Food is a work of art all its own, and the Taste Cafe at the Olympic Sculpture Park aims to reflect food's larger issues along with its flavors.

· The art meets the challenge of outshining the view
· Art history comes alive on the waterfront
· The key people behind the Olympic Sculpture Park
· Welcome to the best public space in Seattle
· Where the money came from
· Landscape design is built on our NW environment
· In the end, the site's cleanup took tons of money -- and dirt
· Milestones on the rocky road to a waterfront park
· Leave your spray-paint cans at home -- the cameras are watching

Cafe suppliers read like a roster from Seattle-area farmers markets, including Taylor Shellfish Farms, Skagit River Ranch, Estrella Family Creamery and Rockridge Orchards. Organizers spent months arranging reliable sources of biodegradable packaging, which (except for the lids on the coffee cups) can all be composted. Mindful of both overfishing and contamination, the cafe will serve only seafood that meets the guidelines of the Monterey Bay Aquarium's Seafood Watch.

Food services at the park, like those at the Seattle Art Museum (now under renovation) and Seattle Asian Art Museum, are handled by the Bon Appetit Management Co., a California-based restaurant company whose goal is to provide sustainable and socially responsible food. The "taste" part of the cafe's name, though, is not an afterthought: Local projects are managed by Danielle Custer, named one of the country's best new chefs by Food & Wine magazine in 1998, who made her name locally at Fuller's and 727 Pine. The executive chef is Christopher Conville, who has been with Bon Appetit for 11 years.

		Paul Joseph Brown / P-I
	The park's Taste Cafe will offer daily soups and panini, priced from $4 to $8.25, plus a kids menu and a case of "grab and go" items. There's no charge for the view.

The sculpture park cafe will have a narrower focus than SAM, offering two daily soups and a handful of panini, priced from $4 to $8.25, plus a kids menu and a case of "grab and go" sandwiches and pastries and other a la carte items, along with coffee (Torrefazione) and tea (Barnes & Watson), wine and beer.

The opening menu includes the likes of a "classic meatloaf" made of organic beef and pork, spread with a blue cheese-black pepper cream, a "grown-up grilled cheese" that includes caramelized onions and green apple, and a seafood chowder of salmon, oysters and crab.

There's seating available, but no table service or china -- all items will be packaged to go, assuming most visitors will take their meals out into the park.

It was simple, when working at high-end restaurants, to encourage the philosophies of local, organic, sustainable dining, Custer said. But when she first interviewed with Bon Appetit, she thought she could make a difference on a larger scale toward the same goals. The park's food will be basic, she said, but that doesn't mean it can't be "natural, local and tasty."

After dealing with the knotty problem of the packaging, they're moving on to other issues, such as sourcing their own baby carrots to accompany children's sandwiches -- real little carrots with greens on top, pulled from the ground, not the standard commercial versions shaved down from larger vegetables.

The park itself has clear connections to the sea and the land, Custer said. With the food, "we wanted to provide that same awareness."