Every pizza has a story.
Most people think it’s all about the ingredients, but the success of a restaurant relies on so much more than sauce and crust.
Those making the pizza have stories, too. Some, like Katie Lee, have a novel unlike any you’ve ever read before.
If you visited any of her three Katie’s Pizza and Pasta Osteria locations in St. Louis or read any of the media coverage about her, you’d get a story about a young woman who lived in Italy with her mother. You’d see someone who opened up a shop, named after her, with her dad. You’d see Instagram-worthy pizza, salads, and cocktails. You’d see all the hallmarks of the American dream.
Until Lee lost it all: her reputation, her business, her relationship with her father, and her sobriety.
Lee’s real story
The real story isn’t on Lee’s website, as it’s one she was never ready to tell—until now: 17 years after she first opened Katie’s with her dad. This time, she has 100% ownership of her namesake restaurant.
Lee dropped out of high school at 15 – a result of never feeling like she fit in, coupled with a struggle with alcohol and drugs. After working in nearly two dozen restaurants until she was 20, she went to live with her mother, who had gotten a job in Florence, Italy. That’s where her love of Italian food took hold.
“That kind of lit the fire with me,” she says. “And obviously, I had a ton of experience in restaurants, and now I had this passion around food. So I came back to St. Louis, struggled more with my alcoholism, but was able to put together a business plan, write a menu, and then open the first Katie’s Pizzeria in 2008. I was 26, and I opened it with my father.”
She was using ingredients that are now very common in today’s food scene but she felt weren’t as well-known at the time: think prosciutto, fresh mozzarella, figs, and squash blossoms. People went crazy for it.
Lee agreed to 0% equity in the business with her dad retaining ownership because he put up $50,000 to open the restaurant.
When her concept started to see success and she didn’t have any equity, she says it caused tension.
“My alcoholism kind of spiraled, and I was kicked out of the restaurant and then spiraled further, lost everything,” she says. “Everything I had: family, friends, and ended up, after trying to get sober for six years, going to treatment centers and hospitals and everything else, [I] ended up in a halfway house in not the best part of St. Louis, and it was kind of the last place I could go because I had nothing left. And I lived there for six months and have been sober ever since … I got my job back at the restaurant that I created, only this time as a waitress, which is a very humbling experience. And then … kind of got back on my feet and then decided that my only path forward was to figure out a way to do it on my own.”
Despite not having a bank account, a car, or anything necessary to get a loan, Lee was able to raise $40,000 through a Kickstarter campaign, which allowed her to sign a lease and begin to raise money through IOUs from friends.
“I raised about $300,000,” she says, “Opened the restaurant, elevated the concept, added handmade pastas, a bigger space … paid everyone back within two years and began building what everyone sees today.”
Her father’s impact
While Lee was rebuilding her entire life, behind the scenes her father, who had epilepsy, was getting worse. Because of his brain trauma, he had to have his hippocampus removed, which created memory issues.
“I had this very sad and uncomfortable situation where, in order to save him, I was going to have to leave him….” she says. “He was destroying the business with his brain damage and dementia … so I go and build my business and he shutters his. But the good news is that the brand survives, the restaurant survives. I begin to build an empire, I begin to build a life … we had about a six [to 12 month period] where it was just traumatic… and then we reconnect and then spend every day together. And over the next five years, he kind of slowly has this terminal illness where his brain [was] shutting his body down. But I’m taking care of him and we reconcile and spend the next five years together. I have a daughter. He spends every day with her. And then he passed away in 2021.”
Despite their ups and downs, Lee’s memories of her father remain an important ingredient to her success. “The benefit of having someone that saw the world a little bit differently or had these outlandish ideas about what he could do that gave [us] the opportunity, my brothers and I, to kind of see the world that way,” she says. “And so I never thought there was any issue with me not having all of the things that you would need to build a business and be a leader.”
First in frozen
In spring of 2020, when the government announced restaurant shutdowns because of COVID, things for Lee looked as though they might implode. Her father was terminally ill, she had a newborn baby, and now she had to close her two restaurants.
“I kind of go into like, okay, I’ve got to save this whole thing,” she says. “So within a matter of 24 hours, I got my team and my family together and we prototyped a frozen pizza.”
She took photos on her phone, wrote web copy, and had her web developer help her build a fully functioning e-commerce site in 72 hours.
She sold 50,000 pizzas in the first six weeks.
Lee turned her restaurants’ dining rooms into assembly lines, and her cooks hand-stretched the dough and wood-fired each pizza, then sealed them with a cryovac machine and froze them on-site. She bought used stand-up freezers for the assembly, then at night her team would load up their cars and take them to an old meal kit facility and store them in a collection of walk-in freezers.
Soon, Lee got a call from the CEO of a local grocery chain, Dierbergs, who helped her put a team together to scale production.
“We get under…inspection, we get into all of the Dierbergs and the rest was kind of history….” Lee says. “We slowly, over the next four years, start growing and then in the last two years, [have been] growing 100% every year. We’re now in 800 doors across the country. We’re expanding our line of foods to shelf-stable sauces and pastas…[as well as] olive oil and balsamic that we’re importing from Italy.”
Lee is building her fourth restaurant and talking to partners about expanding to other cities. She also has her own frozen pizza production plant. “Normally, a startup doesn’t have the infrastructure and the experience that we do, and we’ve kind of got it all” she says.
Photo by Tré Parmalee
