A Little Saint
Agnès Madrigal and Sara Parrot
Little Saint in Healdsburg, California, is a delightful spot to find fresh-from-the-garden dishes and drinks, alongside such takeaway items as cups of coffee, bottles of wine, and bouquets of farm flowers. While sipping a pink drink with ice cubes tumbling over its edges, a narrator reflects on her own spirituality.
Gourmet delicacies and existential musings interweave at Little Saint. Photograph by Madrigalit
A Farm Freshness and Friendliness at Little Saint in Sonoma County by Sara Parrot
Little Saint in the town of Healdsburg, about an hour’s drive north from San Francisco, is not just a restaurant. It is a coffee bar, flower shop, wine boutique, cocktail lounge, entertainment venue, and more. It is what some would call “a concept shop,” offering ideals of farm-to-table eating, vegan ethics, and a general joie de vivre that the Golden State—especially in this little nook—does so well. Situated just off the town square, the two-story industrial building is a gathering spot for locals and tourists alike, with ample space to enjoy food, drink, and community spirit.
An offspring of the Michelin-starred restaurant Single Thread, Little Saint is an accessible option that also draws upon produce from the same local farms and pays impeccable attention to every detail of the culinary offerings and interior décor. Guests can come for Viennoiseries and cappuccinos in the early day, a plate of picture-perfect plant-based food and a bespoke cocktail at lunchtime, or a robust family-style dinner and a live concert in the evening. The interior is grand, filled with light, with several counters of assorted treats, and a fashionable bar upstairs. However, a visit to Little Saint is more than any one of these delectable offerings—it is an experience unto itself.
After spending a few hours there on one sun-dappled afternoon, reveling in the fresh air on one of the outdoor balconies while enjoying a succession of dainty dishes (and shopping afterward for locally made gifts), I wonder why this kind of establishment—a shop or center built to transform and elevate the good and goods of a particular locale—is not more common, both in the Bay Area and beyond. I leave you with this, my Little Saint musing—a wish for more spaces that alchemize simple locality into sheer loveliness and form community conversations through the culinary and cultural makings of a unique and singular place.
“A Little Saint” by Agnès Madrigal
Her name started with an M, the two delicate humps of the lowercase letter could have been the top of her lips, contoured as they were there and cascading simply at the bottom to form the shallow underside of an O, that letter was in her name, too, but in the surname, the family name of Odessa—her first name was Mary. Mary Odessa had come to the restaurant with her fiancé, Henry. She wore, for the first time in several days, a cotton dress with pink cabbage roses printed on the cloth and she had put on makeup again, including a lip gloss of alizarin crimson. It glittered on her delicate mouth. They had come to the restaurant after a trip to the seacoast where they stayed in a small cabin with oil lamps and an outdoor shower. The small single room was lined with wood, maybe redwood, and they lived in it together, alone, for one week.
The restaurant, and its surrounding little village with its town square rimmed with polished shops, was the first bit of civilization they had encountered and it jolted her a bit, even made her angry for a moment, before she gently lapsed back into it, into life, into the way that life was going to be again, was going to be mostly forever. She had not really wanted to go on the trip in the first place. It was Henry who liked to “rough it” as people said. If not for Mary, Henry would have gone camping into the middle of nowhere with just the items in his big backpack—she had seen that backpack in the back closet of his apartment. It was because of Mary that he opted for the cabin, so that she could make a morning coffee at the small sink or eat from the bounty they brought with them in the car or lounge on the simple bed away from the wind or bright sun or one day the rain and hail.
The cabin was outside a town on the coast that was reached only by one road that meandered mostly west for nearly fifty miles. It took two hours and some nausea to get in and the same getting out. The little shack was perched on the side of a hill and it overlooked the ocean, which, on most of the days of their stay, was a dark blue with silver sparkles. What would it be like, Mary wondered, to live beside that swelling beast each day, to feel its breath upon one’s skin every morning and every night? It was alive, enormous beside them, rocking unceasingly as though to remind them that it did not rest, was not to be entirely pacified no matter what their wishes, no matter what they named it. It breathed through the night, it swept into her dreams and back out, and she wondered what it did there, inside of her, what it made of her, and what it knew.
“The little shack was perched on the side of a hill and it overlooked the ocean, which, on most of the days of their stay, was a dark blue with silver sparkles. What would it be like, Mary wondered, to live beside that swelling beast each day, to feel its breath upon one’s skin every morning and every night? It was alive, enormous beside them, rocking unceasingly as though to remind them that it did not rest, was not to be entirely pacified no matter what their wishes, no matter what they named it. It breathed through the night, it swept into her dreams and back out, and she wondered what it did there, inside of her, what it made of her, and what it knew.”
—Agnès Madrigal
In the restaurant they sat atop the turquoise velvet-covered chairs at the gold bar and Henry ordered the cocktails for them. Henry, who was always so good at choosing these things, who admired her daintiness and wanted to protect it—he was not drinking alcohol that day so he could drive them back home. He was ever finding ways to make things easier for her, opening doors for her, taking out the garbage, fixing any of the small broken things in her house. When she needed to get up from the bar to use the bathroom, he abruptly rose from his seat, and helped her pull back her tall chair. On her way to the prettily decorated bathroom, under a painting of a horse, men looked at her, two older men, both seated at different tables, in different situations—one appeared to be having a business lunch with a man in a sports jacket, the other sat with a tired wife. Both looked at her and made her think she looked different to them, strange, perhaps, after her days in the country. Had the sea, the dune grass, infected her such that now she appeared natural, primitive? How would she know? But what she did not know, at least not yet, and what these men could not know, was that inside of her belly, a tiny pale leaf was uncurling, a body, only hours old, was beginning to dangle as a spangling ornament amid her ribs, her organs, and all the blood that coursed through her. Soon, as the sea, it would take her over completely.