RE:VITALIZE | WELLNESS

RE:VITALIZE

...our guests’ sense of wellness by offering relevant of-the-moment resources to support well-being

Andrea Nguyen, author of the best-selling “Vietnamese Food Any Day” and others, fired up some char siu chicken and “any day Viet pickles” for a Memorial Day tie-in

STAR CHEFS AND NONPROFITS HELP SPREAD THE WELLNESS WORD

OVER THE SUMMER, when many of Bon Appétit’s cafés had to close or were operating with minimal staff, guests were hungry for cooking inspiration at home. The Bon Appétit HQ team reached out to the company’s nonprofit partners and to several recent Star Chef authors (who had shared recipes and signed cookbooks at in-person café events) to serve as guest curators for the Bon Appétit blog for the week, contributing recipes and links.

For 18 weeks, on Mondays, Wednesday, and Fridays, new blog posts went up to be shared across all Bon Appétit’s active social media accounts. Among the contributors were:

• Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Seafood Watch team, who shared seafood prep tips and a recipe for broiled sockeye salmon with citrus glaze

• Jennifer DiFrancesco and Josephine Morris from the Humane Society of the United States, who provided reasons to eat more plants along with a recipe for garbanzo bean sliders with aquafaba “mayo”

• Amy Kimoto-Kahn, the author of Simply Ramen and Simply Hot Pots, who blogs at easypeasyjapanesey.com, chose her greenvegetable nabe, “the perfect hot pot for those times when you need a good dose of heart-healthy green vegetables”

• Food What?!, a youth empowerment and food justice organization, which served up rainbow fried rice in a fun video from their Santa Cruz farm

• Nikki Cooper, the second-generation owner of Two Jack’s Nik’s Place, a family-owned restaurant in San Francisco serving southern comfort food and fresh seafood since 1977, who shared her recipe for Two Jack’s Nik’s Place salmon and crab croquettes

The Quarantine Culinary Engagement series, as it was called internally, ended up being a terrific way to nourish our guests with healthy recipes while spreading the word about both the values Bon Appétit shares with these organizations and some terrific cookbooks, blogs, and restaurants!

FOOD FOR YOUR WELL-BEING AND OTHER WELLNESS ACTIVITIES GO VIRTUAL

IN THESE STRESSFUL TIMES, guests are looking to us for guidance to build healthy habits and achieve wellness goals. Bon Appétit’s Wellness team is creating a toolkit of relevant digital content and modified wellness events so that we can support our guests’ well-being no matter where they are.

Our registered dietitian nutritionists have adapted the Food for Your Well-Being program to provide wellness education without depending on in-café events, using in-house-developed videos and other digital content, along with instructions for self-guided activities. Menu tie-ins are suggested for cafés that are serving guests in person, with home-based ideas for others. In addition, Wellness “takeovers” on the Café Bon Appétit website network continue to use the most valuable real estate on the site — headers, Stay Fresh articles, and recipe shares — to put hot wellness topics right in front of visitors.

The Love Food and Cooking Is An Art and a Science series are also both being adapted for the new virtual-engagement era, turned into videos with optional localized activities that can accompany them. Despite the many and ever-changing restrictions on breaking bread together in person, food can still be an effective vehicle for education, connection, and pleasure.

— Submitted by Terri Brownlee, Director ofWellness and Nutrition

The plant-forward wellness bulls-eye

FEDELE’S KITCHEN CABINET TAKES ON WELLNESS AND HITS A PLANT-FORWARD BULLSEYE

WHEN CEO FEDELE BAUCCIO convened his Kitchen Cabinet to help him re:invent the company, he knew that keeping the company’s commitments to healthy cooking and plant-rich menus had to be a vital part of that strategy. He tapped Dreamworks Animation Executive Chef Patrick Youse (who is also a member of the Bon Appétit Plant-Forward Culinary Collaborative taskforce) and Bill Telepan, the new culinary director at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, to help inspire their fellow culinarians to make healthy items the easiest, most appealing choice for guests.

Chefs have many tricks up their white sleeves, Bill and Patrick reminded everyone in a companywide webcast, from making sure that vegetables, whole grains, and lean or plant-based proteins are the first options guests see as they approach a station or on the online ordering system, and stocking healthier items and unsweetened beverages at eye level in any grab and go coolers, to explaining how important it is to name their healthy items as lovingly as they might their comfort ones. Bill walked the audience through all the tools at their disposal, tossing out truly mouthwatering menu ideas as he went, like Patrick’s Korean barbecued jackfruit in a bao bun with purple cabbage slaw, radish, and toasted sesame.

The second half of the webcast concentrated on how to increase plant-forward menuing — not moving to wholly vegetarian or vegan, but asking meat to take a much smaller role. During the COVID-19 crisis, there are many health, environmental, and business reasons that dovetail for doing so, Patrick reiterated, sharing some of his own story of weight loss and renewed health thanks to shifting toward a plant-based diet. He introduced everyone to the concept of the Plant- Forward Bulls-Eye, recommending chefs start with a vegan or vegetarian entrée (versus an animal protein), adding more vegetable and/or whole-grain sides, and then pausing to ask themselves whether it worked as a complete meal — would guests be sated, and satisfied? If not, only then should they consider perhaps adding some animal protein into the mix.

“Anything you might do to meat — marinating, grilling, smoking, searing, charring, roasting — also works for vegetables. In fact, vegetables might say, ‘Anything you can do, I can do better,’” Patrick told the chefs. He closed by showing just how easy it is to build a weekly menu for a station using the bullseye strategy. “You just need to show plants the same love that we’ve traditionally shown meat.”