Less than 100 years ago, it was considered inappropriate for women to dine in restaurants — let alone run them. But much has changed. This series is a tribute to the women who dedicate their time, energy and talents to making the food world a better – and more delicious – place. Check out the full "Women in Food" series.

“My mom gardened a lot. She cooked. She made bread and she canned things," recalls Lisa Kirkpatrick, chef and co-owner of Goodkind. "I grew up in a small town in Illinois and she stayed home with us when we were young. And my dad definitely had a reverence toward certain things. If we were having steak, he was the one who cooked it. Once a year, he’d fry up doughnuts... and here and there he’d make us crepes.

“But I never thought about food as a career option until I dropped out of college. I thought I liked math, so I went to school to study economics. But, after a year and a half, I realized that I wasn’t going to be happy sitting behind a desk in a government office.”

Kirkpatrick says that things began to come together when she took a job cooking at a local homeless mission. The money was good and she remembers working with a chef who – like her – had left a more traditional job to pursue work that he felt was more fulfilling. He made everything from scratch, and when she saw the care and creativity he put into what he made, it inspired her.

“Finding cooking for me was really akin to finding my medium, my art form,” she says. “When you’re young, you go to school. You take classes and piano lessons. For me, none of those things clicked. But cooking felt different. It felt like an art to me. I wanted to do it all the time. And I could make money doing it.”

Pursuing her art

From there, she moved to Chicago, where she worked at a few restaurant jobs and contemplated her next move. Ultimately, she says, she decided to pursue a culinary degree from Milwaukee Area Technical College (MATC). She knew someone who’d gone through the program, and she saw it as an affordable solution in comparison to some of her options in Chicago. 

“So, I moved to Milwaukee, where I got a job at Coffee Trader and started school. But after a year in the program, I quit. I regretted it for a while, thinking maybe I should have stuck it out and gone through the second year, which covered pastry. But, as it turns out, I just learned on my own. I had my nose in a book all the time and I just kept practicing until things worked.” 

From there, she took a job at Pieces of Eight, a fine dining restaurant that occupied the lakefront location now home to Bartolotta’s Harbor House. 

“I moved up into a management role fairly quickly. I was working a lot of hours, which was the norm at that time…there was no such thing as work life balance. Back then it was also really different being a women in the kitchen. Most of the women I worked with were older and pretty rough around the edges. You couldn’t blame them. I didn’t go to work to feel like a piece of meat, but that element was definitely part of the experience, and it wasn’t always comfortable. 

“So being promoted to management helped. It pulled me out of the fray and gave me more day-to-day responsibilities. It also gave me validation and an opportunity to really be creative and exercise my art. It was good experience. But I think I intentionally sought out work at smaller restaurants after that, partially because they had more of a sense of community.” 

But Pieces of Eight wasn’t just an eye-opening experience in terms of Kirkpatrick’s career. It also proved to be the conduit through which she met her future husband and co-chef, Paul Zerkel.  

“I worked with Nick Burki [a chef who would one day take on operations at Sanford D’Amato’s Coquette Cafe]. He was in a band with Paul… Paul cooked too, but at the time he didn’t really consider himself a chef. He was a musician who cooked for a living.” 

Connecting with her art

After years working at Pieces of Eight, Kirkpatrick felt restless. 

“My brother was living in San Francisco. I’d gone to visit and it made me realize there was so much more to learn in the world of food.”  

The experience prompted her decision to move to the West Coast. In response to a recommendation from a friend, she and Zerkel – who she’d been dating for about six months – drove off in Zerkel's Cadillac Coupe Deville and moved to Portland, Oregon. 

It was 1996 and Portland’s food scene was just beginning to come into its own. Pinot Noir was hot and people were flying in and out of Portland to explore wine country. Unsuprisingly, the dining scene in the area was also expanding. The food truck scene was buzzing and chefs were getting serious in their efforts developing  relationships with local farms. 

“It was a great time to be in Portland. There was a lot of community among chefs and there were some really cool restaurants popping up. All in all, people in the industry were working together and there was a true sense of community.” 

As Kirkpatrick settled in, she took a job at Colosso, a well-respected woman-owned restaurant that served Spanish cuisine. During her time there, she honed her craft. In addition to her work in the restaurant, she was given the opportunity to take two trips to Spain, where she learned more about the culture and cuisines of the Mediterranean.

