Katie Lee built one of the city’s best-known Italian restaurant brands the hard way. Now she is putting the whole journey on paper.
Swan Bluff Press is releasing UNEMPLOYABLE: The Katie Lee Story, the first book from the founder of KATIE’S Pizza & Pasta. The memoir arrives exclusively at Target stores nationwide Sept. 27 through Oct. 31 for $24.99. End-aisle displays will pair the book with her line of pizzas, pastas, sauces, and olive oil.
Lee does not soften the early chapters. She dropped out of high school at 15. At 29 she was dropped at a halfway house on South Broadway with a plastic grocery bag of belongings. That scene opens the book. The title comes from her late father, Tom Lee, a self-employed hustler who lived with epilepsy and brain damage. From a young age he told her she was just like him: unemployable.
“Unemployable is a roadmap for everyone who was told they didn’t have a chance,” Lee said.
The narrative follows waitressing jobs, a first business launched on borrowed money and borrowed confidence, the opening and later closing of an early Katie’s Pizza location, a Kickstarter campaign, and the sudden death of her close friend Rolando Colon days before COVID-19 shut the restaurants she had spent a decade building. Relapse, family dysfunction, grief, and the fear of losing everything are all in the text. So is the quieter epilogue set in Italy with her daughter, Nadia.
Lee writes that drugs and alcohol “screwed me up for a long while. Almost killed me…but the result: a woman with an advantage.” That advantage, she argues, is a high tolerance for chaos and a refusal to quit.
That same stubbornness now supports four KATIE’S Pizza & Pasta locations, a frozen-pizza plant, a packaged-goods company with 18 SKUs in more than 6,000 retail outlets, an e-commerce operation, and a 300-acre farm-to-table property. The company employs more than 500 people. Lee remains 100 percent owner of what she describes as the only women-owned certified pizza company operating at this scale. Products still follow restaurant methods: bronze-extruded pasta with egg and semolina, and hand-stretched wood-fired dough fermented 48 hours.
A companion vinyl album, One Night at Katie’s, arrives Nov. 1. Fourteen original tracks by ELPENTHE and Roman GianArthur, featuring Monica Martin, GianArthur, Tydell, and Eric Beenk, are meant to recreate the restaurant atmosphere at home. “The album is not me making music, it’s hospitality as art,” Lee said.
After the Target exclusive window, both the book and the album will move to broader retail.
Lee lives in St. Louis with her daughter. UNEMPLOYABLE is illustrated by creative director Tony Gaddis, with cover design by Gaddis and Todd Hippensteel, photography by Björn Wallander, and book design by Headcase Design.
