Retro Feel, Modern Food at The Pearl Cafe

It’s a Monday morning and Karen McSwain is already creating from scratch food that will be featured on the menu at The Pearl Cafe in downtown Chehalis.

And, like clockwork, her box of Newaukum Valley Farms produce arrives. McSwain said her restaurant and cooking style is influenced and inspired by the rich agricultural heritage of Lewis County.

“Farmers are a lot like people who own restaurants,” McSwain said. “It’s a labor of love. This kind of cooking and farms go hand in hand. We’re not doing it to get rich.”

McSwain recently opened The Pearl Cafe on Pacific Avenue in downtown Chehalis with her partner Maureen “Mo” Anderson. McSwain had lived in Olympia for more than 30 years, where she owned the Blue Lotus Cafe in the early 2000s. McSwain graduated from culinary school in 1984 and entered the field at a time when it was very much dominated by males. But as a single mom she paid her way through The Evergreen State College working at the Budd Bay Cafe. She eventually went into the social work field but said she would always come back to cooking, though she doesn’t think she respected the career choice for a long time because in the time before celebrity chefs, cooking was not a field that was generally respected by the public.

“It’s what has always sustained me,” McSwain said. “I’ve gone between social work and restaurants but this is a little bit of both. I like feeding people good food and having the customers get excited about good food.”

McSwain and Anderson moved to Centralia about two and a half years ago. McSwain said opening a restaurant was something on her mind for a long time. She said the concept in her mind was to create an eatery with the majority of her products sourced locally if possible. When she found a small restaurant space open in downtown Chehalis directly across the street from where the Community Farmers Market will open in early June, she said she knew she had found just the right place to make that concept come to life.

“We have so much farming here and I’m really interested in farm to table,” McSwain said. “I want to see the faces of the people who grow my food.”

McSwain added that when they moved to Centralia, she and Anderson minimized their life, going down to one car and trying to be much more intentional about the choices they make. McSwain said The Pearl Cafe is a reflection of those values, from the farm fresh menu to their choice to be open only Tuesday through Friday until 3:30 p.m.

“We’ve had people tell us, ‘You should be open for dinner,’” McSwain said. “But the healthy concept is about us, too, and not needing to make too much money or work too many hours. We’re trying to have a healthy, intentional life.”

The Pearl Cafe has a retro diner feel with dishes such as a classic egg sandwich and homemade granola at breakfast or a Cobb salad and deviled egg salad at lunch. One sandwich, The Memory, features the classic combination of house-roasted turkey topped with a sausage stuffing patty on a bun with lettuce and cranberry mayo.

“The atmosphere might be somewhere you’d go 50 years ago or your grandma’s house,” McSwain said.

But there are details in the food that are very modern, such as the Baked Challah Salted Caramel French Toast and the Vegan Breakfast Burrito that includes scrambled tofu, a cilantro-avocado sauce and organic spinach in a tortilla. At lunch, some of the more modern offerings include: The Pearl, a sandwich of roasted poblano peppers, cashew cream, lettuce, tomato, bell pepper and black truffle salt; and The Gaelin (named for McSwain’s daughter), a wrap of sliced bananas, almond butter and local honey.

Besides frequent vegan specials, McSwain also offers a number of gluten free items that are clearly marked on her menu. She also frequently makes vegan cupcakes along with her daily house made sweets. McSwain said when she opened her restaurant in Olympia, words such as organic, gluten free and vegan were still fairly foreign and almost frightening to diners, but that now most restaurant-goers are more familiar with the terms, though there are still some converts to be made.

“People think ‘if it’s gluten free it’s going to taste terrible and I can’t have it,’” McSwain said. “But that’s not the truth at all.”