1) When a restaurant is more than a restaurant

It seems that half of the people we all know have dreams of starting their own restaurant. And we felt extremely lucky as we opened the doors of Modern Tea in March of 2006. Our location is great for serving a wide demographic being at the cornerstone of a neighborhood that sees a lot of changes. Our doors grace the foot of the independently stylish Hayes Street shopping district and the back of our building neighbors low income housing that traverses up four more blocks to John Muir Elementary School to our west. San Francisco's City Hall is just 5 blocks east of us.

After a year of amazing support from our customers we realized we wanted to find a stronger connection to the neighborhood. We dovetailed with a local nonprofit, the Hayes Valley Neighborhood Parks Group this past summer - they spearhead a vegetable garden at Koshland Park and help fund a garden educator at John Muir Elementary, among many other accomplishments. Together we offered cooking classes at Modern Tea to our neighborhood youth, ages 10-14 who signed up through the local Beacon Center.

And so it began on Monday afternoons during the summer. The response from the kids was fantastic. We realized that if we could do this on an ongoing basis, we would be serving our local youth in a vital way: being able to expose them to where our food comes from, ways to cook it and enjoying it at a table with others. Then we started to think about older kids - what if we could do some kind of ongoing inservice job training? Not just this garden to table connection that makes the food on our plates taste so much better, but exposure to what it is like to work, and what its like to work at a restaurant? And what if we could make it even more fun after awhile and put together events at the restaurant where the kids plan, cook & serve? Suddenly the meaning of what we do every day matters more to us even just with the potential of these ongoing involvements and our connection to our customers and our neighbors are stronger as we share what we are discovering daily in these efforts.

At this time we have started a small after school garden to table program and are planning inservice training for older youth in early 2008. Events we hope will soon follow. Judging from the excited drive of one of our newest garden to tablers (thank you Marilyn!) it could be sooner than later.

Project #1) the garden to table classes

We have started our garden to table series again this November with 10-14 year olds who have signed up through the local Beacon Center. Every other Monday we come together at Modern Tea over a recipe and cook together, plate and eat together. We even look forward to cleaning the dishes together! On those Mondays we are not at Modern Tea, we garden at the vegetable garden in Koshland Park.










At the end of the series, each student is given a recipe book of the recipes we've made and we hope to keep in touch with them through our Beacon Center connection.

Project #2) for older youth in our neighborhood

Between lunch and dinner service we have less structure and more opportunity for a young person who has never had a job to come in and be exposed to what working in a professional restaurant could be like. From plating a salad to seating and timing service for a customer, there are many opportunities in the kitchen and dining room for youth 14 and over to learn fundamental working skills they could take anywhere in the world. We want to provide a structured, safe environment where a student could work a few hours a week to gain this knowledge on an individual and ongoing basis.

Project #3) modern cooks events

Modern Tea is a beautiful place to host an event with the ambiance ranging from walking into someones' candlelit dining room, to a festive celebration that extends out from the activity in the kitchen. For youth ages 12-18 who want to be part of something, but not necessarily an ongoing weekly class, joining in on an upcoming planned event can develop teamwork, food & business knowledge, work ethic and best of all fun with peers, food professionals and neighbors towards a common goal. Having an events program can round out our offerings as it develops an earned sense of accomplishment for everyone involved.

useful, easy checklists

We realize there are so many good people in the Bay Area that also cook with kids and see the potential for helping youth who want to learn to cook as a vocation. It is a job you can take anywhere in the world. As we look closer, we realize that it would help to have two tools developed: a simple checklist of what a young person needs to know before even walking into a commercial kitchen; and another "work ready" checklist once he or she has learned a variety of tasks exemplifying what they can do. We would love to network with other restaurants to develop a usable "work ready checklist."

who we are

Alice Cravens is the owner of Modern Tea, and even though she loves being behind the tea bar or out on the dining room floor with customers, she is always trying to find ways to sneak back into the kitchen. This has been one of the most rewarding and fun ways to do that.
Besides running a restaurant, she also supplies tea to several restaurants in the Bay Area.


Nora Brereton is the lead garden educator for the Hayes Valley Neighborhoods Parks Group and is based at both John Muir Elementary School and Koshland Park. For several years she has developed programs centered around educating youth about where our food comes from and how rewarding it is to grow, harvest & cook your own food.












Alicia Paullin is our lead savory chef at Modern Tea and she lives for fun in the kitchen. But she also has magical talents in the organizational, motivational and sheer "turning something delicious out of nothing" realms that make her a perfect, professional foil to whomever else happens to be in the kitchen.

monday cooks: kale & tortillas

10/20/2008:
Today was the first day for this group at Modern Tea. Our first class, we took the bus over to the Victory Garden - cool but also not what the kids expected.
This crowd is a little older, the first class is always a little bit of a toss up we wonder as Charles truly starts acting out and complaining - Elokin is on the phone with someone and Alicia ends up handling it - and Charles comes back and involves himself - beautifully. We make tortillas and saute 3 different types of kale with garlic, and have a fruit salad. The blue corn tortillas don't quite work, but the kids eat them anyway. They love the kale - this is good! Darius says.
Are we a family?
Can we be a family?
We are a cooking family.

Volunteers

We have a developing volunteer base that we'd love to stay in touch with as the programs develop. If you are interested, please stop by or drop us an email and let us know how you would like to be involved.

some budgetary guidelines

While a majority of the start up costs for these programs(namely equipment & permits) have already been taken care of with the creation of Modern Tea, there are developmental and ongoing costs we need to consider with this program including:

• time spent with recipe development geared towards youth cooking at home
• overhead (rental fee & utilities) on the days Modern Tea is closed for teaching
• labor costs for garden to table and inservice training efforts performed by our staff
• small wears & ingredients
• promotional materials & documentation

If you'd like to see a work in progress budget in a spreadsheet format, please click here.

monday cooks: tamales

5/12/08: oh boy, tamales sounded great, but they take a loooonnnnngggg time to steam! We used vegetable oil instead of lard. Our fillings were pretty good though: a chard, onion, carrot with some salsa in it, all sauteed up (they were eating this straight from the bowl) and our chopped apple cranberry salad cooked down with a touch of cinnamon and brown sugar - they asked before tasting this.
9 young ones today and I look forward to next time. They love the wrapping part too, so we are going to go asian with fresh spring rolls & dumplings.

monday cooks: yoghurt ice cream, strawberries, crepes, salad

4/28/08: We don't do a lot of desserts, but this time we made this great low sugar yoghurt ice cream in the old ice cream maker on the sidewalk while Alicia's team made crepes and Nora's team made salad from the garden (chard, fava beans(good nitrogen feeder for soil) nastursiums & fava greens). Ice cream went into bowls lined with the crepes. While we make salad everytime, this time it was a particularly nice foil.

10/27/2008: Pasta, salad & breakfast biscotti

Only 5 kids today since they had a field trip.  Did alicia's pasta, sauteed with basil and cherry tomatoes sliced in half - not a lot of tomato takers, but they love rolling out pasta.

Overactive knife trouble?  We switched to tearing basil and raced together - he won.

The salad was tasty with Magdelena's dressing & fuyu persimmons

the biscotti?  A fig newton biscotti recipe but we layered inbetween these cooked up apples, pears & quince syrup - actually the apples & pears were from last week's salad.  Seemed too sweet raw but cooked up well. you could press it into the pan instead.

It was our last class at Modern Tea.