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PrintFrom the Garden to the Table—Jesse Cool
Charlie Ayers and Jesse Cool are raising the bar on local organic cooking. At Palo Alto’s Calafia Café, the quintessential California eatery, Ayers lets organic ingredients take center stage in his eco-friendly dining room. Jesse Cool of Menlo Park’s Cool Café and Flea Street Café grows her own produce, buys from local farmers, and makes compost in a business park.
Jesse Cool checks for ripe beans in her garden on Stanford University's open space land.
Photograph by Kyle Chesser
Jesse Cool
If there is a poster child for organic food and healthy eating, Jesse Cool must be it. Even without a drop of makeup and wearing a T-shirt that bears the word “DIRT”—a tribute to her passion for farming—Cool looks like a very attractive 40-something. Except she’s 60.
Sure, she runs the trails at the Stanford Dish (the open space land near the linear accelerator center) and lifts weights at the gym. But what keeps Cool on top of her game, she says, is good, fresh food.
“I primarily eat a diet of whole, organic, real food and I think the body knows how to process that better than artificial or processed foods,” she says. “But I am so imperfect. I follow the 80/20 principle. I try to do the best I can 80 percent of the time. The rest of the time, I’m not perfect.”
Cool has just opened a new restaurant, Cool Café, in Menlo Business Park. Its understated interior pays tribute to her conservation-minded business ethos—the same practices that garnered her signature restaurant, Flea Street Café, a coveted green business certification from San Mateo County. Tabletops and countertops are made of bamboo. Floors are painted concrete. The lighting is low-voltage. Flatware is either reusable bamboo or “spudware,” made from potatoes and compostable. The only beverages sold are in glass bottles, not plastic, because glass is more easily recycled.
Patrons at Cool Café find a very simple menu with only one hot entree each day, perhaps a meatloaf or a vegetarian strata, priced at about $8. The minimalist menu is a carefully planned strategy in Cool’s eco-minded efforts.
“Simplifying the menu saves manpower, storage, and waste,” says Cool. “It’s about values. It sounds trite but this is what we are all about. Even the cleaning agents we use are far beyond plant-friendly,” she says. “You can eat this stuff.”
Monday through Friday, Cool Café makes lunch for many of the 3,000 people who work in the Menlo Business Park, but this is no ordinary cluster of cubicles. In the parking lot outside the café, Cool’s landlord has created an “edible landscape” according to Cool’s specifications. The pavement is broken up with citrus trees, lavender, rosemary, and other plants that can be used in the kitchen. A compost pile is in the works.
“I’ve entered another community here,” Cool says. “We are creating a community in this place.”
This is the same go-the-extra-mile energy that Cool puts into her other projects, like her work at Stanford University Hospital, where she has revamped their dietary program to include as much organic and local food as possible, including strawberries from Watsonville, whole-grain bread from a San Francisco bakery, and grass-fed beef from Marin and Sonoma. Cool’s soup recipes, including carrot ginger with curry and roasted sweet pepper with goat cheese, are a staple on the patients’ new menu.
“This is deeply challenging work, and it’s never been done before,” she says. “Stanford is taking responsibility around the issues of food and healing. They make 4,000 meals a day, and now they are cooking chicken soup from whole, organic chickens.”
Cool’s influence at Stanford Hospital extends beyond the health benefits of organics to the sustainable practices of the kitchen. “Everything on then tray is recyclable, re-usable, or compostable now,” she says. “It was a struggle, but we did away with all the plastic wrapping.”
Stanford and Cool share more organic connections. Cool is the chef-proprietor of the Cool Café at the Cantor Center for the Visual Arts on Stanford’s campus. And she tends her half-acre garden on Stanford Open Space land, right next to the running path. The garden, where her two grandchildren like to play, has apple, fig, and plum trees, plus an overflowing abundance of vegetables. Cool was new to gardening when she began tilling the soil five years ago, but she is a savvy farmer now: “I knew I had made the grade when I found myself saying, ‘That is the most beautiful compost pile!’”
Cool’s garden plays a part in Stanford’s STEP program, in which elementary school teachers learn about organic food and gardening. One of Cool’s missions is to teach the teachers how to cook. At the start, many insist that they can’t boil water, and yet the class always ends with a delicious meal they’ve made on their own.
“We are disconnected from cooking,” Cool says. “In our modern world, we have lost our connection to food. First we forgot how to cook; then we forgot where our food comes from.”
Food sources are of primary importance to Cool. She gets wild salmon for her restaurants from Seattle, but to avoid the environmental toll of shipping it to the Bay Area, she has it delivered by a Stanford professor who drives up to Washington once a month to visit his second home. “It’s frozen on the boat, and it’s the best salmon I’ve ever tasted,” she says.
Cool is well-known for supporting local farmers; her Menlo Park restaurants Late for the Train and Flea Street Café were serving organic food in the early 1980s long before it was popular, and she was buying goods from small, local farms long before it was convenient to do so. “It was hard to get [organic food] delivered to the Peninsula. The trucks stopped at San Francisco and Berkeley. I had to drive up to Niman Ranch [in Marin] myself.”
The organic food industry has changed a lot in recent years, but Cool says there are still difficulties: “Sometimes it’s really hard working with local farms. It’s so hard for a farmer to step off his farm to sell produce, or to deliver produce. It has to be sustainable for them, too.”
Asked how busy people can find the time to create fresh, organic meals at home, Cool says, “We need to give ourselves way more permission to be soulful. We forget about the great joy we can get from feeding each other. Last night I cooked for my mother. She is 89 and suggested that we go out for In-N-Out burgers. I said, ‘Mom, let me cook for you.’ And I went into the garden and got some vegetables and made some pasta. And we ate and talked and she just loved everything. And I said, ‘Mom, you just fed me.’”
Jewels from Jesse
What is your favorite guilty pleasure?
Gin martinis.
Who is your favorite chef?
I have always learned the most about food from my farmer friends. They keep me connected to how to keep it simple, respect pure flavors, keep it as fresh as possible.
Seen any movies lately?
I saw the screening of Botany of Desire, a documentary based on the book by Michael Pollan. I was there primarily because the filmmakers are dear friends. It was fantastic and I encourage people to make sure and see it when it shows on PBS.
What is your can’t-do-without ingredient?
Eggs. That’s why I have chickens. My sons know that I always have fresh eggs, good cheese, fresh vegetables, butter, and olive oil in the kitchen. With those ingredients, I can always make something wonderful.
Cool Café 1525 O'Brien Drive, Menlo Park, 650.325.3665.
Also read: From the Garden to the Table: Charlie Ayers
