The Power of Thinking Local

The mac and cheese that Beak Restaurant serves at both lunch and dinner is in some ways a departure from the Sitka, Alaska, bistro's culinary precepts.

Certainly, the bowtie pasta is in keeping with the playful attitude that chef-owner Renee Jakaitis Trafton '07 tries to cultivate in her kitchen. And Trafton's staunch locavorism- which likely helped her become a semifinalist for Best Chef (Northwest and Pacific) at the 2023 James Beard Foundation restaurant awards-is evident in the optional upgrades: It costs $5 to accessorize the noodles with reindeer sausage or burly bits of blush pink salmon.

But on a menu dominated by dishes finished with little more than olive oil or soy sauce,

[Link]Photo credit: Caitlin Blaisdell

the mac stands out for being sluiced with cheddar cheese.

Still, Trafton stresses she doesn't use butter or heavy cream. "I want food that you can eat and feel fantastic afterward. I want food that makes you feel powerful."

Trafton has focused on seizing and shifting power through food choices ever since she was a philosophy major at Oberlin. As she puts it on Beak's website, "I am dedicated to putting employees first, even ahead of the guest. Without a team, there is no restaurant."

Case in point: Beak opened in 2017 as a no-tipping restaurant as a way to arm her front-of-house workers with a consistent wage and liberate them from potential guest harassment.

"My female employees have the power to not be bothered by a guy being a jerk," Trafton says.

"They're not going to be financially penalized if they're short with someone."

Trafton's commitment to teamwork has roots in her membership in the Oberlin Student

Cooperative Association. She initially oversaw OSCA's tofu-making program, making sure a crew curdled and pressed soybeans every Sunday afternoon. Then she was elected lead dinner cook at Harkness Hall, a position she held for four semesters.

She credits the experience with determining her eventual career trajectory. "Majoring in philosophy, you can work on a paper for two hours and get two sentences," she says. "If you're working in the kitchen for two hours, you can feed your whole co-op, and people are happy. It's really rewarding."

As lead dinner cook, Trafton was charged with planning and sourcing ingredients for dinners. In one memorable instance, this included 7 grams of saffron that her mother brought back from her native Panama.

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