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Diners at the Indian Station in the Bear’s Den at Washington University in St. Louis, MO, often marvel at the quality, variety, and authenticity of the meals served there. While those qualities may be standard at Bon Appétit, Wash U does have two secret ingredients: two special cooks who work there: Sona Kukal, born in Kolkata in east India, and Zach Khan, born in Karachi, Pakistan.

To galvanize the U.S. government to set labeling and inspection standards, Oceana has launched a Stop Seafood Fraud campaign with a letter for chefs and restaurant owners to sign, asking for stricter seafood regulations. The letter was unveiled Monday, May 14, in Washington, DC, in an event featuring “The Office” star Angela Kinsey, a seafood advocate, and renowned sustainable seafood chef Barton Seaver. Oceana reached out to Bon Appétit to ask for our support, and we’re proud that about 20% of the names on Oceana’s list of 300 chefs and restaurant owners are Bon Appétit Management Company ones, alongside such culinary leaders as Rick Bayless, Eric Ripert and Michael Symon.

Explore the world of misunderstood vegetables this May! This month’s Well Being Challenge encourages you to try a vegetable you are not familiar with one time per week, whether in a Bon Appétit Cafe or at home. To get started, try the below recipe for a stir frycontaining pea shoots, which are only available in the spring so be sure to act quickly. To learn more about misunderstood vegetables, visit cafebonappetit.com.

Recently I met two very different Farm to Fork suppliers for Bon Appétit accounts in North Carolina — about as different as you’d expect a fish distributor and a beef rancher to be. Yet they had one key thing in common that made partnerships with our teams work.

Since I moved to Seattle a year and a half ago, there’s no farm whose name has come up more than Quillisascut, located in the foothills of the Huckleberry Mountains in Rice, WA. And since I visit farms as Bon Appétit Management Company Foundation’s West Coast Fellow, I have lots of conversations about food and farming. Quillisascut is a cheese company, selling what they call “traditional farmstead cheese from the pampered pets of Pleasant Valley,” but it’s also a school for the domestic arts. After completing a five-day “Introduction to Farming” workshop at Quillisascut recently, nicely documented by Farmgirl Gourmet, I understand why this farm school is so beloved by food service professionals, healthcare students, farmers and aspiring farmers, vacationers, and other “co-producers” (as Slow Food and the farm’s cookbook, Chefs on the Farm refer to us “eaters”). Attendees from […]

What better way to celebrate this month’s Well Being Challenge, which invites you to explore the world of misunderstood vegetables than with fennel? To learn more about the misunderstood vegetables, visit cafebonappetit.com

Fennel Bulb and Frond Gratin

At Bon Appétit, we love local food — just ask the thousand-plus small farmers, fishers, and artisans who supply us through our Farm to Fork program. Inspired by them, teams at many of our corporate accounts have started growing some of their own food. These “kitchen gardens” not only provide ultra-fresh herbs and other produce, but also give us the opportunity to educate our guests about importance of local and sustainable food — and the hard work that goes into growing it. Here’s a look at “what’s growing on” at eBay, Target, and SAP!

The question is: How do you connect large volume needs of the University with the very small volume output of most Midwestern family farms? Bon Appétit at Washington University recently hosted a farmer’s meeting, inviting over 35 farmers from Illinois and Missouri, to tackle exactly this question.