PORT TOWNSEND — Jefferson Healthcare’s Garden Row Cafe is now serving hot entrees and is open to the public.
The cafe is open daily with breakfast running from 7 a.m. to 9:30 a.m., lunch from 11:30 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. and dinner from 4 p.m. to 6:30 p.m.
The cafe accepts credit and debit cards but not cash.
The cafe held a public soft opening to the public on Sept. 22 and was open to hospital staff and patients not long before that, chef Arran Stark said.
“I think now we’re just getting into this momentum,” Stark said.
The cafe had not been open to the public for years, first because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Then it was due to Jefferson Healthcare’s multi-year expansion project, which was recently completed.
Before the cafe opened, the hospital kitchen staff had been limited to serving hot soups and stews or grab-and-go options to staff and patients.
“It seemed like overnight, not only did we bring the laurels of that grab-and-go opportunity to this new iteration, but we also are like, ‘OK, we’re back in the hot soups and hot entrees,’” Stark said. “I think that staff really got excited about that.”
A separate line for quick purchase is available for staff, helping to maximize their breaks.
A servery was stood up in a hospital conference room during construction, and the kitchen staff cooked out of a kitchen at the Jefferson County fairgrounds.
The kitchen was built by Jefferson Healthcare for the stop-gap and as an investment in the community, Stark said, noting that an option for leasing a mobile kitchen unit would not have left the community asset now in place.
During the 2½ years of construction, kitchen staff learned precisely how to transfer hot soup and stews, cold grab-and-go meals and microwavable options the nearly three miles from the fairgrounds to the hospital, Stark said.
The staff also served hot breakfast sandwiches and oatmeal, along with coffee, he added.
Now the cafe has assumed a rhythm of serving two or three hot entrees for lunch and dinner. Each of the mealtimes will include two or three protein options, including something plant-based.
Generally, to make the most of ingredients, a lunch menu one day will become the dinner menu the following day, Stark said. Readers can view the current menu at jeffersonhealthcare.org/garden-row-cafe.
The weekend menu is more flexible. Stark provides his cooks with some inspiration and ingredients as a base and gives them lots of leeway to be creative, he said.
The cafe also has returned with an espresso counter, a made-to-order sandwich menu — sold by the pound — and a salad bar.
Most of the greens and vegetables from the salad bar come from Red Dog Farm, Midori Farm or Spring Rain Farm, Stark said. The kitchen does purchase from a variety of other local growers, he added.
The kitchen consistently purchases stew meat and ground beef from local sources and salmon from Key City Fish Company. The kitchen buys stock bones locally and makes its own beef stock, chicken stock and gelatin on a weekly basis and sometimes makes tapioca, he added.
In Port Townsend for about 20 years now, Stark, a classically trained chef and has been at Jefferson Healthcare for 15 of those years.
“Growing up in kitchens, kind of the least thing you aspire to be is a cafeteria cook at a school, or a cook at a hospital,” Stark said. “But then if you kill that ego and you say, ‘No, what could this be?’ And what it really is, is that I get to feed a full spectrum of my community, people in all sorts of situations, and realize that one of the few pleasure points of being a patient in a hospital is food.”
A core inspiration of Stark’s was being in a Seattle hospital for six weeks when his son had RSV and having so little interest in the onsite food options that he would leave the hospital to eat and return.
The food was ironically unhealthy, something he compared to selling cigarettes at a hospital.
Within Stark’s first year, he began purchasing food for the hospital from local producers.
“We live in a rare place, and that is that we have the cornucopia,” he said. “I mean, we have all the fish, we have all the organic vegetables, we have beef, we have pork, we have shellfish, grain, mushrooms. It’s all right here.”
In previous years, the hospital has purchased vouchers from producers early in the year to invest in them but also to maintain a steady flow of locally sourced foods through its kitchen.
In 2026, the cafe will resume purchasing vouchers, Stark said.
The hospital serves an average of 16 patients staying at the hospital on any given day. The kitchen works closely with a dietary concierge to calibrate a menu that works with patients’ dietary restrictions, Stark said.
Stark is particularly interested in refining the cafe’s plant-based options and hopes it will be known for them moving forward.
The early dinner hours, starting at 4 p.m., come from a desire to serve an aging population. Stark said the idea was inspired by a conversation with his friend, chef Gabriel Schuenemann, co-owner of Alder Street Bistro in Sequim.
“It becomes this social opportunity for seniors to come eat,” Stark said.
The cafeteria has plenty of seating, a room with sliding glass doors which allows for meeting space, and Stark plans to re-engage in cooking demos in the space, which is equipped with a camera that could record the public demonstrations.
On one end of the room is a built-in bookshelf, which contains a large collection of Stark’s personal cookbooks. Only a minority part of the books in his overall collection, he said.
Stark said the cafe’s heated and covered outdoor space, complete with tables and landscaping, was inspired by his friends Ned Herbert and Virginia Marston, co-owners of the Pourhouse.
“It’s a solar deck,” Stark said. “So you get the light coming through the opaque roof, but you don’t get wet.”
Still early days for the new cafe, Stark said it’s served about 300 people per day, roughly doubling revenue since it opened.
The food program brings in about $4,000 daily during the week and $1,000 over the weekend, he said.
Finances for the cafe, which are subsidized by the hospital, are expected to become clearer with more time, but extrapolating from the first months of operations, the hospital is expecting to budget $2.5 million for the cafe in 2026, Stark said. That budget may be reassessed partway through the year.
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Reporter Elijah Sussman can be reached by email at elijah.sussman@peninsuladailynews.com.
