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Bastyr’s uncommonly great dining commons
BY REBEKAH DENN
PHOTOS BY CLARE BARBOZA
Jim Watkins seemed a perfect fit to head the dining program at Bastyr University. The dining commons, open to the public as well as to students and staff, had earned a reputation for solid, healthful vegetarian food. Watkins had recent experience with college dining halls at the University of Washington, but had also been the founding chef of Café Flora, the first restaurant in Seattle to raise vegetarian food to a fine-dining experience.
Watkins has indeed earned fans since starting the job earlier this year. He’s brought local growers in for an experimental farmers market, switched the coffee service to Café Vita, and added “grab and go” items like sliced fruits and good cheese and a lemony hummus made from sprouted edamame. But the biggest change he’s brought has also been the biggest surprise: The cafeteria isn’t strictly vegetarian any more.
Oh, there are still plenty of vegetarian dishes, like the gorgeous beet salad a student was assembling this summer from shavings of striped Chioggias and greens. There was honey-baked French toast for breakfast, and grilled polenta patties as a special at lunch; the black currants and rhubarb in the desserts came from the campus gardens. The buy-by-the-pound buffet line is still meat-free. But a separate station with a steam table sells daily specials like wild-caught marbled salmon and Dungeness crab cakes, and meatloaf, and pulled-pork sandwiches. One of the best-selling items since Watkins arrived? Duck, marinated in a ginger-soy sauce, braised, then served with roasted fresh apricots.
Why would a chef who specialized in vegetarian cooking bring such changes to a vegetarian eatery? It was actually on request. When Watkins interviewed for the job, adding animal proteins was high on the school’s menu of what they’d like to see.
While many students and staff members were vegetarian, he noted, many others ate at least some amount of animal protein. A “carnivore club” already held regular events like campus cookouts—and drew long lines.
And there were ways to add meats to the meal service that fit the school’s goals of healthful, sustainable, responsibly raised ingredients. Even with roughly 1,000 students, plus staff and visitors, large but trusted distributors like Ocean Beauty and Corfini Gourmet could stock the university adequately with local meats and seafood.
Initially Watkins thought he would introduce the change by offering prepackaged microwaveable meals. Student representatives nixed that idea immediately. “They did not want to eat food that they had to microwave.” So he settled on a separate station set up away from the buffet line, selling entrees for a fixed price. It started with salmon and chicken breasts.
Ironically, Watkins said, he fielded only a single student complaint about the change. The bigger push-back came from his dedicated staff, concerned about altering such a defining facet of their food.
The move started small, with Watkins and interns. Animal proteins were stored in a separate walk-in refrigerator, prepped at a dedicated separate station that was thoroughly cleaned and disinfected after each shift. Watkins ordered meats and fish in small quantities so there was never a lot around. And over the months, the change turned into a regular way of life. And Watkins, overseeing a big cafeteria-style room of students and an engaged kitchen crew, is happier than he can believe.
“The wonderful thing about Bastyr is, this is one of the most sophisticated dining populations I’ve ever worked with,” he said. With a curriculum focused on health, including degrees for dieticians and nutritionists, “People are constantly coming back in the kitchen during the day, saying ‘Where did the fish come from? Where are the greens from?” Yesterday, I made a seaweed salad; they wanted to know where the seaweed came from.” (It was Japan.) He’s full of compliments for the crew and their work—the elegant pastries like almond cream puffs and raw “truffles” made by Darrin Srda, the raw foods specialties of Paul Douglas, the exceptional foundation laid by Jeff Basom, who helped develop the kitchen’s initial dining program 25 years ago.
“I just have such high respect and regard for their mission and their dedication and commitment to really preparing food that people can trust,” he said. “This is the first time I’ve ever started working with a staff that was already so strong, and had so many good ideas.”
Watkins was born in Virginia, where his family farmed, and grew up in Baltimore. “All the kids living in the north, we were all sent back to work on the farms during the summer—and they were big farms... that was how my parents generation made a living, planting corn, tobacco, vegetables, wheat.”
”It didn’t seem like hard work because I had all my cousins around, and we were all around the same age. It was literally like summer camp.”
His first career was as a social worker. “I worked with a population of newborns through adolescents, and their parents. It got to the point where the people I’d worked with at the beginning of my career were coming in with their children.”
Entering culinary school at age 36, “I felt like I had a lot of catching up to do.” He worked breakfasts at one restaurant and dinner at another, and on weekends he was a pastry chef. In one of his jobs he encountered vegetarian food that was more straightforward than any he had seen before, “not fake meat, but just making really delicious food from vegetables and grains.” It was an introduction to a side of cooking he’d never seen.
Then a contact with a friend led to an executive chef’s job at an Aveda spa in Wisconsin, where he further trained himself in fine vegetarian food. When visiting diners asked if he’d be interested in coming out to take a look at a restaurant they were opening in Seattle, he said yes. It was Café Flora.
There, he temporarily became a vegetarian himself “to be true to the cuisine,” and garnered raves for his international influences and dressed up flavors. He moved on to Plenty, his own grocery/café in Madrona, and eventually to the bigger-picture issues and saner hours of student dining.
He meets regularly with students and staff, and has faced issues like “a real outcry” after raising the price of coffee from a dollar to $1.65. He surveyed other prices in a 10-mile radius, and sent out an e-mail explaining that a cup of drip was $1.99 plus tax even at Denny’s, and that the previous price wasn’t covering costs.
The crew has been striving to add more raw foods, more dishes for gluten-intolerant diners, and other dishes that fit with the school’s curriculum. For the future, the culinary department at the school just met with his staff to prepare for a bigger push into whole foods. “We can do better,” he said—for instance, more sweet potato flour or hemp flour, still less white flour. “I think what they’re asking for is the way everyone in the world should be eating.”
He cooks a lot at home, and when it comes to dining out, he looks for small restaurants with integrity—Dinette, Quinn’s, and Oddfellows are all on his list. He lives in Mount Baker, and, while most of his family is still back East, this has become his home.
“I love Seattle. I feel like I’m in heaven. I love the politics, I love the diversity, I love the closeness to the ocean and the mountains. It’s perfect.”
Seattle-based reporter Rebekah Denn has won two James Beard awards for food writing.
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