Sandwiches and cookies are the fare at Pitzer College’s Grove House, along with a daily special.
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Sandwiches and cookies are the fare at Pitzer College’s Grove House, along with a daily special.
Ms. Gutiérrez (left), known to her staff as Zee, has been working in kitchens for a decade now—since she was 17—and came to Pitzer several years ago as a cook in the main dining hall. But as soon as she saw Grove House, with its cozy rooms, its antique Arts and Crafts furniture, and its quirky kitchen with big windows overlooking the Grove House garden, she knew she wanted to cook here.
She got her chance last year, when the longtime Grove House kitchen manager, Rachel Vanderhorst, retired. It’s no easy task filling Ms. Vandervorst’s oven mitts, though. Her daily specials and her cookies—especially her cookies—had made her a hero to students and alumni. So Ms. Gutiérrez is very cautious about making changes. She has introduced some different specials, along with a new cookie—the Cohen Snack. It’s a ginger-and-chili-spice bombshell she created to send to Sasha Cohen, this year’s Grove House student resident, after her father died.
Grove House serves lunch from 11:30 to 3:30—a full range of sandwiches, plus a daily special, and, of course, cookies. But Ms. Gutiérrez’s day starts much earlier, with a bike ride from her home near the campus and often a walk through the Grove House garden. Then she fires up the big commercial oven and the grill and the vent hoods and seasons a pair of turkey breasts to roast for turkey sandwiches.
Student workers start coming in at 10 to organize ingredients—the kitchen staff makes all the spreads—and to start baking the first batches of cookies (left), mixing up more dough if there’s not enough to get through the day. Grove House usually serves between 60 and 100 lunches, almost all of them with cookies. “Days we do 100 we’re like, ‘Man, what a rough day,’” Ms. Gutiérrez told me one morning as she made up a bread pudding to use up old bread. Music filled the kitchen—whoever has remembered to bring an iPod gets to pick what everyone listens to.
As the 11:30 opening approaches, more student workers appear, don aprons, and set to work. At peak times, one student will take orders and work the register, three will be making sandwiches, and a fourth will be getting drinks and putting the cookies on plates. Another student will be at the grill, and yet another doing dishes.
The special might be brown-rice vegetarian sushi, homemade ravioli, or pad see ew, a Thai noodle dish. The day I visited, though, it was chilaquiles, a Mexican dish in which tortillas are sliced into wedges, fried, and then scrambled with egg and cheese and topped with salsa. Ms. Gutiérrez learned to make the dish from her grandmother—"an awesome cook,” she told me with a grin.
Indeed, Ms. Gutiérrez described one of her goals for Grove House’s food this way: “I want students to taste it and say, ‘Hey, it reminds me of home.’” She also wants students to relax here. “This isn’t a place to be rushed. Sit down—have a cup of coffee.” The college isn’t pushing her to do more than break even, she added. “I’ve worked for large companies, like Chili’s. They’re like, ‘Get moving! Push the appetizers!’”
At Grove House, she said, “It’s about a give-and-take relationship, not ‘I take from you.’” That morning the delivery man from Grove House’s new bread supplier, Old Town Baking Co., had left two loaves of banana bread as gift. Rather than sell them, Ms. Gutiérrez sliced the loaves up and told workers to offer slices to all comers. “That was given to us, so we’ll give it way,” she told me. “Otherwise it no longer has that love in it.”
She’s also committed to supporting local producers and growers, like Old Town Bakery and the farmer from whom she buys avocados. When she’s not busy with Grove House, she oversees paperwork for a student-run venue elsewhere on the campus that serves dinner. That’s why Grove House serves only coffee and bagels after 3:30—so as not to horn in on the other venue’s business.
The lunch rush was ending when Ms. Cohen, the student resident, came by to order the special—with, please, sliced avocado and grilled onion, and could Ms. Gutiérrez make it extra hot? (The Grove House resident has all kinds of special kitchen privileges; when Travis Wheeler held the post, in the mid-1990s, he admitted to eating raw cookie dough by the spoonful.) Ms. Gutiérrez sliced some tortillas and began to fry them, asking in the meantime how spicy I liked my food.
A few minutes later we were seated at one of the big round tables in the dining room, enjoying the delicious chilaquiles. “I am so fortunate,” Ms. Gutiérrez told me. “I love what I do. I have so many different students coming through these doors. I’ll have a nice long conversation with a student and be like, ‘That was a free lesson. Now let me give you a free cooking lesson.’”
Grove House
