Café Vivian’s Local Angle

At Princeton University, Café Vivian was reshaped to reflect the campus’s long-time sustainable efforts. As the United States becomes more and more a polyglot of cultures, the concept of “American” cuisine has become blurred. Chefs have infused even the most quintessential home cooking with elements from the Mediterranean, Asia, South America and the Caribbean.

But as “our” cuisine has become more international, it has also become more local, particularly on college campuses, where the idea of farm-to-fork has developed strong roots. Local and sustainable has become the new American cuisine.

One strong example of this can be found at Princeton University, where a coffee shop known as Café Vivian has been reborn as a quick casual restaurant that features only local, organic and sustainable items.

The chief architect of Café Vivian is Executive Chef Rob Harbison, who says he wanted to find a way to let everyone know what Princeton Dining does for the environment.

“We do a tremendous amount of good in sustainable practices—for example, we’ve been recycling our food waste for years—but I didn’t think there was a soapbox for us to stand on to let people know how ahead of the curve we’ve been trying to be,” says Harbison, who has been at Princeton for 13 years. “We knew we had to develop a concept that would put our sustainable practices in a package.”

When the opportunity to remodel a portion of the Frist Campus Center arose two years ago, Princeton Dining looked at Café Vivian, which at the time was a coffee shop.

“We took the coffee shop to a slimmer footprint and reinvented Café Vivian as a sustainable café,” says Harbison.

Ironically, the idea for Café Vivian had been in the works for several years—but not exactly in its current form.

“When we put this on paper five years ago, I said I wanted this to be an organic café,” recalls Dining Services Director Stu Orefice. “This was before sustainable had been given much thought, and organic was the big buzz word.”

But as the trend shifted from purely organic to the more-encompassing idea of locally sustainable, the template for the café changed as well.

The 100-seat café is open every day but Saturday and has late-night hours every day but Thursday. Because the bulk of Café Vivian’s business is lunch, the menu is mainly sandwiches, pizzas, calzones and composed salads, with a fairly large grab-and-go business.

“The menu is very clean, simple and fresh—uncomplicated,” says Harbison. “We let the flavors speak for themselves. We put bold, fresh ingredients together and they can’t help but taste good.”

The restaurant’s elements include a wood-fired pizza oven—made from recycled and sustainable materials, of course—from which come flatbread pizzas and four varieties of hand-crafted calzones: Philly-style, local creamery ricotta and herb, broccoli and cheese, and uncured ham and pepper.

At the Sub Conscious station, sandwiches made on a choice of soft sub, honey wheat or Cuban sub rolls—all baked on-premise—include a grilled Bell and Evans Chicken chipotle, pub cheddar and grass-fed roast beef, and organic hummus and cucumber.

“Our cold cuts are organic or grass-fed; they all have a sustainable aspect to them,” he explains. “The bar code on our turkey will even tell you what farm it came from. It’s kind of neat when you can tell someone where their sandwich came from.”

There also is a salad and grain bar where customers can either make build their own or choose from a variety of composed salads, such as artichoke spinach noodle, organic three-bean, veggie lo mein and organic bamboo rice.

In the colder months, hearty soups such as creamy acorn squash, rustic gazpacho and grass-fed beef chili are added to the bar.

“The menu changes seasonally, and we play off our interaction with customers,” Harbison notes. “For instance, we just came up with a new item. We had customers telling us they wanted a little sliver of flatbread pizza, but they also wanted a salad. So we developed a whole-wheat flatbread with just an essence of cheese and herbs on it, and we top it with a simple little salad and organic vinegar and oil. We give it to them at a nice price point.”

Vendors as well as customers have a say in what is offered at Café Vivian. For example, Harbison says one vendor suggested a local, organic Greek-style yogurt.

“I tried it and now I can’t keep it on the shelves,” he says. “I don’t know what it is about the yogurt, but it is something customers are very interested in.”

Those types of grocery-style items are one thing both Harbison and Orefice would like to offer more of, if they had the space.

“Customers like the sauce that we serve with our pizzas and calzones,” the chef explains. “They’ve told us that they’d love to be able to buy it in jars. They also tell us they’d like more gluten-free items.”