Growing up in Northern Virginia, you acquired an insatiable appetite for both food and storytelling. What is one of your earliest dining memories?
At the crux of both food and storytelling is sharing, and many of my best childhood memories revolve around the dinner table. My mom cooked most nights and made it a point to have us all sit down for dinner together as a family, especially if my dad had been traveling for work during the week. But I think my siblings and I loved it most when Mom would order pizza for dinner, which I’m sure she did because it’s exhausting cooking for three kids every night, but to us, it felt novel and special.
I also very distinctly remember making confetti cupcakes with Mom to bring to school to celebrate my birthday. There is nothing more nostalgic than cleaning out the remaining batter from the bowl with your fingertip.
“It was a crazy, risky way to do it, and I can’t imagine doing it any other way.”
You flirted with the hospitality industry for more than a decade, working in F&B communications before opening your first restaurant. What made you fall in love?
That arc begins with a good appetite. I started really getting into cooking and baking in high school. I watched a lot of PBS cooking shows and Food Network and had a really good base knowledge as a home cook. I studied journalism and business at the University of Iowa and had aspirations of working for Gourmet magazine (RIP), but my career path in Chicago started out in magazines that had little to do with food. I eventually found a role at a business-to-business magazine for chefs that really let me combine my interests. I started interacting with lots of restaurant publicists through that job, and one day realized it was more lucrative to switch over to hospitality PR and marketing.
Then I carved out an opportunity for myself to take over editorial for the PR firm I was at and spent a few years in charge of writing the press kit materials for all clients nationally, meaning I spoke with a lot of chefs, restaurant owners, and others allied to the field about what motivates them and what they wanted to show the world about their businesses. I have a knack for getting folks to open up and share (and I think my fluency in food really helped with that). I heard a lot about what worked—and what didn’t.
When I met Chef Ryan Brosseau, we got to talking about how we would run a restaurant if we were ever in charge. I wasn’t really even thinking of owning a restaurant at that time, but it was fun to daydream. The more we thought about it, however, the more I started to believe maybe we should just go for it. Before we knew it, we’d written a business plan, I’d had a mentor look it over, and we started looking at spaces to lease.
Then the pandemic hit. The world stopped. We all collectively lost our tethering to each other, our connectedness. I took a few months’ mental break from thinking about opening a restaurant—but came out the other end and told Ryan we had to do this. People would want—no, people would need intimate dining experiences again on the other side of the pandemic. So we updated our business plan, opened in January 2021 with a take-out-only menu, and made big plans to be a full-fledged restaurant down the line, which we accomplished later that summer. It was a crazy, risky way to do it, and I can’t imagine doing it any other way.
Is there a key lesson you learned in your communications career that has shaped how you approach leading your restaurant?
AB+: Always Be Positive. Present yourself in a positive light, put a positive spin on what you’re about, and watch how powerful that can be to get you where you want to go.
My example when I guided young publicists in their writing was rather than, “XX restaurant is unpretentious and offers dining without white tablecloths and stuffiness,” instead say, “XX restaurant welcomes guests with an approachable atmosphere in a casual fine-dining setting.” They’re saying the same thing, but the latter has the reader focused on the good attributes rather than directing them to think of the bad attributes the restaurant doesn’t have.
And if I can pick a second lesson, it’s to give yourself a marketing and PR budget. It’s so important to invest in the right resources and experts who can help get your name out there so you can stand out.
What is your favorite part about owning a restaurant?
The people. I have the most incredible staff, and I pinch myself every day that these folks believe in our little restaurant dream as much as we do. We are collectively obsessed with Chef Ryan’s food, and guests can sense how genuinely excited we are for them to be with us to experience it.
Can you share advice for someone who is making a career change to pursue a culinary calling?
Patience, humility, curiosity. When you don’t know something, find it out. If it’s out of your realm of expertise, find someone to help or hire who knows more than you.
Dear Margaret’s menu is described as both a love letter to Midwestern ingredients and a reflection of Chef Ryan Brosseau’s French-Canadian roots. Which dish do you feel best captures that blend of influences?
I always say that our menu depends on the whims of the seasons and the chef. The menu is constantly in flux—partially because the growing season in the Midwest is short and elusive, and partially because Ryan is always bored—and it’s one of the aspects of Dear Margaret that keeps it exciting. We are founded on what ingredients we can get locally, which we supplement with the best products we can get our hands on that are responsibly raised and maybe offer a little global inflection.
I have met and worked with many chefs, and Ryan is hands down my favorite cook. (It’s okay, he knows this, but I don’t let it get to his head!) He has a mastery of what works well together and holds himself to a really high standard, driven to make something better and better until it’s exactly where it needs to be for the menu. There is so much care that goes into what he does and the ethos he instills in the kitchen, especially to keep up with an ever-changing menu.
That said, there is one item I’ve told him he is never allowed to remove: the duck liver mousse. I joked early on that we could build a restaurant around his duck liver mousse (and then we did). I’ve been known to say it’s the mortar between the bricks of Dear Margaret. We do change the toppings seasonally, but the primary recipe remains the same—duck livers puréed with really good European butter and seasonings to the creamiest of consistencies. You could put it on a car tire, and it’d taste good, but luckily, we have 9-grain toast and sourdough baguettes we make fresh in-house that serve as a much better consumption vehicle.
Since opening during the pandemic for takeout and delivery, Dear Margaret has expanded to taking reservations for dine-in service and racked up a seriously impressive list of accolades. What are you most proud of?
This year, my team won the Jean Banchet Award (Chicago’s local culinary awards) for Best Hospitality. I knew in my heart of hearts they would win, and bringing them all up on stage to receive the award and thank them will forever be one of my proudest moments.
Close behind: winning Jean Banchet Best New Restaurant, our three-star review in the Chicago Tribune (peak pandemic, before we had even opened for onsite dining), and making The New York Times’ list of the 50 Best Restaurants in the country.
Time Out wrote that Dear Margaret belongs at the top of Chicago dining lists. Where else are some of your favorite go-to places to refuel or find culinary inspiration in the city?
I honestly need to make an effort to get out more! These days, when I do go out, it’s usually something chill to catch up with the friends I’ve been meaning to see, and I like to take them to Bayan Ko Diner, which is open all day on Mondays when most restaurants are closed in Chicago (including mine). If it’s breakfast time, I’m getting caée con leche and silogs with longanisa, and if it’s lunch, I’m getting a Cubano, and no matter what time of day, we’re also going to need lumpia and ham croquetas. So. Freaking. Good.
I do a lot of dining out when I travel and visit family. My other favorite food city is Charleston. The best meal I had on my last visit was at newcomer Merci. It’s very seasonally minded (like Dear Margaret) with the added bonus of super-fresh, local seafood.
How do you spend a day off?
Relaxing, hopefully! I am, regrettably, chronically online, so I’m scrolling TikTok for entertainment and for trends I’ll never convince Chef Ryan to do. But I do force him to make TikTok videos (@dearmargaretchi), which has grown into a series called Everything Takes Forever, pulling back the curtain on all the processes that go into our wholly from-scratch menu.
You’ll also find me elbows-deep in a craft project hyperfixation (lately, it’s beaded bracelets and sewing thrifted shirts into crop tops); trying to spend quality time with my son, who just started seventh grade; and planning my next trip to visit my family, during which, more likely than not, we’ll be attending a concert.
