For those of us who have watched Katie Lee build Katie’s Pizza & Pasta Osteria over the years, it’s hard not to marvel at how far she’s come. We’ve loved her restaurants for a long time, from the wood-fired pizzas and handmade pastas to the way they manage to feel genuinely welcoming to families. And now, we’re just as happy to grab a frozen Katie’s pizza or pasta bake at the grocery store when we can’t make it to one of her restaurants.
That makes her new memoir, Unemployable: The Katie Lee Story, particularly fascinating. Lee landed an exclusive book deal for her debut memoir, which will be available exclusively at Target stores nationwide beginning Sept. 27. The book’s release comes as Katie’s expands its retail presence with Target, where its products will now be available at every Target location in the country.
Unemployable, published by Swan Bluff Press, opens with Lee being dropped off at a halfway house on South Broadway at age 29 with nothing but a plastic grocery bag of belongings. From there, she recounts a childhood marked by family dysfunction, years of addiction, sobriety, single motherhood, grief and the long, sometimes improbable road to becoming a restaurateur and entrepreneur.
It’s an oddly constructed book at times, but that’s part of what makes it so riveting. Lee doesn’t tell a neat, polished success story, and the contrast is hard to ignore: How did this woman, who now runs beautiful restaurants, a national food brand and a growing hospitality business, come from such a difficult past?
The answer unfolds through Lee’s own stories, which move from her childhood and relationship with her father to waitressing, early business ventures, the opening and eventual closing of Katie’s Pizza, a Kickstarter campaign and the loss of her best friend, Rolando Colon, just days before the pandemic shut down restaurants across the country.
The book’s title comes from Lee’s father, Tom Lee, whom she describes as a self-employed “hustler” who had epilepsy and brain damage. Throughout her childhood, he told her, “Katie, you’re just like me. You’re unemployable.”
Lee eventually turned the word into something else entirely.
Today, Katie’s includes four restaurants, a frozen pizza manufacturing plant and a packaged-foods business with 18 products sold in more than 6,000 grocery stores nationwide. The company also operates an e-commerce business and a 300-acre farm-to-table property. The retail line has grown particularly quickly, expanding from four pizza products in 400 specialty grocery stores last year to a much larger lineup that includes pizzas, sauces, frozen pasta bakes, dried pastas and olive oil. The expanded Target presence will put Katie’s products in stores across the country.
And while the restaurants have become a serious St. Louis food destination, they’ve never lost some of the things that make them especially fun for families. Kids can watch pasta being made in the restaurants, and servers will give them pizza dough to play with at the table while they wait. It’s a small touch, but it says a lot about the kind of restaurants Lee has built: places where parents can have a really good meal without feeling like they have to apologize for bringing their kids along.
That sense of hospitality runs through Lee’s work, whether she’s serving a wood-fired pizza in one of her restaurants or putting a frozen one into a grocery-store freezer. It’s also part of what makes Unemployable such an interesting read. We already know the success story. The book fills in everything that came before it.
Lee writes frankly about her struggles with drugs and alcohol, including the period when she said addiction nearly killed her. She also writes about sobriety, motherhood, grief and the fear of losing the business she had spent years building. The book ultimately lands on a more hopeful note, including an epilogue set in Italy with her daughter, Nadia.
“Unemployable is a road map for everyone who was told they didn’t have a chance,” Lee said.
The book will be available exclusively at Target stores from Sept. 27 through Oct. 31 for $24.99, with displays pairing the memoir with Katie’s pizzas, pastas, sauces and olive oil. Beginning Nov. 1, it will be sold at retailers across the country.
Lee is also releasing One Night at Katie’s, a vinyl album inspired by the atmosphere of her restaurants. The 14-track album features original music composed and arranged by ELPENTHE and Roman GianArthur, with contributions from Monica Martin, GianArthur, Tydell and Eric Beenk. The album and book will be available at retailers nationwide beginning Nov. 1.
