FareStart Restaurant Will Reopen to Feed Our Mission and Welcome Back the Community
FareStart’s flagship restaurant at 7th and Virginia will reopen its doors later this month. We sat down with FareStart Senior Vice President of Social Enterprises, Meg Viera (she/her), to learn more about the plans and why this is such an important step in fulfilling FareStart’s mission.
What is the concept behind the new FareStart Restaurant?
Our focus will always be on job training and employment. The FareStart Restaurant will serve as both a front-of-the-house and back-of-the-house classroom for our students. We have a unique opportunity to welcome the community in to see our mission at work while offering a comfortable place for the community to gather.
We also needed to recognize the needs of the community in our neighborhood. It is a fast-paced environment, our pre-COVID model of a traditional sit-down restaurant needed to change. Our new model is much more flexible and dynamic; it keeps the best elements of the former restaurant (creating a gathering space for community to come together while providing student training opportunities), while evolving to meet the changing needs of our customer and to best prepare students for employment.
The restaurant will look a little different to those who have known us for years. The most dramatic change will be the service counter where people can purchase hand crafted beverages, pastries, breakfast and lunch grab-and-go items to take with them or to sit down and eat in our dining room.
Some will notice that we relocated our community table from the center of the room to the windows. This new placement creates a more functional flow of space and provides the perfect seat to watch our busy neighborhood while enjoying items from our menu. Other than that, it is really a refresh, with new tables, paint and flooring. We used this space for packing and prep for the millions of meals we put out during COVID, so there was some obvious wear to it. We took the opportunity to do some acoustical work to cut down on ambient noise, and we have added audio visual capabilities on the mezzanine level to better integrate that space and make it more functional for private events.
Will the restaurant be open in the evenings and on weekends?
We are excited to reintroduce Guest Chef Nights in the FareStart Restaurant, which will allow us to bring our students, staff, volunteers and the community together to share a meal and connect with our mission. Guest Chef Nights are a fantastic opportunity for our students to work with other people in the industry, have another point of learning and make connections for future employment opportunities.
FareStart will host a minimum of 12 Guest Chef Nights in 2024. We held our first two earlier this year before pausing for the restaurant refresh that is just finishing up. We will resume in June with an amazing lineup of chef partners, starting with several of FareStart’s longtime supporters and friends: Chef Michela Tartaglia of Pasta Casalinga on June 27 and Chef Brendan McGill of the Hitchcock Restaurant Group on July 18 (tickets will go on sale on our website on 6/20).
The restaurant will also be available for private events catered by FareStart staff and students, providing yet another opportunity for student training while the community gathers for a meal.
Why did the FareStart Restaurant concept change?
When COVID hit, we closed the restaurant and redeployed our resources to meet the enormous food security needs of our community. We were proud to provide over 5.3 million meals during the pandemic. As things began to open up, FareStart remained committed to our work in feeding the community.
We are now diversifying training opportunities for our students and have invited more students into our Food Pathways Program. We are thrilled to expand our social enterprises – as a way to build community, generate revenue and most importantly, provide job training for our students. Now is the right time for FareStart.
We have re-opened our cafés in both South Lake Union and Beacon Hill, welcomed people into our restaurant space for private events, and just this year began offering box lunches. As we turned our attention to reactivating the restaurant, we needed to take stock of how the industry had evolved in our absence. We knew that the labor industry had changed, and that peoples’ patterns of work and pace of life were different, so it became clear that our traditional restaurant model had to evolve as well.
We were really fortunate to be able to tap into the expertise of Deloitte Consulting to help us map out a business plan for our social enterprise businesses. Deloitte provided pro bono work where they assessed different restaurants and the broader restaurant industry, both hyper-locally in the neighborhood, as well as expanded to the city and national level. They were able to look at the market from many different angles and on many different levels and help us build a robust business plan.
What food will the restaurant offer?
We are expanding to offer both breakfast and lunch, giving our students more robust training opportunities and our customers more options to enjoy a meal, interact with our space and see our mission at work.
The morning will be geared to grab-and-go so that people can get what they need to start their day and quickly head out the door. We will have delicious pre-made items like breakfast sandwiches and burritos heated up at the counter, as well as pastries and coffee.
At lunchtime, people will have the option of grabbing items to-go like salads and sandwiches, or they can order items at the counter that will be prepared in our kitchen and delivered to their table.
Our food will be delicious and accessible for anyone who walks in the door. We are calling it ‘comfort classics.’ Very good, straight-forward, familiar and satisfying food with a variety of different flavors.
Students in our Food Pathways Program will work alongside our chefs, gaining the job skills needed for future careers in the food service industry and beyond. Fundamentally, we are here for our students, and now our customers can also feel aligned with this mission as well. We will combine hospitality, skilled staff and great food, and ground it all in our mission of transforming lives through job training. This is what sets FareStart apart.
How do the restaurant and FareStart’s other social enterprises feed its mission?
We will now have many opportunities for our students to experience different and more robust customer service, hospitality and food-related career paths. The restaurant creates different types of training opportunities in areas such as food preparation, working on the grill, plating and more, as well as the potential for front-of-house training which we will be exploring later in the year.
We also have two different kitchens where students work alongside staff trainers to produce our Community & School Meals. We offer private event catering in the FareStart Restaurant and a box lunch program which offer additional job training opportunities. And then of course there are our cafés which provide younger students ages 15 ½- 24 with job training as a barista and in customer service.
With the launch and expansion of all these new businesses, we’ll have more capacity and resources for more students. FareStart plans to train 140 Food Pathways students this year, an approximate 80% increase in student enrollment over 2023.
What does the future look like for FareStart?
Innovation is ingrained in our approach, so we will continue learning, exploring new ideas, refining solutions and doing what’s best for our students, staff and community.
With support from community partners, donors, volunteers and staff, we are building a strong foundation that will enable FareStart to grow and thrive in the years to come. Our focus for the remainder of this year will be to optimize our existing operations, adapt to the needs of our customers, establish a reliable and self-sustaining revenue stream and further build out our student training opportunities.
We also have a deep commitment to increasing food security in our community, providing healthy meals and beautiful produce and food to those who need it. While we open the FareStart Restaurant, we remain committed to our Community & School Meals Program and our Mobile Community Market. We will look for ways to expand those efforts while realizing efficiencies and optimizing for long-term sustainability.
FareStart is profoundly grateful to our donors for their generous support as we worked to reopen the FareStart Restaurant: Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Boeing Employees Community Fund, Deloitte Consulting, Joshua Green Foundation, La Marzocco, NBBJ, Sunderland Foundation, WA State Department of Commerce, Wyncote Foundation Northwest.
