Take the Cake's Melissa Mileto's background in fashion adds to the artistic flair behind her dishes.
Soapbox's Andrew Welsh found that different artistic impulses help drive the female chef-owners of Cincinnati's
Nectar,
Eat Well Cafe & Takeaway and
Honey.
Nectar chef-owner Julie Francis, 49, studied photography in Tucson. After graduation, she got into restaurants as a server, but quickly moved to the kitchen when it became clear that the necessity for sales acumen didn’t suit her.
“I was immediately drawn to kitchen work, working with food and expressing myself in that way,” Francis says. “I picked it up fairly quickly—plating food especially—thanks to my art and visual background.”
Her first cooking job was as a pantry cook at a French restaurant in Denver. Under the tutelage of the restaurant’s female chef, she learned food preparation and kitchen fundamentals. From there, she worked her way through Albuquerque and northern Mexico, where she ran up against gender resistance while learning butchery at a restaurant in Santa Fe.
“The
Coyote Café was known for not advancing women,” she says. “It was kind of an unsaid rule. But usually in kitchens it all comes down to your ability. Basically you have to have a steady head and the mental ability not to freak out.”
Francis learned the butchery, long-braising and roasting skills she needed, and then moved on to her first executive chef position at the
Galiesteo Inn, just outside of Santa Fe. Two years later, she felt ready to open her own restaurant.
Throughout her career, Francis visited her family in East Walnut Hills once a year. She noticed that there weren’t small, chef-owned restaurants with the seasonal, fresh approach to food she’d seen in the West. So in 2000, she took out a five-year loan and opened Aioli in downtown Cincinnati.
Five years later with the loan paid off and her downtown business still in a decline following the 2001 riots, Francis closed Aioli and began marshalling resources and designs for the next stage of her ventures into the color, flavor and intrigue of Southwestern food.
Francis opened Nectar in 2005 as a fresh start, building on the skills and knowledge amassed during her career to create a focused, economical restaurant.
“The name connotes something unique, sought after, delicious," she says. "The food’s local and seasonal, and it’s got to be delicious and pretty."
Whether it’s smoked tofu or carnitas with a fried egg, Francis designs Nectar’s menus to express her delight at bright, interesting flavors and unusual juxtapositions. Under it all, she sets a foundation of husbandry and sustainability.
“Food’s an expression of everything, really; how you sustain yourself, your culture and history, how things are raised and treated, and how we treat the earth," she says.
The way food expresses art and culture also drives culinary styling for Renee Schuler, founder of
Eat Well Celebrations and Feasts. Schuler, 38, recalls her parents as prolific entertainers during her childhood in Northern Kentucky. The sound of clinking wineglasses kept her imagination running well past bedtime—not to mention the promise of leftover French snowball cake for breakfast the next morning.
“It was just so magical to me,” Schuler says. “Cooking and bringing people together, all with something you could create.”
At age 12 she threw her own fancy dinner party, preparing Steak Diane for her family and serving it per “the age of Martha Stewart.” Throughout adolescence, as her two younger sisters fawned over
Seventeen magazine, Schuler ogled the pages of
Bon Appetit.
After studying psychology and theater at Indiana's DePauw University, Schuler moved to New York to work at a photography agency. The job brought her in contact with food stylists, which struck her as the perfect occupation. First, however, she needed a formal culinary education. Schuler attended the
Institute of Culinary Education in NYC, supporting herself with serving and catering jobs. After completing the six-month program, she divided her time between kitchen work and food photography.
“It hadn’t occurred to me that restaurant hours and the difficult lifestyle were something I could handle as a living," she says. "But I found I just really liked making food for people, and never looked back after that.”
After five years in New York, Schuler moved back to Ohio in 2000 to be closer to her family. She spent three years in the Amish country of Adams County, where she worked as an executive chef at
Murphin Ridge Inn.
That’s where she learned to cook local, using herbs and vegetables from the Inn’s gardens, buckets of Amish berries and other produce—even whole lambs. Unlike the large kitchens of New York with brigades of cooks, Schuler now worked mostly alone, and she was responsible for everything from soup to dessert for groups of 50 to 120 guests.
“It forced me to learn speed, but to keep quality high and my wits about me,” she says.
Those skills proved critical when Schuler began catering. In 2005 she founded Eat Well Celebrations and Feasts. She’d catered on the side throughout her education and career, but now found it the best expression of her culinary vision.
“It’s an amazing thing to have a blank room, and in a couple days to create an event, to be there as the drama unfolds with the lights and props," Schuler says. "And then to shut down at night. Everything is gone, the room empty. It really appeals to the theater geek inside me.”
In January, Schuler opened
Eat Well Café and Takeaway in O’Bryonville. While her catering allows her to perform the more theatrical, formal dinners she enjoys, the café is an outlet for Schuler’s day-to-day fare: simpler, stylistic food-as-art without the fanfare of a catered event.
“You either love to cook or you don’t," says Shoshannah Hafner, 46, chef and joint-owner of Honey in Northside. "Chef-owners have to love to cook because this isn’t an easy business.”
Like Schuler, Hafner’s love for food developed around a social core. When she left Buffalo, NY, to study at the University of Cincinnati, it was food that established her social network. During her 20s, she lived in an apartment across the hall from Doug Hafner, who she would later marry. The two were friends and shared a delight in cooking and eating.
“Living away from home and family, it’s friends that become your family," Hafner says. "And it happens through decades of shared meals."
Hafner’s culinary career began in the Virginia Bakery, where amid the schnecken and other specialty breads, she found a calling in cooking. Two years later, she got a job at the
York Street Café in Newport. Within the first two months, she cooked dinner for owner David Hosea and his wife, which inspired Hosea to build her a kitchen and restaurant where she would be in charge. Hafner was 27.
“I was just driven to do it," she says. "I don’t know if it was even a choice."
Three years later, Hafner accepted a job offer from a Cincinnati couple to cook at their bed and breakfast in France. There she found herself running a 250-year-old kitchen, preparing food for 18 to 24 people at a time and watching them share the experience. For seven months she cooked, ate and traveled around France. She was hooked.
“That’s when I really knew I wanted to cook,” Hafner says. “People remember special occasions, not necessarily the fine details of each dish. But food is the catalyst, and there’s something big about providing that shared experience.”
On returning to the United States, Hafner weathered three winters in her hometown of Buffalo before returning to Cincinnati to work for the Vineyard Café. From there, she became head chef at Tinks (now La Poste), and after four years was ready to open her own restaurant.
Hafner and her husband opened Honey in 2005 in the space formerly occupied by Boca. Farm-to-table is the essence of Hafner’s vision for Honey.
“It’s like the best food your grandmother cooked,” she says. “Some cooks are scientists, and some cook from the heart. Honey is all about the heart.”
The Hafners live on five acres of land. They plant gardens and raise chickens, and bring as much of their own produce and poultry into the restaurant as possible.
As the gardens expand, she encourages Honey employees to get involved with the process from agriculture to dining room. Through this, they become part of a culinary family, she says. This, after the years of hard work and perseverance parallel with Francis, Take the Cake’s Melissa Mileto and Schuler, is her vision brought to fruition.
“In the end, if you’re highly creative, you’ll find a way to do what you love.”