UPTOWN — Paige Meagher met Zach Greatting in 2010, in the pressure-cooker environment of culinary school, where Meagher said "you have a knife in your hand by 6 a.m., no time for coffee, and get hollered at" on the first day.
She was the focused, note-obsessed perfectionist. He was the calm and confident natural. But the two opposites forged a friendship — and hatched a business plan that evolved into Brix Catering & Events.
More than a catering company, Brix holds private dinner parties and events, runs a supper club offering pre-made fare, and hosts a pop-up dinner series featuring their chef friends. It's all to bring a new dimension to Uptown's culinary reputation — which isn't barren, but isn't exactly bursting at the seams.
Brix, 1463 W. Leland Ave., is nestled in a quiet slice of the neighborhood just east of Uptown staple Carol's Pub, where the friends hope to help the community realizes its potential as an "up-and-coming" neighborhood.
"Uptown is really growing, and it's a lot more fun to be part of a community that's up and coming," said Meagher, a 32-year-old Lincoln Park resident who hails from suburban Barrington.
The location is "off the beaten path," said Greatting, 28, of Lakeview. But as a catering company they didn't need the same foot traffic a restaurant might. They also have a lot of clients in Lakeview, Lincoln Park and the northern suburbs, so the location was somewhat central.
Old family recipes from both the cooks inspire a lot of what ends up on customers' plates, although Greatting begrudgingly acknowledges their offerings can be described as American contemporary.
Growing up with "four generations of Italian relatives in the same town, every family dinner and every family gathering centered around entertaining and around cooking and being together around the table," Meagher said.
Among Meagher's favorite family recipes are her grandfather's pork neckbone-based red sauce, and her grandmother's homemade gnocchi. Greatting describes himself as a fan of "simple food done well" whose upbringing in Springfield had him accustomed to "farm-to-table" meats and veggies before the term grew popular in recent years.
But both dabbled in other fields before settling in the kitchen.
Meagher worked in finance for about five years, first as an assistant on a trading desk and later as an executive assistant for a hedge fund. But, she said, "I didn't want to be the assistant anymore, I wanted to do my own thing and follow my passion."
In 2010 she enrolled at Kendall College, where "right away, the first week of class made me feel really connected to family."
Cooking was just as important in Greatting's house, said the certified sommelier who has a knack for Indian cuisine. For a young Greatting, just waiting for a plate wasn't enough. He got his hands dirty.
"And then I was eventually the one doing things, because it stresses some people out — but it doesn't stress me out," he said.
But after studying opera performance at the University of Denver, he moved to New York with aspirations of being a singer while working side jobs at restaurants, front-of-the-house gigs where he said he was "really unhappy," not to mention a bit homesick for the Midwest.
"You hold a door here for someone and people say 'Thank you,'" he said. "In New York, 25 people just blow past you and you learn to stop doing that."
Greatting tapped into his childhood love for cooking and enrolled at Kendall College in 2010 to learn classical French technique.
The classmates soon bonded when Meagher became Greatting's "restaurant recommendation friend" and after the two had a couple nights out drinking. They began doing private dinners together and realized they could "really lay out these beautiful dinners at people's homes," Greatting said.
By 2012 their catering operation was gaining steam. They reached the point where they figured it was time to make the business more official and find their own space to operate out of rather than shared kitchens and people's homes. Meagher took a bit of a detour, getting married and having a baby — but the two's aspirations weren't dampened.
What they found in the former Cousins' Restaurant , which they moved into earlier this year, was an affordable spot with a serviceable kitchen and enough dining space to host events and make their operation more than a catering business.
"It would have been easy to plop this on Southport, and have a cute little spot," Greatting acknowledged, but "we really wanted to be a part of closing the gap between Lakeview, Ravenswood and Andersonville."
"There's this little spot right here where if enough small businesses like us come in, something really special can happen," he said.
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