BLOG.Notes from the Field

A conversation with Perry Hoffman, Culinary Director at the Healdsburg Shed—the winner of the 2014 James Beard Award for best Restaurant Design in America.

As a restaurant/bar/fermentation lab/exhibition space, SHED is the heart of Healdsburg’s food and drink culture. It’s a bucolic space with no shortage of delicious options for a present or future meal… this is the California farm-to-table good life we see in magazines turned into reality.

Fans of delicious food who are also concerned about social and environmental responsibility now have help when selecting a place to dine in Sonoma County.

Not every restaurant that receives the Snail of Approval meets the same standards. Each locality, from Boston and New York to Chicago, creates its own criteria, though they all rally behind the watchwords “clean, good and fair.”… Cindy Daniel and her husband, Doug Lipton, have made Healdsburg’s Shed a destination and showcase for local farmers.

[Farming] inspired Doug and Cindy to create SHED in downtown Healdsburg… Consumers are backing away from foods grown on land saturated with pesticides, fungicides or herbicides. There are farmers who don’t want to farm like that either. Many are reverting to earlier agricultural practices, practices used by our forefathers, practices used before synthetics. They’d prefer to look to nature and the microbes beneath their feet for sustenance, and to the moon and the stars for guidance.

These restaurants offer excellent food at a reasonable price and are included in the upcoming 2018 edition of the MICHELIN Guide San Francisco.