E-Mail This Article to a Friend Veg out Veggie Planet owner Didi Emmons enters a new orbit at the nonprofit Haley House BY TAMARA WIEDER

SHE’S A SUCCESSFUL restaurant owner, award-winning cookbook author, and all-around mainstay on the local culinary scene. So what’s Veggie Planet’s Didi Emmons doing packing up her spatulas and heading for a Roxbury nonprofit?

Taking on a new cooking challenge, actually. For the past several years, Emmons — the author of Entertaining for a Veggie Planet (Houghton Mifflin, 2003) and Vegetarian Planet (Harvard Common Press, 1997) — has focused her energy on her Veggie Planet vegetarian restaurant at Harvard Square’s Club Passim. Soon, however, she will become the executive chef at the new bakery and café at Dudley Square’s Haley House, a decades-old nonprofit that also includes a soup kitchen and low-income apartments. The organization’s wholesale bakery has been selling a limited number of products to a limited number of clients — Emmons considers Haley House’s pizza dough to be a foundation of Veggie Planet’s business — for years; in her new role, Emmons will open a café with an evolving menu and a staff of culinary trainees.

Q: Tell me about your new role at Haley House.

A: The Haley House is opening up this large, 3200-square-foot warehouse space in Dudley Square, and there’s going to be a café and a wholesale bakery all in the same space. My job is to oversee everything. I’m going to first be creating the café and making that happen, and then once I’ve got that under my belt, then I’m going to start spending time in the wholesale part of the business, trying to expand that side of the business, because there’s a lot of room for growth there. They’re very small right now; they only have, like, 12 clients, and they only make, like, eight products. Then there’s the whole training aspect of the business. These people are facing job barriers; they’re people that have been homeless or have had drug problems. There’s only five positions every six months, and they’re under our tutelage.

Q: It sounds like a really big departure for you.

A: Yeah. It’s so much fun. Yesterday I was in Dudley Square for five hours, and I’m like, oh my God, I feel like I’m in the Caribbean. I feel like I’m in a different part of the world. It’s so different, and yet it’s 200 yards from the South End. Unfortunately, the way Boston is, people are really clustered. People are very tight in Dudley Square, and they’re all really excited about it. There’s no better way to try to appeal to the black community than to try and open a restaurant in Dudley Square, because they need it. They want it. It’s not that we’re going to be enlightening the neighborhood; it’s [that] the neighborhood can support this, wants this, hasn’t had it. I was talking to a bunch of people yesterday, and they were like, "I really want salads with low-fat dressings, but made with yogurt and tofu." I was talking to a man who was like 60 years old, and he [said], "Yeah, I like tofu. It’s okay with me." They’re very savvy, and they just don’t have access to it; they have to drive to get good food.

Q: So this is going to be a pretty crucial resource for this community.

A: It’s going to be a breath of fresh air. It’s what it needs, it’s what it’s ready for. It’s a very poor neighborhood — the statistics are really bad, like $12,500 is the average median income — but the people who work in Dudley Square are a slightly different population. They earn more. So we hope to appeal to both. It’s not a wealthy clientele, so the restaurant needs to be affordable. Also what’s new for me is to make a menu that doesn’t have to appeal to me. Obviously on some level it’s got to, and it’s got to meet certain criteria, like not using canned goods, and maybe not using meat that we don’t know where it comes from —

Q: But you will be using meat?

A: We’ll be using meat. Yup.

Q: Does that worry you?

A: My friend over at the Food Project, he says that he has a lot of good sources for beef that are sustainable. So we are going to be using sources that have been practicing sustainable agriculture. But I can’t say for sure that I’m going to do that. I mean, I might not be able to find a ham that can do that, and then I’ll go ahead and get the ham anyway. I’m going to have to let my politics go a little for the greater good. I really feel like what’s important is to raise their level of awareness of that whole local, sustainable thing, but I don’t have to go 100 percent all the way.

Q: So the six-month training program will be for people with no restaurant experience?

A: Right. They jump in, and we start them at the bakery, which is the easier place for them to start, and they start doing things like forming cookies and maybe making a muffin batter here and there. But really they’re a liability to us at that point. After they finish three months there, then they move to the café. That’s more rigorous, and there’s a lot more change; the menu is not stagnant. It’s going to be changing. We’re really going to try to work with the community and make foods that people want, and experiment here and there. So there’s going to be a lot of learning for them. They’ve been doing this in the South End on a very, very disorganized, lackluster scale. They haven’t had somebody really good that can place them into new jobs. That is all going to change. We’re really going to try and make a difference [for] these 10 people a year, in their lives.