Behind the Scenes at the Smith Cafe

Each school day, about 1/3 of Prep’s student body uses the food services from the Smith Family Café. Food options and the daily menu, including a great variety of cookies, soups, and sandwiches, are served and prepared daily by head chef Ms. Kenyetta Carter and her staff.

The mastermind behind it all, Ms. Carter, has been in the restaurant business for 32 years and was even chef at the famous Kingfish Café on Capitol Hill for fifteen years. Before this, she minored in nutrition and graduated with a BA in food science and production management. She started her work at Prep in the fall of 2014, following the remodel of Adelphia Memorial Hall. Upon arrival, she was tasked with creating a food service program for multiple locations on campus.

“I used my many years of restaurant skills and research to build a program from the ground up,” expressed Ms. Carter. In creating a new food program for the school, it was her goal to move away from more institutionalized style lunches (compartment trays) to something “homier.”

Today, the general rotation of hot entrees served only in the Smith cafeteria include Meatless Mondays, Taco Tuesdays, Sandwich Wednesday, Wild Card Thursday, and Comfort Friday, mostly being pizza or fish. On some Fridays, “I mix it up if there’s a holiday or something I want to showcase,” saidCarter. The daily entrée is posted on the PowerSchool calendar. There is also a salad bar open every day and a weekly rotating pasta and burrito bowl in the cafeteria.

In creating the weekly menu, Carter starts with mostly crowd favorites and says that it will “sprinkle in the more creative items that appeal to more adventurous eaters.” Proper nutrition is also a factor in creating the menu, however, Carter admits that balancing nutrition is quite difficult.

“The healthy options we offer are not always the most popular, but I like that we switch out some of the less healthy options with a more thoughtful option,” she says. These alternatives include wheat pasta in the pasta bar, the spinach or wheat wrap on a burrito, or making their fries, salad dressings and soups to cut down on sugars, salt and processed oils that exist in already processed foods. Carter does claim that “I do sneak in a surprising amount of vegetable, fiber, and fruit to balance everything out.”

“I’m also a believer in moderation, so burgers and fries don’t get sacrificed for nutrition,” she adds.

Carter gets her ingredients from local purveyors that she had developed relationships with for over 20 years. This way, she says, they know her needs quite well. This includes several ingredients from Harbor Foods, whose corporate campus is in Lacey, WA, produce from Charlie’s Produce here in Seattle, and meats from Kirkland butcher Cascioppo Brothers.

“The quality rarely suffers because I have built a reputation and relationship with these companies, they keep me informed of trends or items that would benefit my operations, and with being mostly local they can get things quickly to me,” said Carter.

In the modern Smith Café food program, “I didn’t want to dictate to students. I wanted to have them make choices, so that’s why the sides that come with lunches are available,” relayed Carter. Choices of optional sides include hard-boiled eggs, carrot sticks, tangerines, apples, apple sauce, and many other smaller yet healthy snacks.

Studies have proved that better nutrition will boost a student’s focus and energy. Nutrition is also shown to help students perform better for athletic events, and thus should be important in the Prep community, as 75% of Prep students play at least one sport. And, as a chef for Prep students, Carter believes that food is a great contributor to the overall health and wellness of the human body. “When your stomach is happy, a lot of other things fall into place. If you overeat, you can feel sleepy and unmotivated, too much salt can make you bloated and cause high blood pressure. When you eat well, you can perform better in almost all areas of life,” she says.

“You only get one body, so why not take care of it?”