Volume 30 · Number 1 · Fall 2012
Queen of the CoHo
After three decades as Coffee House director, Sharon Coulson has left the kitchen.
Sharon Coulson with stained glass from the original CoHo.
(Karin Higgins/UC Davis)
We call it the Coffee House, but Sharon Coulson made it a home.
She retired at the end of June after nearly 30 years as the director, proud to have kept the essence of the Coffee House as a home away from home for student employees and a place where the coffee is always on and the home-style meals always hit the spot.
She signed on in 1983, after working as food service manager at the McGeorge School of Law in Sacramento for four years. She recalled how Dean Gordon Schaber tried to talk her out of leaving, asking her, “Why would you want to go work at that two-bit hot dog stand?”
The ASUCD Coffee House was a bit Bohemian at the time, Coulson recalled. But two-bit? Hardly.
Back then, the Coffee House was bringing in $800,000 in business. Today, the 45-year-old CoHo serves 7,000 customers a day in the fall, winter and spring quarters — doing about $4 million in business annually.”
“Sharon Coulson revolutionized the way retail food service is provided in a university setting,” said Brett Burns, the ASUCD business manager. “The student-directed, from-scratch cooking is the model for food service delivery and iconic to the UC Davis experience.”
$1 subs back in the day
The Coffee House was founded in 1967 in the old East Hall (where Dutton Hall stands today). By the time Coulson came on board, the Coffee House had moved to the Memorial Union, the east side. She recalled a menu of $1 subs and a few salads, and a different stir-fry entrée every day.
Drawing by Susie Houlden ’12, who works in the new CoHo South Café
Then, in 1990, the Coffee House moved to the Memorial Union’s west side. “We ended up with all this space, and we had to fill the hot wells [in the serving counter] with something,” Coulson said.
“I dug deep into my recipe books,” she recalled. And then she enlarged those recipes.
Student employees brought in their own recipes to add to the CoHo’s home-style flavor — casseroles and pasta sauces, favorite cookies and more soups, all from scratch. (But nothing deep-fried, not even french fries, student employee Austin Smith said, noting Coulson was “all about health.”)
Coulson and her husband, Ted Abresch — a UC Davis staff research associate for 36 years until his retirement, the same day as his wife’s — have relocated to Rancho Bernardo (in the hills of San Diego County) to a home they bought five years ago. Coulson speaks of days bike riding, surfing, hiking, swimming and playing tennis.
And cooking. Maybe some “chicken Tet” or “Hung beef” every now and then, to remind her and her husband of home.