Kitchen Chicago
That’s what Alexis Frankfort discovered about a year ago. She’d left her job as a portfolio analyst at Merrill Lynch for frosting. “I loved buttercream, so I went to pastry school,” she says. “Buttercream just keeps me going.” After training at the City Colleges of Chicago’s French Pastry School, she landed at Bittersweet for a year (“great buttercream,” she notes). It was only after she started craving her own business that she realized “you couldn’t do it out of your house.” She examined her options and found few, so she started researching shared-use commercial kitchens, learning that even nationally the only ones out there were job-training centers run by nonprofits. To gauge interest in the idea locally she posted a survey on bakerynet.com. Then, with the names of 30 potential clients in hand, she walked into her bank.
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What she and her partner and boyfriend, Jeff Leverenz, wound up creating–Kitchen Chicago, a shared-use kitchen with a storefront in Ravenswood Manor–is a novel solution to a common problem. For many small businesses the Internet has radically simplified the start-up process: you knit a sweater, you create a Web site, someone buys your sweater, and everybody’s happy. There’s no wall of debt–from a room of industrial knitting machines, say–that threatens to collapse and crush you. But since bakers and cooks are required by the government to operate in a commercially certified kitchen, they can’t start small: they need a separate workspace, which means large start-up costs. And in the restaurant business there’s little tradition of sharing costs and space.
Garcia had “basically taken the tour of Chicago natural food stores,” she said recently at Kitchen Chicago, midway through a wedding order for 460 lollipops imprinted with the initials of the bride and groom. After sojourns baking in Amsterdam and San Francisco she came back to her native Chicago last year with the intention of opening an all-organic, locally sourced bakery complete with solar-powered ovens. While making wedding cakes for Vosges Chocolates, she spent nine months “testing recipes and talking everyone’s ear off about how great it’s going to be.” She’s just signed a lease on a storefront in Ukrainian Village (she’s currently selling her stuff at the Lincoln Park and Wicker Park farmers’ markets). But for now she plans to continue cooking out of Kitchen Chicago. “I want to show you can work together with people and still have your own business,” she says.
Closing
