The Story of Today: How SingleThread’s Daily Menu Is Shaping the Future of Food

At SingleThread, the three-Michelin-starred restaurant nestled in the heart of Sonoma County, Chef Kyle Connaughton is doing more than crafting exquisite tasting menus—he’s designing an ecosystem. Part farmer, part futurist, and part culinary anthropologist, Connaughton isn’t just thinking about what’s on the plate. He’s thinking about how it got there, who touched it, what it took to grow or catch, and what story it tells when it’s served.

His approach to fine dining isn’t performative. It’s systemic.

That system begins with the soil—specifically, the no-till, biodiverse land co-managed by his wife and collaborator Katina Connaughton. But it stretches far beyond the farm’s 24 acres. It extends to traceable seafood sourcing in Japan, blockchain technology, and guest experiences designed to leave diners with a deeper understanding of where their food comes from.

The latest evolution of that mission is ThroughLine, a traveling, cinematic dining experience that pairs an omakase-style tasting menu with short documentary films. “It’s all about connecting our guests to our food systems,” Connaughton says. “We want them to understand the people, partnerships, and practices behind what they’re eating.”

ThroughLine is both a culmination and a beginning. It reflects Connaughton’s ongoing drive to build transparency into the fine dining experience—not to moralize, but to clarify. Not to tell diners what to think, but to show them what’s possible when hospitality, sourcing, and storytelling are woven into one ecosystem.

Soil First

When Kyle and Katina Connaughton talk about sustainability, they don’t lead with slogans or certifications—they lead with soil. At the core of SingleThread’s identity is that 24-acre farm where Katina oversees a no-till, biodiverse operation focused on habitat preservation, pollinator health, and regenerative practices. “We’re farming on a hand scale,” Kyle says. “It’s small, it’s intensive, and it’s deeply intentional.”

This isn’t sustainability as a buzzword. It’s sustainability as lived practice. The farm sits amid a sea of monoculture vineyards, making biodiversity an act of quiet resistance. Crops are selected for both flavor and ecological value. Cover crops are used to build soil health. Flowering plants are left to attract pollinators. It’s less about yield and more about balance.

And while Connaughton acknowledges that their model isn’t scalable for feeding billions, he sees it as a proof of concept—an approach that emphasizes input and output, responsibility and relationship. “Nothing’s made from nothing,” he says. “So we think carefully about every decision—what we take, what we give back.”

For SingleThread, sustainability also means human sustainability: mentorship, longevity, and creating an environment where cooks can grow and thrive. Every month, the team awards a Kaizen Trophy—named for the Japanese philosophy of continuous improvement—to the staff member who best embodies progress and purposeful change. It’s not just about growing vegetables. It’s about growing people, too.

Redefining Sourcing

For Connaughton, sustainability isn’t synonymous with locality. “Locality is not the only conversation,” he says. “What matters more is responsibility.” That mindset guides his sourcing strategy, which balances hyper-local ingredients from the farm with direct imports from Japan—particularly seafood.

It might seem contradictory at first. How can a restaurant so rooted in its own soil justify flying in fish from halfway across the world? The answer lies in traceability. Connaughton has spent years developing direct relationships with Japanese fisheries, skipping distributors entirely and WhatsApping with brokers at the Toyosu Market. He knows the exact provenance of every item he brings in—sometimes down to the name of the fisher.

He’s also helping to shape the future of those fisheries. In partnership with Japan’s Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries, Connaughton is testing new technologies in traceability, blockchain, and shipping. From tamper-evident boxes to deep-freeze methods that reduce the need for air transport, these practices aren’t just experimental—they’re intended to scale.

“The goal,” he explains, “isn’t to just do better at SingleThread. It’s to help move the needle globally—so that the sushi bar in Iowa has access to better practices and more responsible products.” It’s the culinary version of the Devil Wears Prada effect: what begins in haute cuisine trickles down to the mainstream, influencing how entire food systems operate.

At SingleThread, sourcing is treated as both an ethical question and a design challenge. Connaughton sees no contradiction between excellence and impact—only opportunity.

The ThroughLine Project

One of the most ambitious expressions of Connaughton’s philosophy is ThroughLine, a cinematic dining experience that fuses documentary storytelling with a 12-course omakase-inspired menu. Debuted in 2024 as a traveling residency and developed in collaboration with Emmy-nominated director Justin Taylor Smith, ThroughLine immerses diners in the food systems behind each dish—not just through taste, but through film.

Each segment begins with a short documentary, projected behind the chefs as they cook. Guests learn about sea urchin divers rebuilding kelp forests, or artisans crafting dishware by hand. Then, the corresponding dish is served—closing the loop between story and plate.

“The idea is to connect guests more deeply to the people and places behind the food,” says Connaughton. It’s a narrative-driven extension of SingleThread’s existing mission, designed to answer the unspoken questions a dish alone can’t: Who grew this? Who harvested it? What systems made it possible?

More than just a one-off, ThroughLine represents the early stages of a long-term vision—possibly a permanent concept—that blends immersive media and dining to foster transparency, sustainability, and curiosity. As the residency travels from Park City to the Hudson Valley to New York City and beyond, the goal remains the same: to reframe fine dining as a point of connection, not just consumption.

A Living Menu

At SingleThread, the menu is never static—it is a daily meditation on seasonality, scarcity, and ingenuity. Connaughton calls it “the story of today.” There are no signature dishes, no greatest hits. If a turnip is harvested that morning, it may appear on the menu that night—perhaps as a delicate purée, perhaps as a raw sliver dressed in citrus. If it isn’t harvested, it won’t.

This fluidity is both creative constraint and catalyst. Each dish is built in real time, often starting as a small bite—a green strawberry just thinned from the vine, or a sprig of flowering herb—and evolving into a composed plate as the ingredient becomes more abundant. “Everything has a curve,” says Connaughton. “We meet it at the start, ride it through its peak, and then say goodbye.”

This daily improvisation is only possible thanks to the seamless dialogue between farm and kitchen. Every week, chefs and farmers walk the fields together, talking not just about what’s growing, but how it’s growing. That shared language translates directly onto the plate—and into a guest experience rooted in immediacy and truth.

A Lab for the Future

SingleThread isn’t just a restaurant—it’s a prototype. A closed-loop experiment. A living case study in how farming, sourcing, mentorship, and storytelling might work in harmony to create a more responsible food system. Every walk through the farm, every menu change, every sourcing choice is a chance to refine the system, not just the dish.

Connaughton doesn’t pretend that SingleThread’s model can be replicated at scale. But the insights generated here—on traceability, on soil health, on guest education—are designed to ripple outward. If a three-Michelin-starred restaurant can pilot a blockchain seafood chain, maybe a small-town sushi bar can follow. If a tomato grown with pollinator-first farming is celebrated on the plate, maybe the farming model behind it can scale.

“We’re not saying, ‘Do what we do,’” Connaughton says. “We’re just trying to show what’s possible.”

In that way, SingleThread functions less like a temple and more like a lab—proving that fine dining can also be responsible dining, and that the story of today might just shape the food systems of tomorrow.