Christina Hansen still recalls the smells from her Polish grandmother’s kitchen: freshly made potato pancakes, or perch frying in a pan, caught that day in Lake Michigan by her grandfather. Berry picking was one of her grandparents’ favorite summer activities, and their kitchen would be filled with the bounty, ready to be made into pies and jams. And “I’ll never forget my grandma’s bow tie cookies,” Hansen says. “She’d store them in huge roasting pans in the closet because there was nowhere else to put them.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Hansen grew up in Hyde Park and went to the University of Illinois at Chicago, then spent nine years working in sales, many of them in the advertising department at the Reader. Inspired by a cooking class she took at Whole Foods, she enrolled in culinary school in the spring of 1998. “I really liked my job but knew I needed a change,” she says. “I was only 36 at the time and knew I was still young enough.”
With little business knowledge, Hansen enrolled in the four-month Entrepreneurship Training Program at Jane Addams Hull House, where she learned to create a business plan, make contacts, and do a comprehensive market analysis. She called several similar food publications for advice, including Table in New York’s Hudson Valley and Easy Food in New Orleans. “I had a chance to talk to the founders of these papers, and they were such a valuable resource,” she says. “I admit that during my market research, I had some people tell me they thought this was the worst idea they’d heard. But I thought it was better to hear the negative, because then you can see the worst-case scenario.”
