On the morning of September 11, 2001, Kim Garza’s Evanston bakery, like most retail establishments in the country, was empty. But by 1 PM, says Garza, “there were about 15 people in here. They were sitting on the windowsills, they were sitting on the floors, sitting on the tables. Some people were crying; we ended up laughing about some things. It was just a place where people came to get a cup of coffee and just be.”
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Garza was raised in Winthrop Harbor, in the far northeast corner of Illinois, by parents from Mississippi. “Coming from the south, there was always the cardinal rule of, Don’t forget to feed the guy next door. Don’t forget to invite the preacher to dinner. And if you have anyone over, don’t run out of food.” She’d been wanting to put those words into action for a few years when she spotted a former video store for rent in September 2000. Garza, a former technical training salesperson, gutted the place and installed a kitchen that takes up most of the square footage. “Everybody said, ‘You’re not gonna make it, there’s never been a place like that here before,’” she says. “Well, we’ve been here over two years now.”
These days she tries to cook with only fresh ingredients: real butter, real eggs, real milk, real cream. Soups at Kim’s Kitchen–varieties include tomato bisque and sweet potato–are made from scratch. “We do a lot with fresh herbs,” she says. The only item not made by Garza or her staff is the bread, which comes all the way from La Brea Bakery in Los Angeles: “I can’t even try to top that.”
Garza now limits the dinners to 20 people per seating (there are one or two seatings per night). “We get a few people who repeat, and we have one couple that comes to every dinner,” she says. “It’s a really nice way to get to know your customers.” It’s also a way for customers to get to know each other: a guest at one of the dinners found that another guest was his high school English teacher from 20 years ago.
