When you want to understand just how far Katie Lee has come since opening her first project, Katie’s Pizza on Clayton Road, all you have to do is listen to her tell the story of what happened with one of her first guests. A newcomer to the restaurant business at the time, Lee got behind the peel to fire her first margherita pie, only to find out that she could not get it quite right. She had to remake it four times—such a long time that the man who’d placed the order had to take it to go. But there was another problem: Lee didn’t know how to fold the pizza box.
Fast-forward 16 years, and Lee now stands atop one of the St. Louis region’s most thriving culinary brands, Katie’s Pizza and Pasta Osteria, where she oversees a group of three restaurants and a growing line of consumer packaged goods. It’s a success story that’s been defined by transformation: First, Lee’s transformation from a total novice into a seasoned restaurateur. Next, the move from the original Katie’s project with her late father to the first Katie’s Pizza and Pasta in Rock Hill, followed by a shift to a multi-unit restaurant group and eventually into consumer packaged goods. Now, Katie’s Pizza and Pasta is undergoing yet another transformation as Lee adds to her growing restaurant group and takes her line of frozen pizzas, pastas and sauces nationwide.
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This month, Lee is introducing her new Chef Collective, a powerhouse team of three culinary professionals, including her longtime chef, Jake Sanderson, and the venerable Cary McDowell, most recently of Wright’s Tavern. (The third, yet-to-be-named chef will round out the new leadership group.) As Lee explains, the newly formed culinary team will be key to her future plans and represents a new way forward during a pivotal point in the business’ evolution.
“I love this idea of evolving because I feel, at this point, like we are in a new beginning,” says Lee. “I just gained ownership of the company for the first time since I opened it. When I opened with my father, I got zero equity because the arrangement was that it was a learning opportunity for me. Then, when I split off, I got 50 percent ownership. Now, I have finally gained 100 percent ownership for the first time in 17 years. I’ve finally gained control of the thing I started 17 years ago. There was a lot of inertia from that, and what we are now doing has been building and building for all that time.”
The Chef Collective
With the ascent of Katie’s Pizza & Pasta’s national profile, Lee realized that she not only needed help, but she also needed to rethink the traditional hierarchy found in most restaurants. “Sometimes, it’s very necessary to have set positions and hierarchy in restaurants,” says Lee. “However, when you get to the level of talent that we have, you have to innovate with how you do things.”
That innovation led her to create a Chef Collective, consisting of herself, McDowell, Sanderson, and another chef, who will work together and draw upon their individual areas of strength to focus on different aspects of Katie’s multifaceted business. Although no one has official titles in this new arrangement, Lee describes herself as a creative director, while Sanderson serves as a culinary director and leader of the day-to-day goings-on in the restaurant. McDowell will focus on both mentorship and menu development. Lee describes building the collective as putting together a dream baseball team, getting the absolute best position player and then letting them thrive in a particular area of expertise.
A major catalyst of this new way of doing things was the addition of McDowell. A revered veteran culinarian whose resume includes working for Daniel Boulud in New York City and such St. Louis institutions as The Crossing, Revival, Liluma, and Pi Pizzeria, McDowell was most recently executive chef at Wright’s Tavern, where he worked alongside his longtime friend and esteemed restaurateur Matt McGuire to bring the restaurant from their shared vision to reality. A little over a month ago, McDowell amicably departed Wright’s, a decision that he notes was born of a desire to take on a different sort of role.
“Matthew [McGuire] was leaning into and tightening up what he was going to do in the future, and my goal always was to set things up so I didn’t have to be there forever,” says McDowell. “I trained the guys really well, and we were doing great on a consistent basis. It felt like ‘mission accomplished.’ I feel that sometimes people get boxed in and that they should think of their time like a play: You write the script, hire the actors, build the set, and there is a point where the play needs to be over, so you can keep writing more plays.” (McGuire echoes McDowell’s sentiment, noting, “We’re grateful for [McDowell’s] help in getting us started and wish him the very best in his new and bigger projects.”)
McDowell had already made the decision to leave Wright’s Tavern when the idea of the Chef Collective took shape between him and Lee. The two had known each other for many years and always kept an eye on each other’s work, rooting for their individual projects as friends. As Lee explains, she’d always hoped to one day work with McDowell but hadn’t previously found a place for him on the team that would match his talents. With the expansion of Katie’s brand, however, she’s now able to do so.
A New Brunch Menu
Lee admits that she and her team have a lot in the works—new growth for the restaurant brand, expansion of their consumer packaged goods line—and that they are currently setting the stage for it with the new additions to the team.
The Chef Collective will also allow them to do is to reimagine the restaurant’s brunch offerings. A new menu launched this past weekend and, as Lee explains, it feels aligned with the overall Katie’s brand. “We wanted to start working on that immediately,” says Lee. “It was a good project for us to figure out everyone’s place and see how we work together—and it was fantastic.”
The new Katie’s Pizza & Pasta brunch menu, available on Saturdays and Sundays at all three locations, underscores the restaurant’s Italian inspiration, in Lee’s view. Dishes include the spaghetti cacio e pepe frittata, citrus cured salmon pizza, bolognese sausage frittata, and an Italian riff on biscuits and gravy, made with polenta buttermilk biscuits and Fiama sausage gravy. “It’s Italian enough to be Italian but biscuits and gravy enough to be from Little Rock,” Lee says with a laugh. McDowell and Sanderson also have their own favorite: Wood Oven Eggs in Purgatory, composed of three poached eggs in spicy tomato sauce with salsiccia, ‘nduja, and goat cheese.
The Future
While Lee is not yet ready to unveil the extent of her plans for Katie’s, she does note that there is a lot happening, including the ambitious consumer packaged goods line that she plans to unveil soon and a rebrand and new marketing campaign.
With some of the brightest minds in the business on the team, she feels that Katie’s is poised for growth while remaining true to what made the restaurant successful in the first place. “I don’t know of any restaurants in the U.S. that do handmade pastas at this scale for three or four locations,” says Lee. “We are doing it at a scale of service for 1,500 people per day. We’re also doing this for the consumer packaged goods line, hand-stretching and wood-firing 1,500 pizzas per day. People tell me that I will have to automate or buy cheaper cheese, but we have been able to accomplish what we have on this scale, and to keep growing, we really need the Chef Collective. If we are going to grow, then we are going to keep doing this as an art.”
