Sunny-side Up

Serving up the taste of home in Bellingham

STORY BY SAMANTHA KLINGMAN | PHOTOS BY GRACE SCHRATER 

(above) Tina and Kirby White exchange a loving glance as they stand in the kitchen of the restaurant that they own together, HomeSkillet. The couple met while cooking for scientists in Antarctica, and opened HomeSkillet in 2010.

The smell of strong brewed coffee mixes with the aromas of spicy chilies, hearty gravy and fried eggs. The sounds of laughing guests, the clatter of pots and pans, and the sizzling of breakfast skillets erupt in the dining area of the small restaurant

On Homeskillet’s opening day in 2012, the owners, Tina, 50, and Kirby White, 49, scrambled to cook enough food to serve the hordes of hungry guests. They never imagined their restaurant would be this busy, and they pictured working side by side in their tiny Sunnyland restaurant without many employees.

They quickly learned how wrong they were, Tina says, laughing with Kirby.

Neighbors and friends volunteered their help during HomeSkillet’s first weeks of business to pick up the slack, Kirby says.

“They saved our ‘heinies!’” Tina says.

HomeSkillet looks more like a brightly painted house than a restaurant. The building is painted shades of vibrant orange, purple and green, and a massive statue of a patchwork-rainbow chicken named Velveeta Jones stands in the small lawn out front.

The restaurant is anything but ordinary, and not just because of the funky paint colors or peculiar lawn decorations. It’s a lively, eccentric restaurant serving mountainous portions of comfort food with a home-like feel and wild decor.

HomeSkillet’s interior is just as vibrant as the outside, with every wall painted a different color, and small trinkets lining every shelf and counter top. A rainbow-colored warthog hangs above a fireplace filled with Christmas decorations, and the tiny bathroom is covered from floor to ceiling with the faces of smirking and sneering clowns.

Tina is the primary “decorator” of the restaurant, but Kirby built the restaurants’ benches, tables, and bar, Tina says.

“I found things at a garage sale and put them in the window,” Tina says. “All of a sudden, things just started appearing; I don’t even know where some of this stuff came from.”

As for the warthog, Tina’s friend gifted it to them at a party while whiskey tasting.

“She walked up to me and said’ ‘Do you want a stuffed warthog head for your restaurant?’” Tina says. “Is there any other answer but ‘yes?’ No matter what kind of warthog it is, I want it.”

BEFORE THE SKILLET

Tina and Kirby met on a frigid October morning in 1999 while cooking for scientists in Antarctica. It was not yet 4 a.m., and Kirby was lost on his first day of work.

“I was going to work and asking how to get to the galley,” Kirby says. Tina was the first person he had met in Antarctica.

They spent a whole year living and working together in Antarctica, Tina says. “Half of which was in 24-hour darkness, so as far as relationship tests go, I think we passed.”

After returning from Antarctica, they traveled all over New Zealand together, then Tina moved in with Kirby in Bellingham, Washington.

The couple married in 2001 after being together for nearly two years.

For the next 10 years, they talked about opening a little restaurant together, but they never were very serious about it.

“It always came down to reality though; we are too smart to do that,” Tina says, laughing. “Why would we ever open a restaurant? That is a pain in the butt!”

The Whites became a lot more serious about opening their own restaurant when Tina heard about a small building for sale in the Sunnyland neighborhood.

Some customers love Kirby’s cooking so much that they ask Tina if they can go back to the kitchen and give him a big kiss.

They made a quick decision, and within a week of discovering the building, they had bought it.

“We call it the ‘impulse buy,’” Tina says.

Tina and Kirby opened their restaurant just three months after purchasing the building.

Today, the restaurant has been open for nearly three years, and has become increasingly busy in the otherwise quiet Sunnyland neighborhood.

Recently, the restaurant was featured as a “Cheap Eats” destination on the popular Pacific Northwest television show “Evening Magazine.”

On a slow day, HomeSkillet now serves about 150 to 180 guests on weekdays, but on the weekends they serve about 250 to 300 people per day, Tina says.

“When you take into account that we have 32 seats, are only open seven hours a day and have just one cook, that ain’t bad,” she says.

