Exploring Global Flavors at the Kindness Cafe
By Jade Fisher, Communications Specialist
Ask anyone their favorite dish served at the Kindness Cafe and you will get a great array of answers.
Visitors, volunteers, and staff are welcome to one hot meal per day at the Kindness Cafe
The vegetarian option for a creamy Thai red curry says one staff member. A visitor who's impressed by the first South Asian dish they've had in the cafe goes for the tadka dal. A comforting lugaw (Filipino rice porridge with pork shoulder) captures someone else's attention. I personally can never land on an answer. But the chicken mole with rice and beans stands out in recent memory.
This global menu didn't happen by chance. It's the culmination of our Kindness Cafe team's thoughtfulness, personal culinary backgrounds, and determination to do the most with what we've got on hand.
I sat down with Nissa, the Executive Chef of our Kindness Cafe, to discuss the menu planning process and how it supports our value to include perspectives and guidance from the people we serve.
We know food is a human right and the Kindness Cafe team simultaneously holds our value that culturally appropriate food is critical to our community's wellbeing. This value was centered even before Nissa joined the team.
"This [global menu] predates me here. There's always been kind of like a work up toward more global cuisine. There were Ethiopian dishes, Palestinian dishes, and I have really tried to elevate that to make it a little more accessible. So our clients can see themselves in our cuisine on a more regular basis."
They plan meals every Tuesday. And it covers only the next four days of meals! To plan for the week ahead, Nissa and team needs to know what ingredients we're expecting to have in the building. They can come from pre-planned orders. They're sometimes sourced from bulk commodities, donations, and purchases from WSDA or Food Lifeline. Then the whole team gets into collaborative mode to come up with ideas based on what's available.
Nissa prepares a Filipino dish for our guests
They ask themselves, "What donated goods or especially like proteins were we able to find for inexpensive or free? Can we be scrappy and use the leftover reserves of that for elevating our meals in different ways."
Things have to move fast in their program. And they always deliver top quality eats. Nissa says she's inspired by cookbooks for ideas and inspiration but almost always comes up with her own spin. She finds her comfort space culinarily in East, South, and West Asian meals. That's almost always what she cooks at home.
Josue contributes a lot of Mexican and Guatemalan offerings. Cavan is very global as well, and jumps here and there with their inspiration. They are also stellar at coming up with more scrappy American style dishes. Johnathon is our newest Kindness Cafe addition and he's jumping right into the fold. Growing his creative culinary chops and working with Nissa to season things to perfection.
The wealth of knowledge between the team is vast. Nissa explains, "it's always a group effort between the four of us. Like 'what idea do you have for these ingredients that we have on hand?' 'What can you bring?' and we all kind of bring something different."
The dedication to their craft really comes across to our guests. I still remember a neighbor stopping me to pass along a message to the cafe: "That was the BEST chili I've had in 40 years!"
Though limitations do exist for the planning process: food distributors may not have specific ingredients like sumac or fenugreek, there are set budget constraints, and they can't really work with donated bulk items that have to stretch and feed the 900+ daily visitors on average. Most of the time they can't use grocery recovery items since the donations wouldn't cover the volume of food they need to cook.
But the meal planning process has really opened up thanks to Nissa connecting with a new food purveyor that offers ingredients from cuisines all around the world.
She says, "having access to bulk spices, oils, and sauces prevents us having to physically go out and buy it. We'd have to go to lake city previously, now we cut out the middle man and saved us on labor. It expands where the mind goes during this planning process." Now they have access to bulk cumin seeds, cardamom pods, garam masala and coriander seeds directly from India. She says there's always fish sauce on hand. She was able to provide guest chef Nadia from the Pantry with Lebanese olive oil for a West Asian dish.
With Nissa's leadership, she wants the global menu to exist beyond just celebrating holidays. It's always important to utilize the team's recipe toolkit. She's tried to challenge the team to think outside the box. She says, "we've been trying to do more vegetarian offerings because it's like, do we always need a protein? Can we do an ancient grain and roasted vegetable salad and have people be happy with that?" They most certainly stuck the landing last week with their grain salad topped with an addicting tahini dressing and a colorful array of vegetables.
Meals Partnership Coalition (MPC) is another huge partner in expanding the delicious possibilities for the cafe. MPC is a coalition with 45+ meal providers in the Puget Sound region who serve collectively over 4 million free meals each year. As a coalition they help connect organizations to funding. They help plug in resources for us and have wonderful connections that have contributed hundreds of pounds of free proteins to our meal program in the Kindness Cafe.
Nissa (top row, second to the left) joins MPC to meet with legislators in the Legislative Building
They also advocate at the legislature (you can read more about Nissa's visit to Olympia with MPC here) to protect the funding that already exists for free meal programs. And connect us to more than just food. They connect us to grant sponsorships including a recent grant that resulted in funds for equipment upgrades. Thanks to MPC's help, Nissa was able to buy two new rice cookers that were sorely needed. They've also allocated free vouchers and education through the Washington State Department of Health.
Through MPC's relationship with the Muckleshoot Indian Tribe, they purchased and donated salmon fillets to Ballard Food Bank. As partners of MPC, we are excited to support local and indigenous food systems. We think it's incredibly important to invest in these food systems that belong to the original stewards of this land. Land that we're guests on. And utilizing local ingredients helps minimize our environmental footprint. These are values we hold dearly at Ballard Food Bank.
The cafe team turned these locally sourced fillets into 1,000+ dishes of salmon mutahfy - an Omani style fish curry served over fragrant basmati rice. With the leftovers, the team envisioned a Vietnamese-inspired rice bowl with flakey salmon atop warm rice accompanied with sweet quick pickled veggies! I was quite impressed by the flavors. It really felt like a meal my Vietnamese grandma would whip together on a weeknight.
The process that this mighty team of four uses to meal plan keeps visitors, volunteers, and staff buzzing about what's next! The scrappy determination to use everything in such imaginative ways is what keeps this global menu interesting, fresh, and so fun to keep up with. And the team's collective culinary knowledge helps us explore different parts of the globe through a to-go container served at our humble counter on the corner of Leary.
We'd love your meal ideas! If you have a dish you'd like to see in our cafe (or give kudos for a dish you've already enjoyed), please fill out the form here.