Potatoes from Collinwood Farms. Grass-fed beef from Roger Short’s farm in Chimacum. Yellow wax beans from Nash’s Organic Produce in Sequim. Veggies from Corona Farm.

Chef Arran Stark is incorporating fresh local ingredients in his new kitchen at Jefferson Healthcare in Port Townsend.

The hospital may be the first in the state to steer toward fresh and local.

“Arran keeps reminding us there are others sprinkled across the nation, but I think we are the only ones in Washington state redefining what food service is as well as hoping to make it a destination dining place,” said Paula Dowdle, the hospital's chief operating officer.

Incorporating fresh, local produce into cafeteria-style food and returning to the art of cooking is getting noticed.

“The patient in room 318 today said the chicken he had for lunch is the best chicken he’s ever had,” is just one of dozens of emails Jefferson Healthcare Chief Executive Officer Mike Glenn has received since Stark took over as head chef and food service director earlier this summer.

Before everyone who’s ever watched Stark demonstrate how to slice a juicy tomato at the Port Townsend Farmers Market or eaten a feast at Brassica Restaurant descends on the hospital for lunch, Stark would appreciate some time to adjust to his new position as executive chef and food service director.

Sitting in the hospital’s cafeteria last week as a vat of yellow beans waited to be “manipulated,” as he calls it, Stark was still working to get a grab-and-go cold cabinet installed. He's also working with architects to make modifications to the cafeteria and kitchen, which has been used more for heating frozen prepared food in the last few decades than actually cooking from scratch.

The 40-year-old chef has so many goals, starting with the kitchen, and then connecting with doctors to revise patient meals' menus and yes, ultimately inviting the community into the hospital.

“The food epicenter of the community is the Food Co-op. Wouldn’t it be a beautiful thing if this was kind of like that and a place where the community came to have a good meal?” Stark asked.

It’s going to take some time – months, maybe.

Stark literally has a lot on his plate, working 40-50 hours at the hospital while maintaining his Cultivated Palatte Catering business with his wife, Micaela Colley, director of the Organic Seed Alliance. When he’s not in a kitchen, sometimes even preparing six-course meals for up to 10 people, he’s caring for “two teething babes.”

Healthy vibes

It’s not just that Stark has brought fresh farmers'-market ingredients to an industrial kitchen known for its boxed, portion-controlled frozen entrees that’s causing buzz at the hospital.

“It’s the overall vibe of the service,” said Glenn. “He’s running it like the restaurant businesses that he runs where he says to staff, ‘Hey, we’re going to be spending a lot of time together. We’re going to work hard. We’re going to enjoy what we’re doing. This is our craft.’ He’s educating. He’s an incredible chef, obviously, but he’s a wonderful person and that’s what’s really cool.”

It’s not just the patients and Glenn and Dowdle who are raving.

During a conversation in the cafeteria, a hospital worker in blue scrubs stopped by to give Stark a hug. She thanked him for the new, fresh, hospital fare.

“I like what he’s doing foodwise,” she said. “The vegetables are not plain and rubbery.”

Stark wants to bring his fresh and friendly fare to everyone.

“Hospitals are notorious for being sterile places that are pretty depressing,” he said. “When you’re down and you’re feeling kind of miserable and you say you have to go to escape and you go down into the same sterile environment and have a bad cup of coffee it doesn’t make you feel any better. This is going to be an escape from what the hospital does.”

Ultimately, Stark envisions a culinary reading room in the hospital’s dining room with cookbooks he inherited from friend, chef and gardener Erica Springstead.

Back to the past

When he first got to the hospital, Stark said he got a lesson in the past that also gave him inspiration.

“Joy (Guptill), who works in human resources upstairs, tells a story about when the nuns were here and they had a big white plow horse that used to live across in the field and they used to have gardens and she used to feed the horses carrots. That’s wild,” he said.

“The [St. John's] hospital originally had a garden. They had chicken coops. They fed all the patients that way. There was no institutional boxed food then.”

“And then somewhere along the line it became the way to do things … to have a big refrigerator freezer and stuff gets delivered to you. It’s in a box and it’s portion controlled and that’s kind of important in a hospital.”

Because he’s switching from using ovens to reheat those frozen entrees to needing space to chop and prepare food as he does in a restaurant, Stark needs to revamp the kitchen, get in more burners, find more prep space.

Stark said he hasn’t penciled it out yet whether using fresh ingredients and manipulating them is going to be cheaper or more expensive than trucked-in frozen food.

For now, he has a staff of eight mostly unionized employees to prepare food for the 25-bed hospital, which has more employees than patients.