The Whites did a lot of brainstorming before coming up with the name “HomeSkillet.”

“It’s sassy, but the older folks will just think of it as ‘home skillet,’ and the kids will like it too,” Tina says.

The couple divides up the labor; Tina greets, seats and serves the customers, and Kirby does the cooking.

“He’s really good at [cooking,]” Tina says, laughing and smiling at Kirby. “He is a carpenter, and he cooks. He is awesome, kind and wonderful and he loves his mom.”

Some customers love Kirby’s cooking so much that they ask Tina if they can go back to the kitchen and give him a big kiss, she says, beaming.

Tina’s favorite meal on the menu is the poutine, which is French fries with gravy and cheese, but Kirby ironically does not like to eat what he cooks at the restaurant.

“By the time I’m done, I am going to go home and make a sandwich,” Kirby says.

Tina enjoys working directly with people, and likes sitting down at the tables to have conversations with their customers.

“I was actually most scared about working up front,” Tina says. “But, then it’s just so easy. Everyone’s so great. It’s amazing.”

Our customers feel at home enough to be regular people, Tina says. People will just walk out the door and then have to come back in, because they forgot to pay, she says.

LOCAL ROOTS

HomeSkillet is a restaurant that uses many locally-sourced ingredients in their dishes, including locally roasted coffee, vegetables from Cedarville Farms in Bellingham, and seafood from Barlean’s Seafood in Ferndale.

Fifty-two percent of consumers think that it is more important to purchase local food than organic food, according to a Mintel research study in 2012.

The rising consumer demand for local food has driven many businesses around the U.S. to turn to local farms and gardens for fresh ingredients.

Sara Southerland, food-and-farming program manager at Sustainable Connections, helps implement an “Eat Local First” campaign.

Sustainable Connections is a non-profit membership organization in Bellingham that consists of businesses and community leaders working together to model a local economy built on sustainable practices.

Southerland works to connect local farmers and food producers with chefs, grocery stores and food buyers to get more local foods in to places where people eat and get their groceries.

Supporting any type of local business, whether it is specifically food or something else, is important because it puts money back into the local community, Southerland says.

“Whenever you shop at non-local businesses, you are sending the money out, and not contributing to the vibrancy of the place that we live and work,” she says.

When buying and eating locally, the foods are fresher and more nutritious, it helps to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, since the food is not transported long distances, and it allows for a better understanding of where the food comes from, she says.

“You have more awareness of how [your food] is raised, since there is more transparency,” she says. “It’s not just some unknown farm from California. You can go out and visit the farms, call them, or ask them personally at the farmer’s market what their growing practices are.”

Local foods can be easily found at many grocery stores, like the Community Food Co-Op, Terra Organics and Haggen, along with the Bellingham Farmers Market, she says.

Many types of foods grow well in the Bellingham area due to the temperate climate, Southerland says. Vegetables such as roots, leafy greens, beets, carrots, cabbage, winter squash, kale, beans and many others grow very well here.

“Supporting local is key,” Tina says. There are many advantages for using local foods, but sometimes consistency can be an issue.

If an item off the menu calls for spinach, and the local spinach crop does not do well that year, then that would call for a menu change, she says.

“We want to keep giving a good product, and find that happy medium between supporting the community and paying the bills,” Tina says.

Using local foods is beneficial because it creates relationships with local businesses and supports others in the community, Tina says.

Building community seems to be a common theme that Tina and Kirby strive for in their restaurant. Tina calls every guest “Sweetie” or “Honey,” and the restaurant feels and looks like a dining room in someone’s house.

The restaurant’s unique slogan is posted on a chalkboard inside the front door for all the hungry patrons to read.

“Eat it and beat it,” the sign boldly declares.

Tina and Kirby have plans for expanding their kitchen, and possibly opening a beer and mimosa garden on the restaurant’s outdoor patio by summer 2015.

“I definitely want to get in live music on the weekend while people are sitting around,” Tina says.

They also might set up booths where local artists can sell merchandise while people are waiting for tables, Kirby says.

With big plans for the restaurant’s expansion, the busy little HomeSkillet will have more space for the community to gather — and for Kirby to cook up his proclaimed “genius” food.