The Dining Hall & Kitchen: Heart of the FHL Campus

by Megan Dethier, FHL Director

A year ago we celebrated via Tide Bite the hard work and great attitudes of two essential FHL teams: the Maintenance and Custodial staffs.  This month we are highlighting another core team and a remarkable space that is the heart of campus: the kitchen staff and Dining Hall.  Few visitors have not spent time in the wonderful old building, and the collaborations that have begun during a chat at one of the tables inside or on the deck are beyond counting!

First, the space.  According to our unofficial historian Claudia Mills, the Dining Hall will be 100 years old next year.  It was designed by Carl F. Gould, who also played a significant role in designing the UW Seattle campus.  When it was completed in 1924, it included a library space on each end, and cement-floor kitchen and lavatories on the north side.  Little has changed since then except for the addition of more restrooms, and the relocation of books to a library that is now in the Fernald Building.  The Maintenance crew may grumble about the Dining Hall’s old foundations and plumbing, and the Custodians about the many small mullioned windowpanes that are so time-consuming to clean, but it is a lovely and functional building.  With its high ceiling and giant fireplace, it welcomes students in spring, summer, and fall for three meals a day and hosts occasional large conferences, visiting field trips, parties such as the annual Invertebrate Ball, and even weddings!

People who have worked on research cruises, in rustic field camps, or at remote field stations all know that MEALS are the glue that brings team members together, the incentive to take a break from pipetting, the excuse to relax and interact.  At FHL, meal service has been the purview of Food Services Manager Laurie Spaulding for many years.  Even we old timers have trouble remembering back to “pre-Laurie” days.  Laurie began working in the Dining Hall at the age of 13 (legal back then!) when the kitchen operated only during the summers and was under the purview of UW Housing and Food Services (HFS), which sent professionals here from Seattle to cook.  One summer the kitchen crew was short a cook, so they trained Laurie to step up to the stove.  She still vividly remembers one of the older cooks making fun of her “hash whites” which hadn’t quite browned.  Laurie eventually became the kitchen manager, reporting to Seattle; each week, she planned out a week’s worth of meals and then faxed tens of pages of her plans to the HFS office for them to approve and place the necessary food orders.

The first un-summer kitchen season was Fall 1992 when Northeastern University’s East/West (now Three Seas) Program first came to FHL.  In 1996, HFS relinquished control of dining operations at both FHL and UW Pack Forest, although it still provides umbrella contracts with food vendors (reducing our food costs here tremendously), conducts necessary inspections, and serves as a helpful resource for navigating food allergies and increasingly complex dietary preferences.

Tracy Nash started working in the kitchen in 1993 and retired this year after almost 30 years of cooking for FHL!  Tracy has a long family history in the islands: her great-great grandparents homesteaded on Shaw Island.  Her daughter Molly also worked in the kitchen and now is one of our most reliable custodians, and her grandson Floyd is working as a meal server in the Dining Hall.  Tracy remembers Jan Newton and Adam Summers – now full professors at UW – coming through the food line as students.  She “met a lot of good people over the years,” fondly recalling the Iwatas who came each summer from Japan.  Tracy struck up a friendship with them despite their halting English, bringing them flowers from her garden; each summer Mrs. Iwata would bring Tracy a Japanese scarf.

Like Laurie, Megan Connelly also started working in the Dining Hall as a teenager in the summers.  She found she was passionate about food and planned to go to culinary school after graduating from high school, but the 2008 market crash derailed those plans.  She stayed at FHL for 15 years, moving up the dining hierarchy from server to Food Service Supervisor.  When the Dining Hall was closed during the COVID pandemic she briefly moved to a position in accounting for San Juan County, a job that appealed to her as a detail-oriented person.  However, she “likes cooking better!” and fortunately for FHL, returned as Program Support Supervisor in 2022.  Now she is busy learning more about running the kitchen, which involves not only cooking but planning, people-managing, and all kinds of problem solving.  She says each week is a big puzzle!  The next image shows her week’s meal plan.

It also illustrates what has become an increasing challenge for the kitchen staff: dietary restrictions.  When Laurie began as a teenager there were NO meal choices; the kitchen staff simply cooked the same meals for everyone.  Now as you can see, they cook up to six different versions of most meals to accommodate allergies, intolerances, and different ethical choices.  This makes for daily puzzles for the staff to solve!  As Laurie notes, it helps that it is much easier now than in the past to find appropriate products such as dairy alternatives and gluten-free options.  Rarely do staff have to tell someone they cannot accommodate their dietary needs (some soy allergies are the exception, as “soy is everywhere”).

The meal complexities, combined with the nationwide and certainly Island-wide challenge of filling staff positions, make it very difficult for the kitchen to feed additional mouths on short notice (e.g. researchers or instructors who want to have an occasional lunch or dinner in the Dining Hall).  Currently, the staff cannot accommodate such meals.  However, we hope to one day re-institute them if it does not add too much burden to the kitchen crew, because we all know how wonderful those shared meal times are for collaborations and social interactions!

All of the kitchen staff have their favorite stories about special challenges or memorable diners.  Both Laurie and Megan reminisced about serving a salmon barbecue for a large conference group in early September when (as we locals will tell you) “it never rains”…but they wound up cooking in the outdoor space behind the kitchen, standing in four inches of water wearing garbage bags for raingear!  They also have stories about their trainees, many of whom are high school students who have done very little cooking – for example, one who was following a recipe to make mocha frosting for a cake and used coffee grounds instead of brewed coffee.  Or another who carefully cut a whole meal’s worth of bagels in half – the wrong direction.  And then the diners!  One was (negatively) obsessed about baby carrots and wrote the kitchen staff even before he came to FHL, saying he hoped they would never serve them.  Another diner came through the serving line and when asked if he wanted lentil soup, said “Oh yes, I love lentils!”  But when it was ladled up for him: “Oh, does it have lentils IN it? I don’t want that!”  And one “vegan” diner who regularly consumed several helpings of bacon, unable to resist when the staff cooked it for breakfast!  We suspect that a lot of giggling happens behind the scenes in the kitchen, yet every day they serve up delicious meals and hold the FHL community together.

We can’t thank them enough for this valuable (and nutritious) service!

The Kitchen staff is looking for more students to feed this fall: we have spaces left in both of our autumn programs, and even some financial aid.  Please spread the word!