Healthy Me Cafe serving healthy food opens in Coppell

Healthy and cheap, with no dish over $10.

COPPELL — Healthy Me Cafe had a grand re-opening of sorts, even though it never really closed.

Previously a dry-goods store called Healthy Me Marketplace, this Coppell spot woke up one day refashioned as a quick-casual cafe with a menu of healthy dishes, says chef Todd Shaffer.

"The owners [Cathy and Alfred Fraser] want to make more of a restaurant," Shaffer says. "We expanded our dining room -- we used to have about 12 seats, and now we have up to 32 seats -- and we have a menu with everything from starter pizzas to soups to build-your-own salad."

They use turkey bacon, chicken sausage instead of pork. There's no Splenda, no artificial sweeteners of any kind, and no heavy cream.

"Our alfredo we make using 1% evaporated milk, but you'd never know it, it's so creamy," he says.

There is tuna salad, chicken salad, hot sandwich melts, veggie meatball subs on wheat hoagie, wheat wraps in flavors such as turkey basil, beef fajita, and roasted veggie. There are entrees: blackened tilapia, ginger-orange salmon, chicken & squash enchilada Florentine.

Baked goods are made with wheat flour and pure cane sugar, and they do some interesting "nutrient-infused" desserts such as the chocolate brownies supplemented with blueberries and spinach puree, and the chocolate chip cookies whose secret ingredient is white bean puree.

Shaffer graduated from the cooking program at the Art Institute of Dallas, but the thing that led him to cooking healthy was his mother, who suffered a heart attack and is diabetic.

Perhaps most remarkable are the prices, with no dish over $10. Soup is $2.95, salads are $4.95, sandwiches are $5.95, and entrees run from $7.95 to $9.95.

"The key thing is that they're portioned correctly," Shaffer says.

Meanwhile, they offer a "kids' cooking camp" during the summer, for kids 4 to 11, with two time slots available: from 8:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m., and from 1:30 to 5:30 p.m. The program runs from June 8 through August 17. Compared to many summer camp activities, this seems like a great gift: to not only teach a kid about cooking, but healthy cooking.