KILAUEA — As Common Ground Kauai readies to offer dinner starting Aug. 19, its owner shared his thoughts about goals for the nonprofit garden cafe. Christopher Jaeb, owner, said his attention is almost exclusively on the success of the restaurant
KILAUEA — As Common Ground Kauai readies to offer dinner starting Aug. 19, its owner shared his thoughts about goals for the nonprofit garden cafe.
Christopher Jaeb, owner, said his attention is almost exclusively on the success of the restaurant and the nonprofit Malama Kauai he founded in 2006.
The restaurant and farm are two of several projects with a goal to create a community destination space.
“Anything that has to do with personal health and sustainability,” Jaeb said.
While some believe his intent was to improve his 46.59-acre ag land property for a higher sale value, Jaeb said everything is falling into place now that he found partners and staff.
“I changed my mind,” Jaeb said. “It is not for sale and the vision is to build this out from an agricultural and a human development perspective as best we can.”
The organic field-to-table café and catering focus on healthy, family meals. In the coming months, Jaeb said there will be new programs, products, services and events.
Extending the hours was essential as the restaurant could not sustain itself without dinner. The liquor permit is one more element to keep the restaurant and catering service solvent, Jaeb said.
“The majority of the drinks are not alcohol based,” he said. “It is a cool down in relation to the range of elixirs and health tonics of which there will be an alcohol component.”
Jaeb was looking for a grower who could run the farm side as a separate business on the same property.
Fred Rhoades runs the Mohala Hou Produce Co. farm at Common Ground. He comes from Plain City, Ohio, where his family founded a farm in 1818. Rhoades went on to farm in California and then Kauai where he worked for other growers before expanding the Common Ground garden from less than an acre to around three acres starting around eight months ago.
Rhoades added 30 different types of vegetables, including kales, chard, and bok choy. The main garden has mixed greens for the restaurant with arugula, red chards, four varieties of egg plants, six varieties of peppers, squashes and green beans.
“Fred has really expanded our range of vegetables and just sort of digging into stuff that is new for us to be brought in and used in the restaurant,” Jaeb said. “The status report we put together for the county shows that we do around 400 pounds a week from our garden, and that is just for breakfast and lunch, and we would expect it to double over time.”
Chef Rodman Machado said that a Kilauea restaurant that gets most of its food no further away than Moloaa is “economics 101, pure economics, where you support us and we support you to keep money flowing back to the community.”
“It is the wow factor,” Machado said, holding up an organic sugarloaf pineapple grown on the North Shore.
The path to other sustainable projects will stem from the success of this restaurant, Jabe said. Once the right hours, services and partner businesses are also flourishing, Common Ground will no longer be a fancy idea financed by his checkbook, he said.
“We will work together to find solutions,” Jaeb said.
