The best baguette in Chicago is made by a 33-year-old woman who has been in business about six years. Her name is Nancy Carey, and her company is called Red Hen Bread. When she started, in 1997, she imagined it as a retail bakery, a little store in Wicker Park with some display cases and a counter and a cash register to sell the breads and light pastries she’d make in back. But before long–when the bills started coming in–she realized that she’d have to sell wholesale to keep the business going. Her first restaurant customer was Gordon, the seminal contemporary American restaurant in River North, a famous training ground for Chicago chefs. As the young cooks dispersed from Gordon Sinclair’s kitchen, Carey’s reputation and client list grew. Today she supplies most of the best restaurants in town–the Four Seasons and the Ritz-Carlton and Tru, Spiaggia, Les Nomades, and dozens of others.
Carey grew up in Riverside, the seventh child of nine in a family of Irish Catholic achievers. It wasn’t really a culinary household. “I shouldn’t say this because my mom would kill me, but she knows: in a way, I couldn’t stand the way we ate. She did a really good job of making very basic meals–roasted meat and canned vegetables, every night, and a baked potato. It got to the point where I couldn’t eat anymore.” At the library she would gravitate toward the cookbooks and gourmet magazines. She doesn’t know where the interest came from. But she does remember that her mother baked cinnamon raisin bread every Christmas–“We’d go around in our pajamas and bring bread to everybody in the neighborhood. We used to love that.” She also remembers the magic cookies that one of her sisters baked. “They were just a very basic, common meringue. They were green though; she’d put food coloring in them, and creme de menthe, and chocolate chips. And she’d put them in the oven and say, OK now, we have to just forget about them or else they won’t cook. You know, all night. So all night long I’d be lying there going, Forget the cookies! Don’t remember the cookies!”
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Wherever it came from, an interest in food has been one of the two constants in her life, Carey says. The other is art. She started taking classes at the Art Institute when she was 12, and after high school and a year at Loyola she earned a bachelor’s degree from the School of the Art Institute. She met her husband, Frank Spidale, a painter (and now a baker), in the process of opening a community gallery in Riverside. “He says, ‘It’s always the good ones that quit, Nancy. You’re just one of the good painters that quit.’ I guess if I could have reasoned with myself to keep doing it, I probably would have been good. If I could figure out a way to make money at it, I probably would have done it. But it came down to one field or the other. I thought, If I go the art route, the realistic perspective is I’ll always have to have a side job. I’ll always be in food anyway, so why not just really focus on food?”
She enrolled at the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, New York, where she found that what she really loved was baking bread. Before completing her degree she left to work for a former CIA instructor who ran the baking operation attached to the Atticus Bookstore Cafe in New Haven, Connecticut. There, in addition to learning techniques of high-volume commercial baking, she picked up lessons that would help her–and hold her back–when she went into business for herself.
“That’s when my oldest brother said, You’re just going to have to figure out how to start your own thing.” Another brother, an entrepreneur who started the Chicago Trolley Company, took her out for a beer and filled her head with warm capitalist dreams. “Once you get that bug, once somebody inoculates you with that, there’s no going back. You know, when they say it’s possible, you can do your own stuff, you can be your own boss, you can run the company the way you have these grand visions of running it, being so fair and honest and all this stuff. I was thinking I can have employees that I really like, and like to be around, and I can have a really good relationship with them. So I thought OK, I’m doing it.”
“Then this guy Miguel came to work for me, and he could work circles around everybody. He was like an angel. No complaints, he did his job, he went home, he had his family. When he felt he wasn’t getting paid enough he would come to me and he’d say, Look, I want to make this much money, how can I do that? It was very up-front, as opposed to the mind games I had with the local slackers.”
“He was very different because he wasn’t necessarily going to put up with the stuff that I was serving out. He had his own ideas about how things should run. Of course we butted heads a lot. He’s very educated in the business and I’m not; you know, my education was all lived-out business. So he had a very different approach.”
