Lunch Counter’s Thai beef flank sandwich is packed with Vertical Harvest micro greens and served on 460 Bread from the bakery in Teton Valley.
Victoria Parker (left) and Molly Broom (right) prep food Friday morning in their upstairs kitchen of Suda. The aptly named Teton Lunch Counter is the first of its kind — a zero waste, locally sourced catering service specifically for guides of Jackson. The guides may provide their own containers or use the stainless steel bento boxes the business offers. Leftover food is composted and in the three months of operating, the business has only filled one tub of recyclable waste.
Founder Victoria Parker assembles the roasted vegetable feta wrap, with locally sourced goat feta and a rotating sauce of the chef’s creation.
Founder Victoria Parker with her delivery bike. Fitzgerald’s fixed up this Trek bike with a custom attachment so Parker can deliver chilled lunches to guiding outfits across town.
Molly Broom is the kitchen prep and sustainability manager for Teton Lunch Counter. For a recently-promoted home chef, she’s surprisingly particular about her parsley.
Lunch Counter’s locally sourced meals come in stainless steel boxes sturdy enough to sustain a river guide’s drop kick.
Victoria Parker (left) and Molly Broom (right) prep food Friday morning in their upstairs kitchen of Suda. The aptly named Teton Lunch Counter is the first of its kind — a zero waste, locally sourced catering service specifically for guides of Jackson. The guides may provide their own containers or use the stainless steel bento boxes the business offers. Leftover food is composted and in the three months of operating, the business has only filled one tub of recyclable waste.
Lunch Counter’s locally sourced meals come in stainless steel boxes sturdy enough to sustain a river guide’s drop kick.
Stuffed in a corner of the Suda Izakaya kitchen, Tori Parker and her sous chef Molly work late into the night transforming local greens, steaks and sweets into waste-free lunches exclusively for Jackson Hole guides.
The scrappy and ambitious operation known as Teton Lunch Counter launched in May and is already on track to save 20,000 single-use plastic containers from the landfill this summer. Along the way, Parker is giving the valley’s guiding community — and their visiting adventurers — something to savor.
“People are eating food from the valley while they’re enjoying our valley,” she said.
Picking up a bushel of butter lettuce from Haderlie Farms, the chef can barely contain her excitement.
“It’s crispy!” she said. “It’s fresh! You can’t get that s--t anywhere else.”
Lunch Counter’s Thai beef flank sandwich is packed with Vertical Harvest micro greens and served on 460 Bread from the bakery in Teton Valley.
At Lunch Counter, sustainability starts with the grub. Greens come from Vertical Harvest, bread from 460 Degree. Teton Valley Meats supplies the beef, and said Parker’s orders match those of a proper steakhouse. Every meal comes with a gluten-free Sky High Cuisine cookie made by a fellow female entrepreneur, Teri Davis.
But the crux of the zero-waste mission comes in the packaging, or lack thereof. Instead of the plastic containers synonymous with packaged grocery store sandwiches, Lunch Counter’s meals come in reusable stainless steel tins, bento box style. There are smaller metal tins for salad dressing, and sturdy silicon lids.
One of the guides at Rendezvous River Sports drop-kicked a tin of gravy to make sure it could take a beating.
“The guides are loving it,” said Max Pelosi, Parker’s partner and a helpful hand in the business, who has also worked for the past decade as a full-time Rendezvous guide.
Parker first got the idea for Lunch Counter when she moved in with Pelosi.
Before then the well-traveled backpacker hadn’t owned a trash can in six years. Now her new guiding boyfriend was coming home almost every night with leftover sandwiches encased in a reliably non-recyclable container. For a young couple the surplus made for cheap eats. But the amount of waste was astounding.
“Our entire town is dependent on tourism ... and they’re all doing the same exact thing that I was experiencing with the leftover food. I just thought, that’s way too much waste.”
Founder Victoria Parker with her delivery bike. Fitzgerald’s fixed up this Trek bike with a custom attachment so Parker can deliver chilled lunches to guiding outfits across town.
Parker invested about $8,000 in the reusable containers, which she stuffs and delivers from a Trek e-bike Fitzgerald’s retrofitted to tow a cooler on wheels. The kitchen space borrowed from Suda Izakaya wasn’t easy to find — Parker spent six months knocking on every restaurant door in Jackson — but it also helped keep startup costs low. Despite its premium food costs, Lunch Counter is expected to make a profit by the end of the summer.
Parker previously used her master’s degree in sustainable energy development to design net-zero commercial buildings in the Pacific Northwest and South Africa. But even as an undergrad she was flexing her green thumb.
As part of a campus-wide effort to ditch single-use coffee cups, Parker, an engineering major, calculated that the cups from a single school year would stack to the height of the mountain next to campus — 17 times.
She’s proud to have emptied Lunch Counter’s moderately sized recycling container only once so far.
Molly Broom is the kitchen prep and sustainability manager for Teton Lunch Counter. For a recently-promoted home chef, she’s surprisingly particular about her parsley.
The business’ ethos is forward thinking and also a callback to established sustainable practices. It’s getting workers to use a metal lunch box rather than a sack. It’s also one small way to reduce the tourism footprint in Jackson Hole while supporting local producers.
“I’m not doing it to make people really enjoy their meal,” Parker said. “I’m doing it to help combat the tourism footprint and waste from tourism. And that’s my main goal. I mean, of course I want the food to be delicious.”
She’s tried to avoid compromises. But if she wants her 460 baguettes to not be croutons, they have to come in a plastic sheath.
Ben Ellis, one of the bakery’s co-owners, said they run into those little obstacles too.
“It’s really hard to pull together a truly sustainable business practice,” he said, “because there are so many forces working against you. We try to be green, but we still put our bread in a big diesel truck and drive it over the pass every day.”
Like Parker, Ellis did his time in higher education (he has a doctorate in economics) before pivoting to bakery operations. The former county commissioner said he’s “super psyched” to see another local maker.
Founder Victoria Parker assembles the roasted vegetable feta wrap, with locally sourced goat feta and a rotating sauce of the chef’s creation.
With dishes like “Groovin Tabbouleh” and “Asian Noodle Funk,” — inspired by the tastes and smells Parker experienced backpacking 28 countries over six years — it’s no surprise the guiding community seems to be eating it up.
Teton Wilderness Tours shifted all of its lunches to Lunch Counter and praised the concept as “simple but radical,” and “delicious.”
“I just think they really nailed it,” co-owner Allison Parker said.
Grizzly Country Wildlife Adventures said the meals align with the luxury experience their clients expect. Plus, for owner Jonathan Hunt, it feels good to support a fellow Kentucky native.
Davis made about 250 of her snickerdoodle and chocolate chip cookies for Parker this week, more than any other bakery in town. They come on bulk trays so there’s no waste.
It’s a small consideration, Davis said, that’s “making a really big difference.”
Parker will close shop Oct. 15, coinciding with the end of most summer guiding. But she’s already working to gather clients for a winter season.
“I’m getting a call almost every day now,” she said. “Trek Travel called me the other day saying that somebody from Persephone recommended us, and I don’t even know anyone at Persephone!”
The founder hopes to open a deli similar to Sweet Cheeks but exclusively for guides. In the meantime, fans can follow @tetonlunchcounter on Instagram for more mouthwatering meal prep and e-bike adventures.
Contact Evan Robinson-Johnson at 732-5901 or ERJ@jhnewsandguide.com.
Evan Robinson-Johnson covers issues residents face on a daily basis, from smoky skies to housing insecurity. Originally from New England, he has settled in east Jackson and avoids crowds by rollerblading through the alleyways.
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