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The philosophy of Cool
CHEF-RESTAURATEUR JESSE COOL ON FARM-TO-TABLE, SOCIAL JUSTICE AND THE FUTURE OF FLEA ST. CAFE By Elena Kadvany
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t Flea St. Cafe in Menlo Park, the customer always comes last. It sounds counterintuitive — even unappealing — but when longtime owner Jesse Ziff Cool explains it, it makes sense. Since she first opened Flea St. Cafe more than 30 years ago, her first allegiance has been to the people serving the customers and by extension, the people growing and raising the food on their plates. “If you take care of the soil and the environment and the water, and the way the farmers, the fishermen and the ranchers are treated, and then you take care of the dishwashers and you take care of all the people all the way through, then the customer will get taken care of,” she said in a recent interview at the restaurant. The philosophy embodies what Cool has always been about: high-quality food made from organic ingredients, with a touch of political activism and social justice on the side. The longtime local chef and restaurant owner was championing farm-to-table cuisine and the slow-food movement on the Peninsula before those terms even existed. Arguably, it’s in Cool’s blood. She grew up in a small coalmining town in Western Pennsylvania, where her father, an Orthodox Jew, owned a grocery store. He used local ingredients at a bakery he opened, to make ice cream from scratch and to cook for the family, as well as his staff. Her uncle owned a local meat processing plant,
which Cool said exposed her to whole-animal eating — cutting down on food waste by using every part of an animal. Food carried her through raising her child as a single mother on welfare — she cooked lunch several days a week in exchange for her sonís tuition at a private Quaker preschool in Pennsylvania. And when she arrived in Palo Alto in the 1970s, in a Volkswagen bus she had painted with rainbows, she became one of the first waitresses at the healthconscious Good Earth Restaurant on University Avenue. In 1976, when she opened Late for the Train in Menlo Park with her then-husband Bob Cool, the premise was “food that had no artificial anything in it that was made by hand and (with) love,” she said. The restaurant became a community fixture until its closure in 2003. Cool went on to open four more restaurants under the same belief: Flea St. (on Alameda de las Pulgas, which translate to Avenue of the Fleas) in 1980, the now-shuttered jZ Cool in downtown Menlo Park in 1999, Cool Cafe at Stanford University’s Cantor Art Center in 2000 and a second cafe at the Menlo Business Park seven years ago. At Flea St., the kitchen draws inspiration from local farms, Cool’s own gardens and a row of unlikely planting beds in the restaurant’s back parking lot, brimming this spring with herbs like Thai basil, cilantro and peppermint celery. They follow a menu but
VERONICA WEBER
Jesse Ziff Cool sits in a booth in her Menlo Park restaurant, Flea St. Cafe. The chef-owner helped introduce organic, sustainable fare to the Midpeninsula at her first restaurant, Late for the Train, in 1976 and has stayed true to her principles ever since.
are constantly adjusting dishes based on what produce, meats or seafood are available. “We don’t look for the perfect beauty; we look for the perfect taste and the way it’s grown,” Cool said. “We keep food simple.” Over the years, Cool has worked to spread her dogma beyond the kitchen. For 11 years, she has taught a cooking curriculum class for the Stanford Teaching Education Program (STEP) and nine years ago spearheaded an effort to revamp the food Stanford Hospital serves its employees (goodbye, mystery meat;
hello grass-fed beef burgers and steamed local beets). She’s taught young children at the Boys & Girls Club in East Palo Alto how to make her signature biscuits and hosted local farms for special dinners at the restaurant. She’s been a prolific writer, with newspaper columns, magazines articles and seven cookbooks — including one solely about tomatoes — under her belt. Today, Cool is still unapologetically political, with a penchant for social justice. She recently designated Flea St. Cafe a sanctuary restaurant in support of her immigrant
employees. A sign posted outside the restaurant’s front door, next to the menu of the day, reads: “We welcome everyone at our tables and in our kitchen.” She’s also taking a newly hired young female chef to a conference this year, demonstrating how seriously she takes her role as a female mentor in a male-dominated industry. Flea St. is also entering a new chapter, with a new executive chef heading the kitchen: Charlie Parker, a 30-something Menlo Park native who grew up blocks from the restaurant See JESSE COOL, page 16
April 14, 2017 Q Mountain View Voice Q MountainViewOnline.com Q
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