When Nourish Coffee Bar + Kitchen opens this Winter, patrons may only notice the more obvious charms of our new restaurant at the Center for Health & Wellbeing in Winter Park.

Sure, there’s the fresh fare cheffed by Collette Haw. There’s the sustainably-sourced coffee bar, an indoor-outdoor space ripe for dining-cum-socializing, the serene ambiance of a cafe designed with your whole-person health in mind. But it’s the less concrete features, particularly the approach to healthy cooking and the chef behind it all, that make Nourish a unique experience and an authentic extension of Winter Park Health Foundation’s commitment to creating a healthier community.

Chef Collette Haw, Captain of the Kitchen
She’s the woman behind the popular Collette’s Clean Eats and WPHF, owner of Nourish Coffee Bar + Kitchen, is thrilled to partner with Collette Haw as head chef and manager of this new restaurant endeavor. Collette is a Florida native who graduated from the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, N.Y., one of the best training schools in the world. After several years as a personal chef for celebrities and working in local kitchens, Collette set off on her own, launching a meal delivery service, and now, a storefront aimed at bringing taste-forward choices to a market starving for healthy options.

“I set myself apart with the kind of food I was making when I first started out with Collette’s Clean Eats. All the other meal delivery services at that time were just doing a chicken breast with asparagus or a pork chop and a broccoli. Nobody was putting together a complete meal that made people feel satisfied after eating, but was also really good for them,” Collette shared.

She’ll bring that same approach to Nourish, where members of our community – and beyond – can experience this healing power of food for themselves.

The Nourish Difference
With menu items like “Not Your Grandma’s Chicken Salad,” vegan broccoli cheddar soup, feta and dill scones and dark chocolate and almond flour brownies, it’s Collette’s personal cooking philosophy – a comfort foods gone healthy approach — that make her a perfect fit to operate Nourish Coffee Bar + Kitchen.

“I approach healthy foods a little differently. I believe comfort foods are really what make you feel good… offering healthy comfort foods make my customers not only feel warm and satisfied, but they’re going to be eating healthy at the same time and feel good about themselves,” she said. “When people think about healthy eating, they think ‘I have to eat a salad for the rest of my life,’ and that’s not necessarily the truth. There are so many other nutrient-dense foods people can eat that aren’t raw kale, that aren’t Swiss chard.”

The added flair of seasoning, sometimes an after-thought in most home kitchens, is what takes Collette’s rendition of healthy cuisine from “ho-hum” to “yum!”

“I try to incorporate a lot of herbs and spices because many offer really good nutrients we might not be thinking about when considering healthy food,” Collette shared.

Nourish and the Seven Dimensions of Wellbeing 
The guiding principle of the Center for Health & Wellbeing is the philosophy that personal wholeness comes from an internal balance of the Seven Dimensions of Wellbeing. The menu offerings at Nourish certainly meet the ‘eat better’ tenet of Physical Wellbeing; the dining space with several long communal tables has been specifically designed to encourage connection and engagement between customers, which enhances Social Wellbeing. And locally and sustainably-sourced foods aren’t just trendy buzzwords in the Nourish kitchen. Rather, these environmentally-conscious methods of securing seasonal restaurant provisions will be at the forefront of the restaurant’s philosophy and will underscore our commitment to Environmental Wellbeing.

What is Collette most excited about with the launch of Nourish? It’s maybe not what you’d expect.

“I am extremely excited about the aspect of being able to reach the community so deeply at Nourish. Obviously there are places in town that offer healthy food options, but how much are they involving the customer or sharing their knowledge? At Nourish, we can do so much more and we can reach the community at a different level. We’ll have cooking classes and food tastings in the adjoining Nutrition Theater, we’ll have educational programs and literature, we’ll have different menu offerings that maybe people may have never tried before but that they fall in love with,” she said.

“Winter Park Health Foundation has deep roots in this community. I am hopeful that with opening Nourish Coffee Bar + Kitchen, we can build on those relationships and be incredibly impactful.”

About the Center for Health & Wellbeing
Wholeness. Fitness. Medicine. The Center for Health & Wellbeing (The Center) is a state-of-the-art, unique healthy living center focused on improving the quality of life for residents of Winter Park, Maitland, Eatonville and the surrounding area. When it reopens in its new home within the Center for Health & Wellbeing, the Peggy & Philip B. Crosby Wellness Center, owned by the Winter Park Health Foundation, will offer state of the art fitness facilities including two pools, the latest in exercise equipment and a wide variety of classes for members. Florida Hospital will own and oversee the clinical spaces and medical services located within the Center for Health & Wellbeing. And the two organizations will co-own and collaborate on many of the common spaces and programs designed to promote wholeness. Learn more about the Center for Health & Wellbeing at www.YourHealthandWellbeing.org.