New customers at Southport Grocery and Cafe often can’t resist leaning over the counter and whispering, “So, you know what this place used to be?” Looking around the modern, airy store and restaurant, with its beech floors and a subdued color scheme of chocolate brown, pale blue, and white, you’ll find no evidence of its prior incarnation. But residents of the Lakeview neighborhood remember the business that occupied this address for several decades: Cooney Funeral Home. “I used to walk past it two or three times a day,” says Lisa Santos, who opened the cafe this past summer. “When I first looked at the space, it was very much a funeral home–the carpeting, the heavy draperies.” The half of the business that’s now hers, she explains, “used to be the reception and viewing room. I didn’t end up with the morgue.”
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A lifetime foodie who still owns the first cookbook she received at the age of five, Santos fondly remembers cooking and baking at her grandmother’s side as a kid in Milwaukee. But she began her adult life as a certified public accountant.
“I always said I’d know when the time was right,” she says. After getting her bachelor’s degree in accounting and working for over 15 years as a CPA, Santos made her move. With a vague notion of opening a restaurant, she started taking classes at the Cooking and Hospitality Institute of Chicago and attending fine-foods trade shows.
Before opening her store, Santos “didn’t have a clue” what her new life would be like and admits it has not been glamorous. Typically she’s at the shop from open to close, working the register, cooking, cleaning, or up to her neck in paperwork. The dinner parties, for the time being, are on hold. “If you looked in my refrigerator at home,” she says, laughing, “you’d never believe I was a chef. It’s full of to-go boxes. Luckily my friends are very supportive.”
