Going green is nothing new to Jesse Cool. It’s part of her heritage. The restaurateur, organic food expert, celebrity chef, and author credits her dad, the late Eddie Ziff, with “planting the seeds for my lifelong commitment to sustainable agriculture and organic farming.”
In her book “Tomatoes,” Ms. Cool traces her passion for “pure” food to the old-world ethics of her parents. She grew up in Pennsylvania, where her father was an avid gardener who avoided pesticides or chemical fertilizers. He also owned a grocery store.
Her Italian mother and grandmother were good cooks. “We grew a lot of our food and, if we didn’t grow it, we knew where it came from,” she says.
After moving to California in her 20s, Ms. Cool worked at the Good Earth restaurant in Palo Alto. She also joined the Briar Patch food cooperative, where “the produce wasn’t beautiful, but the flavors were there.”
When she became a partner in Late for the Train restaurant in Menlo Park in the mid 1970s and, later, opened Flea Street Cafe on Alameda de las Pulgas, she was determined to serve food raised without artificial chemicals. It wasn’t easy. “It was so hard to get organic in those days. We used to UPS our canned tomatoes.”
Jesse Cool has never wavered from her goal of serving food that is organic and local. Of her three restaurants, Flea Street Cafe, JZCool Eatery in downtown Menlo Park, and Cool Cafe at the Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford, she says on her Web site, “We know where our food comes from and how its is produced.”
In the past few years, Cooleatz Inc., which owns the three restaurants, has expanded its commitment to “going green” by recycling all materials and reducing waste to a minimum.
“Waste management isn’t glamorous, but because we are aware of the effect it has on the water, air and soil, we compost about 94 percent of our waste,” she says.
All the restaurants’ “to go” packaging is made from plant bi-products: wheat corn and rice.
“Everything is composted, down to the straws. We use as little plastic wrap as possible, no plastic bottles.” All cleaning supplies are bio-degradable.
Planet-friendly products were also featured in the recent remodel of Flea Street Cafe. The bar has been updated with cherry-stained bamboo floors and a bar surface of recycled glass.
Times have been rough in the restaurant business, but now Cooleatz is doing “extremely well,” says Ms. Cool. Success is especially sweet because it affords her staff decent wages as well as medical and dental benefits. Many staff members are longtime employees, unusual in the “somewhat brutal food industry.”
When Jesse Cool opened her first organic restaurant more than 30 years ago, critics said it couldn’t be done. Today, with three restaurants, a catering company, and several cookbooks to her credit, Jesse Cool has proven that “going green” is not only good for the planet, it’s good for business.
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