At Honey Butter Fried Chicken in Chicago’s Avondale neighborhood, Christine Cikowski serves a menu mindful of just how comforting food can be, especially when made with high-quality ingredients sourced from local farmers and enhanced ever so subtly with chefly touches. Opening the restaurant in fall 2013 served as the culmination of several elements for Cikowski: putting her and Co-Chef/Owner Josh Kulp’s ideas into a brick-and-mortar restaurant; continuing the community they built around Sunday Dinner Club, which they’d founded in 2005; and creating a business at which they’d want to work, backed by business principles that embodied valuing employees. “It was challenging to put ourselves out there, and humbling to open a restaurant and actually have it be successful,” Cikowski says. “I think our progressive business practices set us apart, like paying employees living wages, on the path to thriving wages in the future, and offering health insurance and good quality of life. We can see the positive effects of offering these benefits, and it’s changing people’s lives for the better, which in turn changes our business for the better.”

She grew up with parents who loved to cook, bake, and garden, and had worked in restaurants since she was 16, but didn’t follow her passion for cooking until she was 27, enrolling in Kendall College School of Culinary Arts in Chicago. At culinary school, she met Kulp, and the two of them began hatching plans for Sunday Dinner Club after reading a New York Times article on underground dining. Cikowski worked at Blackbird in Chicago for 20 months after graduating and consecutively launched Sunday Dinner Club. Her experience at the award-wining restaurant grafted onto her personal chef philosophies, from how to run businesses to cooking high-quality seasonal food and putting menus together.

Throughout the years, Cikowski, along with Kulp, garnered acclaim including a Chicago Tribune Dining Award in 2014, Starchefs.com Rising Star Chef in 2015, and Good Food Chef of the Year award from Family Farmed in 2017. Additionally, Honey Butter Fried Chicken won both Chicago Tribune’s Reader’s Choice Award for Best Fried Chicken in 2016, and Chicago Magazine’s Reader’s Choice Award for Best Fried Chicken in 2017. Christine has worked closely on activist and community initiatives with Pilot Light, RAISE, the James Beard Foundation, Chicago’s Green City Market, The Mayor’s Task Force for Working Families, and Step Up Women’s Network, where she’s held the position of chef chair for four years. She still contends that her greatest achievements are holding a handstand in yoga class, keeping her bay leaf tree alive, and coaxing her nieces and nephews to try new foods.

Christine currently resides in Chicago, but part of her heart and soul lives in the mountains, deserts, and forests. When she’s not working the floor greeting customers, adapting new systems at Honey Butter Fried Chicken, or imagining the next menu for Sunday Dinner Club, Christine can be found hanging out with baby goats, rationalizing yet another plane ticket purchase, or writing for her website, www.achefwhowrites.com.