Message from Locally Grown Kids:

Dear Our Lady of Mount Carmel Families,

Welcome to the Locally Grown Kids hot lunch program! We will begin service at your campus this fall! Locally Grown Kids is a Montecito-based full service hot lunch program offering an extensive and diverse menu of hot and cold options. Food is fresh, sourced locally, almost entirely organic and affordable. This program has been created without the bottom line being a priority. As a local Dad, I'm so excited to offer students and faculty healthy, delicious lunch options that they are enthusiastic about. In addition, I hope to satisfy parents with top notch quality, attentive professionalism and service, affordable rates, and a simple online ordering system to maximize convenience.

Some background on myself: My family lives here in Montecito, and I developed this program because I felt that the hot lunch programs available at my daughter's school (Cold Spring) wasn't up to par with the caliber of schools here in Santa Barbara. I graduated from The French Culinary Institute in NYC with a degree in classic culinary arts. I spent time working and training at NYC restaurants and even worked for a short time in Montecito at the San Ysidro Ranch's Stone House Restaurant. Eight years ago I opened my own seasonal restaurants in Edgartown, MA on Martha's Vineyard Island. I have the experience needed as well as the time during my "off-season" to devote to this endeavor, and nothing makes me happier than serving our community's children and their schools faculty appealing and nutritious food each day for lunch.

Our program is different from other hot lunch programs. Instead of a very minimal rotating menu with only a few hot options and a couple of sides, we offer a standard full menu that will allow students and faculty to have any and all of our hot lunch options available to them every day. The current menu being served has many entrée size hot items as well as several salad, sides, cold sandwich options, drinks and also a few desserts. My goal is always to make the menu compatible and exciting for as many people as possible by offering a wide enough variety to entice everyone from the youngest child to an adult with a discerning pallet.

We live in an amazing area here on the central coast where some of the world's best ingredients are available to us. We take full advantage and embrace all that Santa Barbara has to offer. In addition to the many salads, sandwiches, pastas, fresh meat and fish options we also serve favorites like pizza, french fries and hot dogs. Though these foods come with a bad reputation, they are popular and are created in their healthiest form. For example pizza is hand tossed with sauce made fresh from local tomatoes and basil topped with antibiotic free part-skim mozzarella. Hot dogs are not the typical variety made with mixed meat preserved with artificial nitrate compounds. Instead they are 100% natural beef that is both uncured and hormone and antibiotic free. There is always a healthier and more wholesome approach to cooking, whether you're making buttered noodles, salmon or french fries. I always follow that mindset while maintaining a price point that I feel is acceptable to parents and faculty.

I want this program to be a huge benefit to our community here in Santa Barbara. We are not a restaurant doing hot lunches on the side. We do not have layers of management to traverse, so at Locally Grown Kids if anyone has a question or problem they deal directly with me so that we can figure it out together. This is our program and thus malleable to the needs and wants of our community.

Sincerely,
Bryan MacPhail
 Locally Grown Kids Inc.

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