By Charlie Bermant
Peninsula Daily News
PORT TOWNSEND — Arran Stark wants to redefine hospital food.
“When people talk about hospital cooking, they picture boxes coming in on a dock where they pull it out, unfreeze the food and put it on a tray,” he said.
“The idea that hospital food needs to be formulaic or boring is wrong, since there are alternatives, especially around here.”
Stark, a well-known local chef with restaurant experience, has taken over the kitchen at Jefferson Healthcare hospital at 834 Sheridan St., Port Townsend.
He serves three square meals a day to patients and staff as well as economical, healthy meals to anyone who walks in.
“I want to change the environment here,” he said.
“If you’ve been in a hospital room and see a loved one in pain, you want a place to get away from it all,” he said.
“It doesn’t have to look like a hospital.”
Changing the way it’s done
Stark has been on the job for about a month and has already replaced a variety of pre-packaged choices with a single fresh-cooked menu option.
While he chips away at the hospital’s existing supply of frozen food, he has introduced locally grown produce, much of it organic.
“The patients have already noticed the change,” said Chief Operating Officer Paula Dowdle.
“I had one tell me that the chicken served to him was the best he ever had.”
Dowdle said the costs of running the kitchen have decreased since Stark took over.
On Tuesday, Stark served chicken skewers with black beans, rice and corn — all for $6.
Along with this, Stark added a dab of chimichurri, a pesto-like green sauce, that enhanced the taste of the chicken.
“I like to educate people when I feed them,” Stark said.
“A lot of people asked me what the green sauce was, and I was able to teach them something.”
The dishes are structured so they become a healthy vegetarian meal if the protein — fish, chicken or beef — is removed.
The kitchen operated on a rotating menu plan, serving specific foods on certain days, a schedule that Stark plans to follow while substituting fresh foods for the frozen or packaged foods listed on the schedule.
Along the way, he is looking to make the kitchen more efficient and replace some of the old electric burners with more flexible propane.
Come for lunch
Once the kitchen is renovated, Stark hopes people will come for lunch even if they aren’t at the hospital for a medical reason or to visit a sick friend.
Dowdle likes the idea, saying, “I would love it if people came here to have lunch.”
Stark, 40, was raised in Georgia and has been in Port Townsend since 2006, when he opened Cultivated Palette Catering.
In the intervening years, he owned and operated Brassica restaurant and has provided private lessons and custom dinners.
Most recently, he served Wednesday meals at the Undertown and Friday burgers outside the Port Townsend Brewing Co., but he stopped both enterprises when he began working at the hospital.
He is continuing to offer cooking lessons and hopes to get “free labor” from his students by offering them apprentice programs in the hospital.
Also on the schedule is the installation of a “grab and go” unit that will contain sandwiches and salads and a point-of-sale system that will allow customers to pay with debit or credit cards.
He supervises a crew of eight people who “either love the changes or are just going along” but who mostly are excited to be doing something different with meal preparation, he said.
The next challenge for Stark is to maintain his momentum through the winter.
“Right now, there is an abundance of fresh food, with people leaving zucchini and squash on my front porch,” he said.
“I don’t know what we’ll do in the winter when . . . we will need to keep it interesting.”
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Jefferson County Reporter Charlie Bermant can be reached at 360-385-2335 or at charlie.bermant@peninsuladailynews.com.
