Katie Lee, the chef/owner behind the popular Katie’s Pizza + Pasta restaurant group, launches her new project tonight at Left Bank Books.
As you might guess from the location, the project is a book. But it’s like no book you’ve ever read. There is no finished manuscript, no publisher, no table of contents. There’s not even a title. There is, however, a story. A wonderful story, told with such honesty and brio that it may take your breath away.
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If you know anything about the St. Louis restaurant industry, you know Katie Lee has lived a remarkable life: She was a high school dropout a 14, a restaurateur who’d opened an eponymous pizzeria at age 24 only to lose it in a haze of alcohol—then claw her way back to sobriety and major success (on top of three thriving restaurants, she now has a deal to sell her frozen pizzas at Walmart). What may surprise you is that Katie Lee can write. Her story leaps off the page, combining the pace of a best-seller with the keen observations of a born memoirist. You won’t be able to stop reading.
As Lee tells it, she didn’t set out to write a book, much less one with a wildly unconventional release. The project began with her attempts to process the death of two towering figures in her life: Her father, Tom, in her words “a junk picker, recovered alcoholic with brain damage,” as well as her earliest restaurant backer; and Rolando Llerenna Colon, an exiled Afro-Cuban national whom Lee met at her first restaurant job as a teenager (he was then in his 60s) and who swiftly became, in the book’s telling, “part soul mate, part guardian angel.” Colon died at the beginning of the pandemic; Tom Lee died a year later.
“The day that my dad died was the year after Rolando, and I just put on my coat and went outside and started walking for about a year,” Lee says with a laugh. “Literally, it was that strange. I just walked in the woods and was with my own thoughts for the first time, and ultimately, started to find myself.”
She began journaling. People had long told Lee that she should write a book, but she always demurred. “You know, I finished school at 14,” she says. She didn’t have confidence in her ability to write her own story.
Increasingly, though, she wanted to tell it, so she hired a ghostwriter. When she mentioned that she journaled, the ghostwriter suggested she share her writing. Lee sent her some pages—a raw tale of how she washed up at a halfway house on South Broadway, took a bus to work at the restaurant she’d previously owned, the restaurant with her name on the marquee. Her father agreed to take her back, on certain conditions: “You’re not the boss. I’m not paying you. What you make in tips you can keep. That’s all the money you get. Don’t fucking steal from me. This is your last fucking chance. You hear me?” She did.
The ghostwriter knew when she wasn’t needed. Recalls Lee, “She was like, Oh, my God, you should probably just write this yourself.” And so Lee did.
Lee settled on an unconventional release plan mostly because she couldn’t wait to share what she’d written. Once the book was largely complete—Lee has written 17 chapters, but thinks she’ll probably whittle it down to 15—she was ready release the first chapter, titled “The Last Stop.” You can buy it at any of her restaurants for $5. It looks like a magazine, complete with illustrations. She plans to release the next 14 (or so) chapters the same way beginning in January, maybe every other week, maybe every month. She’s still figuring it out.
“Coming from the restaurant business, doing things in an untraditional way, I just had this urge and need to get the work out there,” she explains. “So rather than wait on a publishing deal or wait on everything to be perfect and final, Let’s just start getting it out there.”
Even though Lee never went to college, she knows she’s harkening back to a long literary tradition. In Dickens’ time, serialized publication was more typical than not. In 1984, Tom Wolfe got the world talking by releasing The Bonfire of the Vanities chapter by chapter in Rolling Stone.
Will Lee get the world talking, too? It seems impossible that a book this interesting, with a story this real, will land with a thud, and Lee assures that she doesn’t intend for it to be a series of handsomely designed printouts forever. She hopes the St. Louis release will generate more interest—and either a conventional publisher, or she’ll publish it herself. And by then, she promises, it will have a title.
There are two possibilities she’s been thinking about. One relates to an anecdote from her childhood. (You’ll have to get a ticket for the Left Bank Books event, or maybe just read the right chapter, to learn about that one.) But the other is based on a mantra well-known to anyone who’s had to fight for their sobriety.
“When you’re drinking, you’re a compulsive liar,” she explains. “Part of the disease is you’re lying to hide your addiction and your disease, and when you get sober, you’re taught it’s always easier when you tell the truth. That’s a famous line: Life’s easier when you tell the truth.
“And so that idea is kind of taking the lead, and also encapsulates what I’ve done, which is to be very vulnerable and tell all of the dark and maybe scary parts of the human story that we’re all afraid to tell, and then life just becomes easier because it’s out there, right?”
Those are hard lessons to learn, and often hard to tell well. Lee has done both, and now you can read all about it—or at least the first chapter.
Tickets are required and seating is limited for Katie Lee’s talk at Left Bank Books on Dec. 3. (She will be in conversation with SLM Executive Editor Sarah Fenske.) You can purchase “The Last Stop” at the store, one of Katie’s Pizza + Pasta restaurants, or online.
