Tag: new offerings

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Official Reopening Friday December 23rd

Thank you to everyone who was able to make it out to our soft opening Relaunch Party on Saturday! We had a great time, and it was a great test run of our new layout. We are excited to announce we will be reopening with new regular hours and some big changes this Friday!

New Hours
9am – 1pm
&
10pm – 3am
Friday through Tuesday
Closed Wednesday & Thursday

We are making some big changes with our new beginning. All of these changes bring us more in alignment with our mission as a restaurant and community space.

  • We are taking a fresh approach to the menu. While taking a zero-waste approach to the kitchen we have come to realize a simple truth, if we offer a large menu available all the time it will be impossible to prevent waste. So, in the spirit of our mission, we will be offering a small, signature menu of our most popular sweet & savory crepes all hours, and the rest of our offerings will be a rotating menu made from what we have on hand with minimal purchasing. By cooking this way as opposed to offering a large menu we can share our unique creative approach to cooking while preventing food waste.

    We are excited to share a new kind of restaurant with you, where the consistency lies in quality ingredients and flavors regardless of what is on the menu each day! We expect to be the place where all the same items may not be available every day, but everything offered every day is made from scratch with whole ingredients. We know how rare it is to find nutritious food in restaurants and believe those seeking food that make them feel good will enjoy the variety!
  • We are no longer purchasing single use disposables or processed food products. We will be using up what we still have on hand, and when it is gone, it is gone! We will be transitioning to BYOC – “Bring Your own Container” for takeout. This also means we will be infusing our own flavors for the beverages, so those will be seasonally rotating and changing along with the food menu!
  • Initially we will not be taking phone-in or online orders or reservations. We value our face-to-face time with you and will be asking all to come in and place their orders. We feel hospitality standards are slipping away for the sake of convenience and are making this change in order to build stronger relationships with you by offering our full attention.
  • Since we are already taking a new approach to take-out by asking you to BYOC, and a new approach to the menu by rotating our daily menu, we have decided to create a new offering as well: “All-You Can Eat Take-out” served out of our hot-holding by weight into any container you’d like as long as it fits on our scale! You could come by for coffee in the morning and have us fill one meal container for lunch, or bring your home food storage containers and stock up on some ready-made food for the week!
  • We are assessing our coffee offerings and plan to focus on more efficient and sustainable brewing methods. New offerings may include pour over, French press, cold brew, or Turkish, but will be taking out the espresso machine.

We will have more details to come and our new menu out when we open on Friday, December 23rd, so make sure to follow us here for further details!

We WILL be open Christmas Day – special hours to be announced soon – with our signature crepes, definitely some comfort food, baked goodies and dessert and we will be showing holiday themed movies all day as it is the first day our movie licensing begins!

See you soon!

Marci

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Tentative Reopening December 18th!

We are excited to welcome you to the new Zest Garden Cafe!

We mentioned when we closed down back in October that we had come across a community of fairies that had moved into the back garden patio in the time it has been undergoing repairs. You may believe it is only a joke, but we were not surprised at all considering the magic we know flows through these walls. These nature spirits brought our attention to the simple truth that waste is a purely human creation and does not exist in nature. They knew of our Zero Waste goal and our aim to procure local, organic ingredients and pointed out how much better we could do. We spent the last month not only remodeling the space but clarifying our mission and core values and finding creative, engaging ways to implement them into our daily practices.

Here are some changes you can be expecting for sure…

  • We are radically implementing our existing “Zero Waste Goal” by making eliminating waste in every way imaginable one of our core values. Our first big steps are assessing our purchasing and making packaging a priority factor in our procurement, finding creative alternatives to food waste including composting, and we will no longer be purchasing disposable takeout containers of any kind! We are currently exploring reusable systems that prevent waste rather than creating more, but plan on bringing your reusable containers, or paying a deposit or fee. We are also playing with the idea of a program for locals for a monthly flat rate membership that comes with a discount on all purchases. Let us know what you think!
  • We believe community, and friendships, are built through common interests, and Building Community through Food is our mission! Our vision is to primarily use our cafe space to host new in-house clubs our team creates, other local small interest groups, and community-oriented events and be the go-to community hangout in Lincoln City. We plan to have an open calendar for any small groups in our community to reserve a space for 5-25 people at an affordable rate that will offset by any purchases made.
  • We will soon me announcing the new platform we will be using as an alternative to Facebook, as we will no longer maintain a presence on that platform. This new app will allow common interest groups to form naturally around topics we are passionate about and will not be filled with advertising or limit who sees which posts or events.
  • Our “Everybody Eats!” community day is being replaced by a new “Kindness Token” program created in partnership with Coastal Support Services, our compassionate next-door neighbors. This program will allow anyone to purchase meal tokens they can share with friends, coworkers, anyone in need, or add to the pool to be distributed by local non-profits.
  • We are seriously debating whether adding alcohol to our offerings in in alignment with our mission and are open-mindedly researching more healthy sipping, or social beverages (like Kava, Kratom, or CBD, fresh juices, smoothies, nutritional shots etc.).

    We are open to the community’s feedback around what offerings you would like to see!