Café, not cafeteria, greets hospital diners
September 27, 2011
By Warren Kagarise
Sam Colombi (left), sous chef for Café 1910 at Swedish/Issaquah, and Eric Eisenberg, executive chef for Swedish Medical Center, prepare to greet restaurant patrons. By Greg Farrar
Swedish/Issaquah aims to dispel jokes about hospital food at eatery
Spare the jokes about Jell-O and mystery meat in gluey sauce.
Everyone is careful to call the eatery at Swedish/Issaquah a restaurant, and not — as hungry guests and patients might expect at a hospital — a cafeteria.
The emphasis on the restaurant-inspired menu tilts to local and organic ingredients. The effort is designed to appeal to consumers, as palates turn more sophisticated in a Food Network-obsessed era.
Kevin Brown, a key project leader and Sammamish resident, envisioned the eatery, called Café 1910, as a destination restaurant for people in the surrounding community.
“That idea as a whole is not impossible to wrap your brain around,” said Eric Eisenberg, executive chef for Swedish Medical Center. “But the ideas of who will come to a hospital to eat on purpose? Who will go out of their way?”
Hospital executives and chefs at Swedish and elsewhere said hospital dining is undergoing a renaissance.
“As things have emerged, we’ve really realized we’re not a cafeteria in a hospital,” Eisenberg said. “We’re a beautiful restaurant in a really beautiful community.”
Café 1910 — named for the year a Swedish immigrant founded the hospital in Seattle — started serving charcuterie and Neapolitan-style pizzas to patients at Swedish/Issaquah on opening day, July 14.
“We’re in a community wellness center,” Eisenberg said. “So, our goal is to provide the most delicious food we can, the most on-trend food we can in the most wholesome way possible.”
Pizza appeared as a staple item early in the planning process. Inspiration also came from the ubiquitous roasted chickens packaged to go at supermarkets across the land.
“There’s no denying that that’s a super-popular thing that people gravitate to,” Eisenberg said, “if we could offer the absolute most delicious, best roasted chicken that there was, and combine it with a couple of really amazing sides, and have that be a reason to actually stop here.”
Emphasis is on fast, fresh food
Sam Colombi, Swedish/Issaquah sous chef, said the team learned from the philosophies at Chipotle and other eateries offering organic options to the masses.
Neapolitan-style pizzas on the menu at Swedish/Issaquah bake in a Wood Stone Oven, a gas oven made by a Bellingham company. By Aaron Blank
“I’ve observed a lot, and I’m impressed,” he said. “That’s the key: It’s the fresh ingredients, friendly staff, fast. Put it all together.”
So, the Café 1910 menu features pizza from a Wood Stone Oven — despite the name, the oven from a Bellingham company is not wood-fired — for pizza, as well as roasted fish and meats. The same oven is installed at more than 200 California Pizza Kitchen outlets; Wolfgang Puck is another fan.
“When we were conceptualizing what we wanted to be when we were tasked with being a destination for the community, one of the things that would draw people to us, that people immediately could identify with” happened to be meals from the oven — Neapolitan-style pizza and roasted chicken, Eisenberg said.
Chefs fired up the oven to prepare pizza, plus roasted salmon and lamb, to serve at a VIP reception July 7. Surprised patrons could not believe the items appeared on the café’s regular menu.
Eisenberg and Colombi — both fathers to young boys — also created a menu to appeal to families, a hard-to-ignore demographic in the surrounding Issaquah Highlands.
“You know it’s impossible to get anybody to decide on what to eat.” Eisenberg said. “So, for us, you can come and one of you can have a delicious burger made from freshly ground chuck and sirloin that we grind every day on a beautiful, artisan bun — grass-fed beef, all Washington beef. You can have that or you can have a delicious salad that we custom made for you. Or, you can have a pizza. Or you can have a piece of salmon. The sky’s the limit.”
Burgeoning trend in hospitals
The staff is preparing for another test in November, as the patient beds start to open and the kitchen starts serving inpatients from a room service-style menu. Still, the focus is not limited to simply feeding patients.
“Our vision is that it works in the other direction. It works from the café back into the patient bedside, versus, oh, we feed patients, and so since we’re cooking anyway, let’s throw some stuff out for staff,” Eisenberg said.
Trish Dever, public relations manager for the Association for Healthcare Foodservice, a national organization, said the shift upends outdated ideas about hospital foodservice.
“A lot of folks, when they think about hospitals, they always think about feeding the patients. But they also feed the public, they feed the employees, the folks that come to visit,” she said. “It makes a lot of sense for a lot of different reasons to have that restaurant style and feel and those choices to meet those needs.”
The concept is not limited to Café 1910. Starting in the late 1990s, hospital executives nationwide started re-examining cafeteria menus and peeking under tray lids en route to patients’ rooms. The result is a broader menu for inpatients, employees and guests.
Tom Thaman, director of food and nutrition services at Wishard Health Services, a hospital in Indianapolis, said patient satisfaction is crucial — and quality food leads to more satisfied customers. Wishard operates Café Soleil, a 52-seat sit-down restaurant offering healthy options, inside the hospital.
“The more choices you give to patients, the happier they are — and the better they’re going to be, not just nutritionwise, but just their overall impression of the hospital is better,” he said.
Nary a french fry in sight
Planning Café 1910 offered the 101-year-old Swedish hospital system a chance to pioneer a different strategy. The menu includes nary a french fry. The eatery offers desserts in dainty portions.
“You’re not going to find chocolate cake that’s 10 layers and the size of your head,” Eisenberg said. “You’re not going to find a cinnamon roll here in the morning that fills your plate.”
Instead, the menu is rich in brand names from the Seattle food scene: breads and pastries from Alki Bakery, treats from Theo Chocolate, and coffee and tea from Caffé Vita and Steven Smith Teamaker.
Eisenberg credits hospital executives for accommodating almost every request during the design process.
“No one has ever once said to us, ‘Don’t’ or ‘You can’t,’” he said. “The only thing we got pushback on, in the very, very beginning, is when we said we didn’t want to have a soda fountain and, in fact, we weren’t going to serve any soda at all.”
The proposed moratorium on soda concerned executives about dissatisfaction among the staff.
“They bought into having no fryers. They bought into having minimum freezer space. But they couldn’t buy into not serving soda,” Eisenberg recalled.
So, the team reached a compromise: Swedish/Issaquah includes a soda machine in the “green room” for staff, but nowhere else on campus. (The café proffers Izze carbonated fruit juices instead.)
The room service-style menu for inpatients includes other, not-quite-as-visible compromises, too.
“As far as feeding patients is concerned, yes, we have red Jell-O,” Eisenberg said.
Just not on the menu at Café 1910.
Warren Kagarise: 392-6434, ext. 234, or wkagarise@isspress.com. Comment at www.issaquahpress.com.
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Thank you, Swedish, for making dining a pleasant and healthy opportunity!
For patients and families and their guests, especially during stressful times.
Hospitals needed to make healthy foods available to help patients get well and to also teach them how to make things healthy and tasty!
Hospitals and their staff should lead by example! To change the health in this nation.
Soda’s are not healthy choices, and should not be included, even for the staff.
As a cardiac surgeon told us many years back…. he should have known better ..
to eat healthier himself and he would not have ended up under the knife … of another surgeon….
Physicians health thy self…. and it starts with healthy food…. at the hospitals to keep staff and physicians healthy…. they are the example…
Thank you Swedish for stepping forward.