Baked Alaska—The Entrepreneurial Restaurateurs

“I’d always wanted to have my own restaurant and was always developing business plans and concepts when I was going thru culinary school,” was how Chef Chris Holen explained how he started his first food business in 2000. “I talked the school into letting me do a real business from one of my business plans as an internship program. So in June of 2000 we started Baked Alaska Soup Co. as a mobile soup kitchen, working out of 5x8 utility trailer which we towed behind our VW camper van. We worked the music festival circuit that summer in Alaska.”

Chris’ wife Jennifer, who he had met in Alaska several years before when they were both tour guides, chimed in, “We coined the phrase, ‘Have Soup, Will Travel’, for our operation. One thing we found out during that summer is that it is awfully hard to sell soup, when the temperature is in the 80s.” The Baked Alaska Soup Co. journey was their honeymoon.

On their drive back from Alaska, they chanced upon Astoria, OR and fell in love with the quaint town. Jennifer, “I loved it, especially the fact that it was right on the water. That was my one hope as we thought about where we would land, to be able to find a place that had lots of water.”

They kept the name Baked Alaska Soup Co. for their first restaurant, a seven table café, that they started on the Labor Day weekend in 2000. When they started Baked Alaska (www.bakedak.com), a full service restaurant and lounge on the waterfront in 2001, they changed the name of the original café to Half Baked Alaska. They have since sold Half Baked, but started another restaurant The Schooner Twelfth Street Bistro. Chris told me, “It was a historic old ‘dive bar’ that had been an Astoria landmark for 75 years. We opened in 2004, across the street from the restored Hotel Elliot. We serve breakfast, lunch and dinner seven days per week and also provide room service to the Hotel Elliot. More on the Hotel Elliot in a later blog.

Chris and Jennifer have thrown themselves wholeheartedly into the community. They had just done a free feed for the Tapiola Park Playground project (more on that in a future blog), started their own 4th of July Street Festival and do a Light Bite Festival with 12 other restaurants as a fundraiser for the Women’s Resource Center.

Chris and Jennifer exemplify the entrepreneurial spirit that I constantly see among the young people that I come in contact with in my travels. They are visionary, giving to their community, socially motivated and incredibly entrepreneurial. The towns that can create a special “sense of place” like Astoria will be the long term winners in the entrepreneurial sweepstakes of economic development.