Cafe Flora turns 25

A venerable culinary institution of Madison Valley turns 25 this month.

Cafe Flora, a vegetarian restaurant at 2901 E. Madison St., celebrates its 25th anniversary on Oct. 2. Executive chef Janine Doran and chefs from the restaurant’s past, including founding chef Jim Watkins, will assemble a greatest hits menu that will be sold at 1991 prices on anniversary night only, and made available through Oct. 6.

Current owner Nat Stratton-Clarke has been a vegetarian his entire life, knows well how few dining options are available for that lifestyle, and how fewer there are featuring fresh local produce.

He still visits three farmers markets a week -- Columbia City, Broadway in Capitol Hill and the University District -- just like when he was first hired on as a the restaurant’s buyer in 2005. Now, as then, he focuses on finding seasonal produce that Doran and the rest of the kitchen staff can transform into new dishes. Other than staples like the Oaxaca tacos and French dip, the menu is constantly changing to accommodate new inventory.

“We have a bounty of farmers markets in Seattle, it’s so great,” Stratton-Clarke said. “If you have great produce, it already has such great flavor that you’re just trying to highlight that.”

As Cafe Flora hits its 25th anniversary, Stratton-Clarke is approaching his 11th in December. He’s spent most of that time as the owner. He was promoted to general manager not long after he started and he purchased the restaurant from its original owners early in 2008.

“Owning a restaurant was a dream I had always had,” he said. “Owning this place is a dream come true.”

The restaurant was founded in 1991 by local restaurateurs Gracie Close, David Foecke and Scott Glasscock, who wished to establish a vegetarian restaurant that based its menu off the freshest and finest seasonal produce of the Pacific Northwest.

“There were few vegetarian restaurants at the time and few like this one,” Stratton-Clarke said. “This neighborhood was very up-and-coming at the time and didn’t have much in the way of restaurants and cuisine.”

The cuisine was their singular goal. Though, by happenstance, they would soon take on a secondary, humanitarian goal as well.

At that time, AIDS Housing of Washington -- now called Building Changes -- sought to open the first skilled hospice and nursing facility in America for people living with AIDS.

That facility, the Bailey-Boushay House, was not universally welcomed by the community at a time when the communicability of HIV and AIDS was little understood, and their consequences gravely feared.

“The ability for AIDS patients to feel loved in their end-of-life care was very rare in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s,” Stratton-Clarke said.

Cafe Flora’s owners chose to support Bailey-Boushay by becoming a regular venue for fundraisers. Over time, regular supporters at these fundraisers, initially few in number, blossomed to become several hundred.

The restaurant’s support of Bailey-Boushay hasn’t changed, but many other things have changed under Stratton-Clarke’s management.

Since 2008, Cafe Flora has added a full bar, breakfast and brunch. Customers can patronize the restaurant at more times than ever before.

And that’s good, because Stratton-Clarke wants Cafe Flora to remain a Madison Valley institution well into the future.

“I had a customer on Mother’s Day who told me she came here with her mother when she was a kid,” the owner said. “Now she brings her children. That, to me, is amazing.

“I am just proud of what we do here. I hope we continue on for another 25 years.”