Chef Shares Her Food Love With Business

Chef Evelyn Shelton, MPA, is the owner of Evelyn’s Food Love, located at 55th and State Street. Photo provided by Evelyn Shelton.
Chef Evelyn Shelton, MPA, is the owner of Evelyn’s Food Love, located at 55th and State Street. Photo provided by Evelyn Shelton.

Chef Shares Her Food Love With Business

By Tia Carol Jones

Chef Evelyn Shelton, MPA always cooked and came from a family that cooked. From early on, it was her goal to become a chef and have a restaurant. She went to college and received a traditional education, but in the back of her mind, she knew she would go to culinary school. After culinary school, she ended up at Northwestern Medicine, which was the same place where she worked in her corporate career. There, she was the first Black woman executive chef.

After getting experience in a corporate kitchen, Shelton had the opportunity to open her own restaurant, and she took advantage of it. She opened Evelyn’s Food Love in 2017, after acquiring the building in 2016 and doing the buildout. Shelton said the menu is a mashup of the kind of food she grew up eating and enjoying, and her culinary training. She said her inspiration for the menu came from seeing what people responded positively to, as well as items that she wasn’t as familiar with, seeing how those items would play on the menu.

As a classically trained chef, Shelton was well-versed in French technique, sauces, butter and rich food. It meant that her salmon croquettes and crab cakes went from being paired with a remoulade sauce to being paired with a lemon beurre blanc or a white wine beurre blanc. She said typically whatever dishes she placed on the menu did really well, so there wasn’t too much adjusting of the menu.

Shelton said she intentionally opened her restaurant in an underserved neighborhood on the South side of Chicago at 5522 S. State St. She said it was her goal and her dream to open on the South side. While investors were willing to partner with her if she had opened a location downtown or on the North Shore, they weren’t as willing to partner with her concept being located on the South side. That’s where the Local Initiatives Support Corporation (LISC) came in, serving as the initial lender for Shelton, who had gone to traditional banks for a loan and was turned down.

Shelton said she was referred to a non-traditional lender by someone in the small business lending department at a bank. She did her research, calling those lenders and someone told her about the Local Initiatives Support Corporation (LISC). She reached out to LISC and immediately they were on board, as their mission was to work with small business owners who are female, minority and Veterans in underserved communities.

“LISC is the reason why I was able to get the money that I needed to not only purchase the property, but to start rehabbing it, as well,” she said.

Shelton said LISC ended up being more than a lender, they also became a partner because they were invested in her concept of being successful. She said LISC didn’t just give her money, they gave her much needed support along her journey. She said nine and a half years later, they are still sort of a partner. When other opportunities presented themselves, LISC was right there.

Shelton said people were interested in her story about how she opened her restaurant on the South side. She wrote a book, Carving Out A Culinary Career, as a way to provide advice and answer questions about how she was able to open and sustain her restaurant. At first, she didn’t want to write the book, but she had a story to tell. Shelton said it is common to see new restaurants open in our communities and they struggle to stay open past the first year.

“People who open restaurants know how to cook, and that’s why they want to open a restaurant, but the thing is, somewhere between knowing how to cook, or getting a really good, solid culinary education and actually opening a restaurant, there’s a huge information gap,” she said. She said she wrote the book to fill that information gap.

Shelton said if people take the time to read the book and can delay gratification until they build up solid resources, it will be beneficial and those entrepreneurs can keep their restaurants open.

She said that being a good chef or cook is not enough; it is necessary to also know the mechanics of running a business. She wants the book to be a start to making a difference for other small food business owners.

For more information about Evelyn’s Food Love, visit www.evelynsfoodlove.com.

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