“It’s a fine balance,” he said. “We’re not going to be doing things that take that much time like butchering a side of beef.”

But he is butchering chickens while also still using some of the chicken breasts that come frozen and individually wrapped.

In a way, he has a foot in both worlds for now – one in fresh, one in frozen.

“I’ve got cooks, but it’s training people to actually break down chickens,” he said. “Bobby (Deen) and I spent the morning butchering chickens, taking a whole chicken and breaking it down.”

Deen, a long-time hospital cook who also has been a chef at many restaurants in Port Townsend, says it’s been awhile since he prepped food the way Stark does, but he’s enjoying getting back to cooking.

“Instead of a canned stock, we’ll make chicken stock that we can use to make our sauces. It’s the art of cooking. It’s one of those vocations that’s alive and well here,” Stark said.

Using fresh ingredients is a challenge for an institution, in part because it’s the farmer who dictates to the chef what’s available.

“There’s the challenge. It’s not the chefs dictating to the farmer what they need. It’s the farmer dictating to the chefs, saying, ‘This is what we have.’ That leads to the true essence of what a culinarian is. They manipulate food.”

Stark wants to take the food at the hospital where few foods have gone.

“I really want to take the food across the board. I want to take it to the patients. I want to take it to employees. I want to take it to guests of the hospital – good wholesome food that is prepared from the heart. The person who is serving it has helped manipulate it and there’s pride there."

Prescribing food

While Glenn and other hospital officials say the reaction to fresh greens and chicken cordon bleu have been across-the-board positive, Stark is more modest, even a bit reserved.

“You’re going to have people who say, ‘I want the old standbys,’ but for the most part, the majority of people are pretty excited,” he said.

Stark started off by giving people choices – adding fresh fruit next to the big basket of cookies the hospital is known for – and kicking up the salad bar a notch or two.

“Right off the bat we can get local lettuces and fresh vegetables. We have Bob's Bagels. We’ve use Rick’s salmon, fresh snapper,” he says of Cape Cleare’s salmon, bits of which he paired with Collinwood potatoes for salmon-potato cakes.

Down the line, Stark even envisions that old hospital favorite – Jell-O – getting a makeover with fruit juice.

For now, he’s having fun, a lot of fun.

 So how does chicken cordon bleu sound for hospital cuisine?

“With the baby boomer generation now spending more time in the hospital, they’re expecting the Hilton Hotel and they haven’t been getting it,” Stark said of expectations. “So I think, as a national trend, that’s where hospitals are going.”

“If I’m serving chicken cordon bleu encrusted with black quinoa we’re going to sell 80 of them in the first hour and a half. We did that and it sold 60 in an hour,” Stark said of one trial run, a “having fun with inexpensive ingredients” for lunch. And yes, those were made with the frozen chicken breasts.

In the meantime, Stark is hoping not to be inundated with a lunch rush.

“Eventually, when I get all my ducks in a row I’d like to have people from the community come in and enjoy the food. I want this to be a community space,” says Stark.

“My dream is to get with doctors and formulate menus and even get to the point of prescribing good nutritious food.

“We’re a hospital. We should be building health. The biggest health builder is food,” said Stark.

Not the first

While it may surprise some that Stark, a cooking demonstrator at the Port Townsend Farmers Market, has taken root at the hospital, it’s not Stark’s first venture into a corporate setting.

He served as executive sous chef for the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and then also was the executive chef there.

He also was the executive chef of a Peruvian restaurant in Portland, Ore., when it was named restaurant of the year, an honor he saw coming but one he said upended his lifestyle because it became so popular.

At Jefferson Healthcare, Stark has made the easy changes he could, such as beefing up the salad bar and connecting with farmers for fresh produce. Now the tough changes are ahead, including figuring a way to infuse flavor into low-sodium diets.

“The changes I made were ones I could make right off the back,” he said. “I knew coming into this there would be some expectations. I’ve been working pretty hard making a name for myself in the culinary world.”

“So I want to make changes here that are positive and reflect my beliefs. I have an opportunity to do a little preaching. Every time they come up to the window I can do a little preaching,” he said.

This week, at the cafeteria counter, right above the selections of warm entrees, there’s a poster advertising the good food revolution and Will Allen’s speech Saturday during the Northwest Earth Institute’s gathering at Fort Worden State Park. (See story on page C1)

“I’m putting a lot of love and thought and concern into this project,” Stark said of his new position as food services director at the hospital, one he says he expects to stick to – while also cooking fresh in his own kitchens in Port Townsend.