Interestingly, her travel to Spain also prompted major changes in her personal life. Following her first trip to Spain, Zerkel picked her up from the airport, took her to dinner, and asked her to marry him. 

“Over those years I learned so much and I really developed a deeper appreciation for Spanish food. I worked my way up, and at one point I was in a position where I could have taken over the restaurant. The owner wanted to travel more, so she’d offered to sell it to me. But I knew – deep down – that it wasn’t what I wanted to do.” 

During her time at Colosso, Kirkpatrick also met another friend and colleague who would play a significant role in her career. Katie Rose had traveled to Portland with a friend to skate the iconic Burnside. They made their way to Colosso, plopped down at the bar and subsequently spent a day hanging out with Kirkpatrick, Zerkel and a group of their friends. Little did anyone know that ten years later the three of them would come together to open their own restaurant, Goodkind.

“After eight years, I left Colosso and went to work at Nostrana, another woman-owned restaurant where I learned to make pizzas and housemade pasta. They had a wood-fired oven, so I learned the nuances of wood-fired cuisine. Pizza and housemade bread were both having a moment in Portland, so I had an opportunity to learn so much.  Most of all, I learned that – no matter how much I knew – there would always be so much more to learn.”

In fact, Kirkpatrick says that she learned one of the biggest lessons of her career during her time at Nostrano.

“There was an older man named Robert Reynolds. He no longer worked at the restaurant, but he taught cooking classes and took people on trips to Provence to shop at the markets and cook. He was really good at showing people how to tie local ingredients into what they were cooking… and the biggest thing he taught me that every dish has to have a sense of place.” 

“When you’re making a dish, you don’t just mash together a bunch of different things. You can pull together ingredients from different places, but there’s an art to bringing them together. There’s always a story. Sometimes a dish has a very specific story attached to a very specific place and sometimes it’s less literal. But there’s always a story that connects the dish to its origins.”

It was a lesson that would play out in the menu at Goodkind, a restaurant that still sets the bar for local, sustainable, community-driven cuisine. 

“The dishes that form the core of the Goodkind menu are all items that illustrate the concept of food really having a story. The spicy crab pasta hearkens back to days spent at the beach in Oregon. We’d take time off, stay in cabins that had kitchens and we’d cook together. The pasta was something we made… with fresh pasta and Dungeness crab…

“And the Basque cake is an homage to my time making Spanish food. In Spain the cake typically has a filling made from vanilla custard or a dark, sweet cherry conserva. My interpretation has both. There’s a custard base and the dessert connects to Wisconsin through the Door County cherries we use.” 

Coming home

“After 10 years living in Portland, we made one of our trips back to Milwaukee to visit... and I realized, deep down, that I was from the Midwest. It was part of me and I needed to be here. At the same time, I think Paul realized how much he connected to the creative aspect of cooking.”

“We both came back to Milwaukee very different people. We were both ready to establish our careers. And, at the same time, Milwaukee had also changed and the dining scene was a very different place.”

Kirkpatrick went to work for Kevin Sloan at The Social and subsequently at Sol-Fire on the East Side. Zerkel took a job working at Roots, where Kirkpatrick eventually joined him. Together they made an imprint on the Roots menu, which blazed the trail for the farm-to-table movement in Milwaukee. 

“I found my way to create and grow here. In 2013, while we were both working at Roots, we started Butcher Baker, a pop-up concept we ran with Katie Rose and Eric Mackey… and that was truly where we began working together and envisioning what could be.”

And then, in 2014, things came together. With a name inspired by a can of Wisconsin’s Iron Ridge Canning Co. peas found at an Elkhorn flea market and a menu inspired by European rotisseries, locally sourced ingredients and a lifetime of stories, Kirkpatrick and Zerkel established a kitchen of their own and an equally creative cocktail bar spearheaded by Katie Rose.  Goodkind was born.

“It took years, but eventually we found the right place to create. We found this space in a residential neighborhood where there was history and community. And we found a way to bring our creativity together. That’s what Goodkind really is.”

Want more? Listen to Lisa Kirkpatrick and Paul Zerkel on the FoodCrush Podcast as they talk about their careers, their experiences working together and the development of Goodkind and the Milwaukee restaurant scene.