Carnegie Kitchen delivers tasty, inexpensive meals for those who are down on their luck or looking for some companionship
Mia Stainsby
Sun
Carnegie Kitchen coordinator Catriona Moore with fresh-baked bread. Photograph by: Glenn Baglo, Vancouver Sun
Vegetarian shepherd’s pie. Photograph by: Glenn Baglo, Vancouver Sun
Beef, mushroom pie with beet salad. Photograph by: Glenn Baglo, Vancouver Sun
It’s like the miracle of five loaves and two fish feeding the multitudes. Robert Bonner would not be eating roast or pork dinners on his own but on week-ends, he’s at Carnegie Kitchen, chowing down on his favourite meals for less than he’s able to make them himself.
Bonner has been involved in one way or another with the Carnegie Centre since 1989, eating there and volunteering — most recently on a poverty and homeless action group.
“He’s our hero,” winks a woman across the table from him. “And he’s famous, too,” she says alluding to his cover-guy status on a fundraising calendar for the Downtown Eastside called Hope in Shadows.
In the centre’s kitchen (all stainless and commercially equipped), volunteers work in shifts alongside staff cooks preparing breakfast, lunch and dinner, as well as snacks in between. It never stops. They go at it 365 days a year. One volunteer is making sandwiches as fast as she can and they keep selling all day. Another is chopping herbs. She wanted to do volunteer work and learned about the kitchen online. Alvin, who seems to have parted ways with his front teeth, is vigorously washing pots and pans. “It’s the busiest section in the kitchen,” he says. “Dishwashing is not one of the bigger things volunteers like doing. It makes me feel good about coming down here and being useful.”
One might assume the larder would be stocked with economical ingredients such as canned and frozen vegetables Jell-O desserts. Not so. The cooks buy organic as much as possible and nutrition is key. Kitchen coordinator Catriona Moore, who’s been on staff some 20 years, bakes 14 loaves of bread daily — healthy and gorgeous round rustic loaves that could be sold in an artisan bakery.
The cook on duty, “Jacquie,” says the staff chefs “have total artistic licence, which is rare in kitchens.” She reels off examples of supper dishes their clientele might sit down to: chicken Marbella, osso bucco, lamb shanks.
I visit on a Tuesday, known to regulars as “burger day,” a day when line-ups are particularly long. I sit down for a quick burger for my lunch and the patty is all meat; the lettuce and tomato slice are fresh and the meal comes with a yam-and-potato salad. Moments earlier, Jacquie was zesting orange rind into the dressing for it.
“After 20 years, it’s rock solid,” Moore says, of burger popularity. Chicken drumsticks, cooked various ways, with rice is the other huge crowd-pleaser.
For lunch, they have a meat and vegetarian entree, as well as sandwiches, two soups and Moore‘s baking (cookies, cakes, buns, muffins, tarts, squares). Dinner entrees come with a nice chunk of freshly baked bread and dessert.
The inner strength of some of the hard-luck clientele never ceases to amaze Moore. “You can’t repress the human spirit. People will carry on,” she’s learned. “They keep trying under what we would consider to be unbearably bad odds. There’s a strong sense of community and caring for other people and there’s a great return on that.”
Grace Morgan, 67, has crumbled crackers into her split pea and smoked ham soup until it’s looking quite solid. “It’s a lot better than I could make,” she says. She lives five blocks away and one doesn’t want to prod too much as she’s having a very pleasant lunch. “If not for this place, I would not still be alive,” she says. “It’s meant everything to me. I owe it my life. They made it a home for me. I found friends here, people to care about.” She eats at the Carnegie Kitchen “as much as I can” and it fits her old-age and disability pension budget. “You don’t have to worry about fixing your own meals. You sit at a table with someone in a similar lifestyle and have nutritious food for health’s sake.”
Dell Cootes, 75, lived in the area until recently and did mission work at a church. She still feels emotionally connected to the neighbourhood and eats at the Carnegie Kitchen once a month, relishing in particular, the veggie burger with salad. “At my age, I have to eat veggies,” she laughs. Although she’s learned to keep away from certain streets in the neighbourhood and walks “as if I owned the world and not show fear,” she’s found there are more do-gooders in the Downtown Eastside than anywhere else in the city.
“There’s so much pain on Skid Row and you just do a little bit. You are doing a lot if you remember people’s names and treat them with dignity.”
At Carnegie Kitchen, she feels she gets the healthiest meals at the best prices along with a chance to talk to people. “I’m on pension, so I look for all the bargains. I’m amazingly tight with money.”
Not all are needy. Others like Laila Biergans has a heart-felt connection to the centre. She used to volunteer, teaching ESL and working as a counsellor there. She eats at the Carnegie Kitchen every other day. “I know a lot of people here, I like the atmosphere; I like the Downtown Eastside,” says Biergans, a counsellor working with adolescents with drug and alcohol issues. “My favourite is the Thursday evening fish dinners. Sometimes I’ll stop and pick up sandwiches before I go to a movie. I’m on my way to see a Che Guevara movie after lunch today.”
Over the years, Moore has seen a parade of characters both in the kitchen and dining room. One memorable character with a passion for music visited once a day and ate three meals at once. “He was absolutely brilliant, but socially inept. He’d have two trays of food and then sit down and polish it off. He was thin and we thought of him as the snake man with an enormously full belly.”
While there are soup kitchens for the under-privileged and other low-low-cost cafes, like Potluck Cafe on East Hastings (run by the disadvantaged and open to the public) and Gathering Place on Helmcken (geared more towards youth), the Carnegie Kitchen is attuned to the heartbeat of the Downtown Eastside and brings meal-time grace into many lives — about 200 a day.
The feedback is extremely positive, Moore says, but her customers are plain-talking and honest of opinion. “If they don’t like something, they tell you right away. They don’t mince words. And that absolutely is good. We need to know.”
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