FoodLove 18: Chef Arran Stark
Meet “fire starter” Chef Arran Stark. He put “hospitality” into Port Townsend’s Jefferson Healthcare “hospital” with flair and fervor. His extraordinary skills and passion for fresh and local food at the hospital has been the proof-in-principle that hospital fare can rival restaurant fare in flavor.
In my mind, casual fine dining in healthcare is the next frontier in hospitality, and it’s also a possible intersection of food equity. What could be better than empowering people by teaching them how to manage their health through cooking nutritious foods? It’s what Chef Arran does daily. Food plans are plentiful for recovery and long-term well-being for many patients. What Chef Arran has done is the beginning of seismic shift in culture when hospitals get rooted in great-tasting food and patients and their visitors expect it.
Chef Arran was trained in many of the best fine-dining, terroir-based kitchens around the country, and this heart-centered executive chef is the consummate creative and visionary. He has deep knowledge of the potent flavors and nutrients of ingredients of the earth and soil. He himself has recently returned to the soil by developing a home farm, which may be the ultimately journey of any chef with appreciation for terroir. Our conversation happens there in the heart of the summer heat in the open-air greenhouse.
If every hospital and every school offered the kind of food that his kitchens prepare, restaurants might go out of business. And yet, his work is the embodiment of a culinary forefather’s, Boulanger’s, motto in the original restaurant, “Venite ad me omnes qui stomacho laboratis et ego vos restaurabo” translated and explained by Merriam Webster’s dictionary as "Come to me all who suffer from pain of the stomach and I will restore you."
There isn’t much the man can’t do, and he has a new vision. He wants our city to have a revolutionary kind of cooking school to meet the dire needs of the hospitality industry in our destination- hotel-tourist-and-agrarian economy.
I want to help him to do this. Imagine a culinary industry and a healthcare industry founded with his culinary leadership and deep understanding of terroir. Share the word if you are local to the region and have your firends give a listen to this podcast.
The cover photo features Chef Arran fresh from his other passion, paddle-boarding. No surprise to me, he’s now a co-designer of aerodynamic paddle boards (I’ve seen a prototype, so think “Ferrari of paddle-boards”).
What inspires me about Chef Arran Stark is that he empowers everyone to have food that fuels their bodies to heal and also satisfies the palate and soul. His work is food equity in action. He cooks and shares stories about food with humor and humility, a dynamic combination that puts him in a league of his own beyond the pale of other chefs with similarly illustrious careers.
Chef Arran has been on a mission to teach people and children how to nourish themselves. When asked how he might reimagine home economics with me (with the aim of world peace through food and a podcast), he said he would take the children out to the land first, then harvest some simple, easily accessible, easily growable ingredients, and show them how to make a flavorful staple that they can “own” for themselves. Here’s the recipe for Berry Salsa that he’s contributing into our growing FoodLove curriculum. In it, he features the bounty of the Pacific Northwest berries.
Berry Salsa
Ingredients
Instructions
- Variations include: Using gooseberries or currants instead or along with blue berries, using herbs like basil, parsley or chervil instead or along with cilantro, using Lemon juice or freshly pressed unripe apples instead of Lemons.
