ELLSWORTH – Chef Steph’s new café will open its doors on Monday, Dec. 5 at 467 W. Main St. in Ellsworth, if all goes according to plan. The grab and go café aims to connect local farmers and customers by making and showcasing delicious food.

Chef Steph Rauzi, formerly of Mindful Fork & Two Broke Chefs meal catering, has branched out on her own with a new adventure, one that’s she’s dreamed of for a long time. Most recently, her grab and go meals have been available at Country Fit Nutrition in Ellsworth’s East End; she has also provided catering and meal prep services.

After leaving Mindful Fork in March 2022, the Ellsworth-based chef decided to focus on farming and determining her next steps. Unfortunately, summer was not kind and she lost her entire garden to heat/drought and pesky rabbits.

“It was a very long summer for me mentally,” Rauzi said.

However, Rauzi isn’t one to let hardships drag her down. She sat down with Paul Bauer, CEO of Ellsworth Cooperative Creamery, and devised a business plan. She approached the owner of the Tip Top Stop (the former Dairy Queen) and hammered out a deal to use the commercial kitchen during the ice cream shop’s off-months in the winter. Suddenly, the owner asked her if she’d like to take over the building full-time, since he had decided not to reopen.

“I hadn’t thought about that,” Rauzi said. “That’s a big hop, from a kitchen to an entire restaurant. But my lifelong dream has always been to have a small hole-in-the-wall café.”

She talked the idea over with her husband, who supported the idea.

“I had been planning on catering and meal prep,” Rauzi said. “But I love adventure, new journeys and new starts.”

Rauzi has 25 years of experience in the culinary industry; her love of cooking was instilled at a young age. She describes her childhood as “a big jumble of me going everywhere.” Her parents struggled with drug addiction, so for a time she lived with her grandparents.

“My grandma was very much a 50s housewife and she spent all day making a full meal for dinner plus dessert,” Rauzi said. “I would sit and watch her cook.”

While with her parents, she recalls eating a lot of Ramen noodles and Moon Pies. But at Grandma’s, she cooked with real food full of flavor.

Rauzi is blunt about her tough childhood. At age 9 she moved into a children’s home and lived there for the next 10 years. Donations were the main source of money to purchase food for the 60-plus children and staff who lived there, so they cooked with what they had available.

“The cooks there had to kind of work with whatever they had,” Rauzi said. “Most of them were actually kids from the home who just grew up and stayed there.”

Rauzi got to know the cooks and started helping them whenever she could. Each dormitory was assigned kitchen patrol, where they washed dishes and cleaned the kitchen.

“When I was 13, even younger, I knew that I wanted to learn about flavor and create things,” Rauzi said. “Food just spoke to me and made me happy.”

For a time, she and her brother lived with her father and stepmother, but he was in and out of the picture. Her stepmother would lock them in a room and starve them; they had to sneak food wherever they could get it, which sometimes led them to eating things such as frosting or peanut butter powder. That awful experience further inspired Rauzi to create food with love.

“The ability to have ingredients and to create something that warms your belly and soul at the same time, there’s nothing better than flavorful food made with love, care and time because you feel it and you taste it,” she said.

Rauzi has been a worker bee since she was a child. She began working at a café at age 13 in Arizona, where she started as a dishwasher. The older ladies there taught her how to make things; she eventually worked her way up to running the kitchen at age 17.

She used her talents to earn a full-ride scholarship to the Scottsdale Culinary Institute. After moving to the Midwest, she owned a bakery for two years in Alma. She and her husband at the time had four kids ages 2-5, which made the bakery hard to balance with family life. When she moved to the Cities, she became an executive pastry chef at an Italian fine dining restaurant and eventually managed the restaurant’s sandwich shop.

She eventually moved across the river to Wisconsin, because she loves the peaceful atmosphere.

“I worked regular office jobs for a while, but I always end up back in food,” Rauzi said. “I’m always cooking at home and feeding my kids’ friends. Food is just where I belong, to keep my peace anyway.”

Chef Steph’s

Rauzi has been catering from the Tip Top Stop kitchen, but plans to open the doors to her new café Monday, Dec. 5 at 10 a.m.

“It will be a grab and go café,” Rauzi said. “The freezers and fridges will be full of soups, salads, individual meals, family meals.”

People will be able to build their own salads with the ingredients available that day. It’s important to Rauzi to have no waste. All of her scraps go to a friend who feeds them to her pigs. Any usable leftover ingredients are transformed into delicious soups. She hopes to incorporate a fun idea called “Make it Stretch Mondays,” when customers will pick ingredients and she’ll make them a meal from those choices.

As for the meal prep side of her business, she takes care of 10 customers per month.

“I pick your meals and it’s not the same thing every week,” Rauzi said. “Not only am I taking care of the cooking, cleaning and the shopping, but the whole thought process of what to have for dinner.”

Coming up with menu ideas is fun for her, because all of her suppliers are local. She sources from local bakers, dairy and beef farmers, tea and coffee makers, and greenhouses.

“I go as local as possible,” Rauzi said. “It’s all about growing our community, and to do that, we have to utilize each other. My whole thing in life is helping people, especially people in need. You have to support the people in your community. They’re your neighbors and your friends.”

The hashtags she uses clearly define her values: Supportlocal, sourcelocal, shoplocal.

“I love feeding people. I grew up in a children’s home. There were many days we walked in and asked what’s for dinner and it was the ‘Chef’s Surprise,’” Rauzi said. “If it had surprise in the name, then you didn’t want to eat it.”

Rauzi recently held a food drive for the Pierce County Food Pantry. If a customer brought in a turkey, she rewarded them with a dozen cinnamon rolls or a family size pan of mac ‘n cheese. In all, she was able to bring 41 turkeys to the food pantry.

“It’s just fun to work together as a community That’s all I’ve ever been looking for. I never wanted to put down roots. I’m very much a gypsy soul. But then we came to Ellsworth,” she said.

The new shop will feature farmhouse décor and suppliers’ spotlights where people can learn about the local businesses and farmers she sources her food from.

“I eventually want to make it a small grocer’s shop, with local teas, local beef, local everything,” she said.

Country Fit will continue to carry her grab and go meals as well.

To learn more about meal plans and menus, visit “Chef Steph’s” on Facebook or email her at [email protected]

Chef Steph Rauzi, known throughout the area for her catering and grab and go meals, will be opening a grab and go café in the former Dairy Queen/Tip Top Stop in Ellsworth. Photo courtesy of Steph Rauzi

One of Chef Steph Rauzi’s many offerings are salads made with fresh, locally sourced ingredients. Photo courtesy of Steph Rauzi