First Slice Pie Cafe 4401 N. Ravenswood 773-506-7380
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Diaz launched First Slice—as in the first slice of the pie rather than the crumbs—in 2002. She signed up paying subscribers for three freshly prepared three-course meals every week—such as salad, veggie lasagna, and peanut butter chocolate pie—then used the income to provide the same meals for free to the needy. At one point she had nearly 100 subscribers, but she eventually decided she was too busy cooking for them instead of the poor. Now she has 40 or so, though she recently started advertising for more. They allow her to offer hundreds of free dinners every week—nutrient-rich meals instead of the processed, highly starchy, heavily sugared foods the needy too often get from food pantries.
Diaz studied with Madeline Kamman in California and at L’Ecole des Arts Culinaires in Lyon, and she was head chef at the Printer’s Row restaurant for several years. But she was always more interested in working in a restaurant modeled on Jane Addams’s Hull House community kitchen than in becoming one of Chicago’s celebrity chefs. In 1997 she rehabbed an old skaters’ warming house in Lincoln Park and opened it as North Pond Cafe, where she emphasized seasonal, locally grown ingredients she found at farmers’ markets and tried to keep prices down. She wanted the cafe to be “something where friends could walk in and have a good meal. Every place I’d cooked prior to North Pond were places that my friends could only go to on special occasions—not just their birthdays but their 30th birthdays.”
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photos/Carlos J. Ortiz.
