Tom Douglas: Seattle’s New Lunch Lady?

By Rachel Belle

Listen to Tom Douglas…The New Seattle Lunch Lady?

The plastic trays, the lunch ladies, the little cartons of milk; I think everyone has memories of their school’s cafeteria lunch. At my elementary school, the chimichangas were notoriously disgusting and uncool. Eating one could turn even the most popular girl into a social leper.

“Everything was gross,” says my co-worker Jillian Raftery. “We would try not to eat the school lunches. It was just kind of…ugh! It was too gross to even talk about!”

“First thing I think of when I think of school lunches is sitting alone and everything tasted like tears,” laments Ross & Burbank’s producer Andrew Walsh (who, it should be noted, cried during our short interview.) “Secondly, I would say I remember square pizza. I loved square pizza! Are you kidding me?”

If you’re eating a homemade PB&J or a Lean Cuisine for lunch today, prepare to be jealous of Seattle Public School students. The district has partnered with Tom Douglas restaurants, and executive chef Eric Tanaka to create some delicious, nutritious menu items that are being served to 18,000 kids a day in all the city’s schools.

“Butternut squash and chicken curry that we served over Israeli couscous. So it’s a curry spice, a little bit of cardamom, coconut milk, fresh veggies, red peppers.”

Kids, like 13-year-old Miyah Rosenfeldt, are loving it. She agrees with me that the dish tastes like it was served at a Thai restaurant.

“It actually tastes like curry, unlike the old curry, that didn’t really taste at all like curry.”

On Thursday at Queen Anne’s McClure Middle School, they served baked pollock with a sauce Provencal, which is tomatoes and olives.

“That was kind of a long shot, but actually the kids really loved that one,” says Chef Tanaka. “The kids kind of dictated that that went on.”

Eighth grader Charmaine Walker says she likes the food much better than before.

“They probably just thought we wanted food to eat, and didn’t care what we eat. But we actually kind of do.”

Fourteen-year-old Jason Lu says kids’ palates have been underestimated.

“I’m more of a person who likes to live balanced. I always want at least some sort of veggie inside what I eat.”

“I’ll admit, for myself, I think I’ve been underestimating them,” says Wendy Weyer, the district’s director of Nutrition Services. “One of the things that the students actually brought forward, that they eat at home, that they don’t see on the school lunch menu, was kind of a steamed, baked white fish. So we developed this menu concept around what kids were telling us they wanted to see.”

Weyer says they have plans to incorporate other local chefs into their menu planning. The planning itself is a bit challenging: They only have $1.25 to spend, per meal, per student and some pretty strict nutritional guidelines. Not to mention the daunting task of creating recipes that will stand up to being cooked in mass quantities.

As for the privilege of eating Tom Douglas’ food in their school cafeteria, not surprisingly, none of the kids I met have ever heard of the James Beard Award winner. But that’s totally cool with Chef Tanaka, a dad of three, who’s doing this as a sort of passion project because he cares about kids and nutrition. Chef Tanaka has his own fond memories of school lunches past.

“I actually love school lunch. It was probably worse then than it is now, but I’m an eater so bad food didn’t stop me. My favorite day was burrito day. I got suspended from school for setting our clock ahead to the shop bell, which rang 10 minutes early, to get out to be first in line, and I got busted.”

No one would have ever set the clock ahead on chimichanga day.

By Rachel Belle