Soul Kitchen owner Pam Scariano gazes up at the ceiling and counts on her fingers the number of employees who have been with her through the restaurant’s transitions. “Let’s see, two have been with me since day one,” she says. Eight more have stuck with her since the 1995 move to North, Damen, and Milwaukee. “I’m so lucky,” she adds, realizing that those ten make up over half her staff. “I have hardly any turnover.”
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The seeds for Soul Kitchen were sown in fall 1992, when Scott Gray, Scariano’s college buddy and then owner of the Lizard Lounge, asked her to be his partner in a loose plan he had for a restaurant. “The only thing he knew at that point was the name–Soul Kitchen, after the Doors song,” says Scariano. She was bartending at Mia Francesca and preparing to take her law school admission test. “I never really said yes to him, but the next thing I knew we’d signed a lease on the space.” It was at Chicago and Leavitt, in a space formerly occupied by a Polish restaurant, with a tiny kitchen and minimal seating. But the $475 rent was just right.
A year and a half later Gray decided to move to Costa Rica, and Scariano bought him out of the partnership. Then in early 1995 Scariano’s friends and veteran restaurateurs Michael Noone and Terry Alexander proposed to finance a move to a larger and better located storefront at 1576 N. Milwaukee. Scariano was leery about moving in an industry where the credo is generally “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”: “I had a few friends who renovated their restaurants and then went bankrupt. It freaked me out a little.” Plus she liked her little Chicago Avenue storefront. “I could have stayed in that space for the rest of my life,” she says. “I told them that I’d move, but only if they promised not to change anything–I mean down to the colors on the walls.”
