Aleen Oakey, Checkered Apron Café
By Mike Mitchelson

Aleen Oakey gives credit where credit is due.

She cooks, but isn’t the chef at her restaurant, the Checkered Apron Café in downtown Minneapolis’ Lumber Exchange building. Those duties belong to Fred Bodine. “He’s the one that creates the meals people love,” she said.

Oakey, in addition to being the owner and her management duties, prepares the salads and will “plate up the food,” at the new breakfast and lunch restaurant. “I’ve never worked a line in a restaurant,” she said. “It’s amazing how fast those guys are. I still can’t flip eggs as fast as they can.”

Not only hadn’t she worked a line in a restaurant, she’d never owned a restaurant until last year. That doesn’t sound terribly unusual, but Oakey this month turns 68 years old. Some people wondered why she didn’t just want to retire. “But I don’t want to,” she said. “I enjoy working.”

A lack of restaurant experience doesn’t mean a lack of foodservice experience—Oakey has plenty of that. She ran kitchens at retirement communities, and, previous to that, lunch programs at Catholic schools and was the deli manager for Red Owl Country Stores. She’s taught Mexican cooking classes and, for the last 20 years, operated her catering business, also called Checkered Apron, part time. “It’s known as cheap and good,” Oakey said, laughing. “The catering kept me in the lifestyle to which I’ve become accustomed.”

The pace is the principle difference between the kitchens in the retirement community and a restaurant, Oakey said. “There, at 8 a.m., I knew how many people I was going to be serving,” she said. At the restaurant, it’s often a crush of people crowding into the dining room.


A whim on a tip

Ask Oakey why she chose the restaurant business, and you get a straightforward response. “I was tired of working at the retirement home,” she said. “I always like restaurants, and I had never done it.”
The food distributor rep she worked with at the retirement community suggested the space, and she visited. “I didn’t expect to do it, but it was where I could afford it, and the rest is, as they say, history,” she said.

Oakey’s daughter-in-law was an interior designer for Gabbert’s, and with her advice, they turned what was Bambino’s Pizza into a café nostalgic for the 1950s. The concept is simple. “My idea was good food, home-style, reasonable prices and a friendly atmosphere,” Oakey said. “They can get in and out in a hurry if they want to, or in the morning if it’s not too crowded sit and read the paper, work on their computer or watch the news.”

Popular menu items at lunch include a hot pot roast sandwich with mashed potatoes, popovers with honey butter, an open-face meatloaf sandwich and a hot turkey sandwich that sold out the day of the interview (“I didn’t think it would be so popular,” Oakey said). For breakfast, the kitchen staff churn out banana wheat germ pancakes among more standard fare, and whip the eggs in a malt machine to create their distinctive omelets. Lunch specials each day include beef stroganoff, a steak sandwich and chicken dumplings. “We tried pizza once, but we won’t do that again,” she said. “People want pizza, there’s hundreds of places to get one.”

The restaurant makes its money attracting the lunch crowd from the building and those that wander hungrily through the skyway. But it’s also become a destination restaurant for many, Oakey said. “We have a lot of retirees coming in here from the suburbs, who are coming downtown to bum around.”


Looking ahead

The Checkered Apron opened in November, and Oakey said business has been very good, despite all the lunch options available to downtown workers. She believes it can improve significantly when warmer weather arrives. “We haven’t had much business off the street—most of it is from the skyway,” she said. “But it’s been a very cold winter.”

The light rail runs in front of the restaurant, and Oakey hopes to attract those passengers and passersby when the city grants permission for outdoor seating on the sidewalk. She is also going to ramp up the catering business, particularly boxed lunches for business meetings.

Oakey admires Key’s Café for its diverse clientele, something she’s beginning to attract at The Checkered Apron. “We’ve got suits coming in, and both the young and the old.”

The Checkered Apron could just be the beginning. Once the restaurant is running to her liking, Oakey’s thought about opening a second location. “But that’s way down the line,” she said.
But maybe not too far. She has her family behind her—two generations worth work with her at the restaurant, her son, Scott, and grandson, Nate. “Sometimes I feel like I fell on my head,” she joked. “But when you don’t have the money to travel the beaches of the world...I thought this would be an adventure, and it is.”