operates with dozens of chefs and a broad agricultural engine behind it, the Connaughtons have chosen focus here, creating something more immediate and more exposed.

That immediacy begins on the plate. The opening menu reads as a dialogue between Kyoto and Sonoma, anchored in hyper-seasonal ingredients sourced from the Kansai region alongside select products from Northern California. Early courses center on sansai, the wild mountain vegetables that signal the arrival of spring, followed by takenoko, bamboo shoots harvested daily from a nearby grove and paired with soft tofu, citrus, and a measured pour of SingleThread’s olive oil. A dish of Nanatani duck, a prized local breed, is grilled over charcoal and served with spring cabbage and kumquat, while dessert turns toward the foothills of Ohara, where honey, milk, and grain come together in a quiet reflection of the surrounding ecosystem.

The food is precise, but it is also deliberately rooted in place. Dishes are developed in Kyoto rather than transported from California, built around local producers and artisans. Ingredients appear and disappear quickly, and the window to capture them is narrow.

Where It All Begins

To understand how SoNoMa operates, it helps to look back to Healdsburg, where the Connaughtons built SingleThread around a fundamentally different rhythm. There, the restaurant is anchored by its farm, where produce is grown specifically for the kitchen. Each day begins with requests from the chefs, followed by harvest, delivery, and service, creating a system in which the menu responds directly to what is available.

“We have ways to say hello and goodbye to things,” Connaughton says, describing how ingredients move through their lifecycle, from first emergence to peak abundance to disappearance. Roughly 70 percent of the restaurant’s produce comes from the farm, a figure the Connaughtons have deliberately maintained, not as a marker of self-sufficiency, but as a commitment to the broader agricultural community. The remaining ingredients come from nearby growers, reinforcing a system built on interdependence rather than isolation.

More importantly, the relationship between farm and kitchen is not symbolic. It is structural. “The menu is essentially a one-for-one result of what is actually happening agriculturally,” Connaughton says. That reality introduces constraints that, in turn, drive creativity. A crop grown to yield squash blossoms must also account for the squash itself, and dishes are designed not around a single perfect moment, but around the full arc of an ingredient. For Katina, who leads the farm, the work is less about adhering to labels than responding to the land itself. “We let the land dictate its needs to us,” she says, emphasizing a philosophy grounded in observation rather than prescription.

That same logic carries through to SoNoMa, but in a more concentrated form. Where SingleThread operates with a large team and a carefully orchestrated agricultural timeline, Kyoto introduces a different kind of seasonality that is faster, more volatile, and often less predictable. Ingredients arrive and disappear within days, and micro-seasons compress the window for decision-making, requiring a level of immediacy that even the farm in Healdsburg does not demand.

In response, the Connaughtons have distilled their approach. The restaurant is smaller, the menu tighter, and the dishes are developed entirely in Kyoto, using local ingredients and relationships rather than being transported from California. Techniques and ideas remain consistent, but their expression is recalibrated to place, bringing their philosophy into sharper focus. “It’s about taking what we do and looking at it through the lens of Kyoto,” Connaughton says.

The result is a cuisine that feels both familiar and newly precise, more intricate in execution, yet more restrained in form. Beyond the plate, SoNoMa reflects a deeper alignment with Japanese notions of time and experience. Connaughton often references ichigo ichie, the idea that each encounter is unique and unrepeatable, and mono no aware, an awareness of impermanence, concepts that shape how guests move through the meal.

The pacing of the experience creates space to notice the texture of a ceramic bowl, the arrangement of seasonal flowers, and the subtle shifts in flavor from one course to the next. Like the tea ceremony, which Connaughton cites as inspiration, the focus is not on a single element, but on the accumulation of small, deliberate details. “It’s not just about what’s on the plate,” he says. “It’s about how people feel in that moment.”

That philosophy extends beyond the restaurant itself. At both SoNoMa and SingleThread, hospitality is conceived as something larger than the dining room, an effort to connect guests more deeply to the place they are in, whether that means guiding them through Kyoto’s quieter neighborhoods or introducing them to the growers and producers in Sonoma.

Extending the Experience

In Healdsburg, the Connaughtons are continuing to expand that ecosystem with a new 11-room inn designed to encourage longer, more immersive stays. Like the farm and restaurant, it is part of a broader effort to slow guests down and create space for deeper engagement.

Seen in that context, SoNoMa is not a departure from SingleThread, but a continuation of its core idea. If the restaurant in California is shaped by the steady rhythms of the farm, the one in Kyoto is shaped by something more immediate: the fleeting nature of seasonality, the compression of time, and the heightened awareness of place.

Standing in the garden in Healdsburg, tasting peas that are startlingly sweet or smelling roses that carry a depth rarely found in cultivated varieties, the connection becomes clear. Flavor, as Connaughton often notes, is inseparable from how something is grown, from the soil, the inputs, and the care behind it. The same could be said of the restaurants themselves. What began in Japan, evolved in California, and has now returned to Kyoto is not a concept or a cuisine, but a way of seeing that continues to refine itself with each new season. Like the cherry blossoms that frame its opening, it is defined as much by its timing as by its beauty.

The Chef

Chef Kyle Connaughton has earned three Michelin stars and a string of other awards for the farm-to-table dining experience he and his wife Katina offer at the SingleThread restaurant, inn, and farm in Sonoma County, California.
Born and raised in the state, he spent years working in elite restaurants in LA, Japan, and the UK before coming back home to realize the dream he and his wife had been nurturing for years: the creation of SingleThread.

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