SPiN Cafe to unveil new kitchen
Published 1:30 am Friday, August 22, 2025
Feeding Whidbey Island’s homeless will be a piece of cake at the SPiN Cafe with the completion of the daytime shelter’s new commercial kitchen.
Community members can peek behind the curtain at the facility during an open house from 5-7 p.m. on Aug. 27.
“It’s a big milestone for us,” Michelle Hines, executive director at SPiN, said. “To reach this momentous goal is great. It feels really good.”
SPiN serves breakfast and lunch seven days a week and then a larger, hot meal on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons before many guests leave to spend the night at another shelter. Providing food to those in need is a cornerstone of SPiN’s principle — nourishment builds trust and better prepares guests to tackle daily life.
“People can’t think or make good decisions if they’re constantly hungry,” Hines explained.
Lacking a kitchen on the premises, however, made holding to that standard difficult when SPiN started its meal program up again three years ago, forcing the shelter to prepare food at a church instead. Cooking off-site limited the variety of what SPiN could serve and required food to be transported back to the cafe.
“We really worked hard to keep funding and find ways to pay for a meal service, pay for a cook, pay for ingredients,” Hines said. “So when we moved into this building (in 2023), our goal was always to put a commercial kitchen in.”
Converting a staff break room into the shiny kitchen seen today took a year to accomplish and cost about $192,000 — private donors provided more than a third of that total, and SPiN raised money to cover the rest. Outfitted with a three compartment sink, a stainless steel center aisle, a six-burner stove with two ovens, storage and other commercial appliances, the kitchen is adequately equipped to feed the 30-45 guests SPiN receives at each meal.
Family Bible Church also furnished the kitchen with $1,000 worth of donated pots, pans and utensils.
SPiN purchases much of the food it serves, but Hines does not employ a cook at the moment. One of her employees holds a ServSafe permit allowing SPiN to serve untouched food donations leftover from various community events, and Hines is working towards obtaining the permit herself. Hiring a cook — or kicking the tires on any other potential projects — requires funding.
Hosting an open house to view the kitchen on Wednesday may help keep money coming in, as the community can see firsthand what their donations fund.
“We want people to see that our kitchen it completed,” Hines said. “There’s a lot of people that donated big, big chunks of money for this. We want our donors to see what we’ve achieved.”
