30 | QSALTLAKE MAGAZINE | FOOD&DRINK
Qsaltlake.com |
ISSUE 347 |
MAY, 2023
on the street
Kathie Chadbourne of From The Ground Up BY MELISSA FIELDS
Amelia
Earhart once said, “The most difficult thing is the decision to act. The rest is merely tenacity.” In celebration of Women’s History Month, here is our third profile of truly tenacious Salt Lake City women, each of whom are contributing more than their fair share to downtown’s rich vibrancy. It was a breezy and overcast Tuesday afternoon in downtown Salt Lake when I met Kathie Chadbourne at her charming east Broadway neighborhood store, From the Ground Up (239 E. 300 South). As we sat at a blue
café table in the middle of her beautifully displayed collection of rocks, plants and petrified wood—along with her tiny kitchen and coffee bar—Kathie greeted each patron who wandered through the door with warm familiarity. They included a construction worker after a bowl of Kathie’s homemade soup of the day (Italian vegetable topped with parmesan encrusted polenta), a pair of phone-toting teenage girls and Kathie’s dear friend, Corrine. Chadbourne explained the eclectic parade of patrons by saying, “I’m all about community.” As if it wasn’t obvious.
Many Salt Lake residents know Chadbourne as owner and operator of the nowclosed Avenues Bakery and Avenues Bistro on Third. “Alice Waters is my mentor,” Chadbourne says. “I’m all about local food and investing in the people around me.” In January 2022, five years after selling Avenues Bistro on Third, Chadbourne was busy with various catering jobs when she had an epiphany. “I was driving around during this huge snowstorm, running from here and there delivering food, when I decided I wanted to open a rock shop,” she says. “When I told my four daughters, they said, ‘it’s about time.’” Serendipitously, the next day while getting a pedicure at Happy Nails on Broadway, she spotted a ‘for rent’ sign in the storefront next door. “The
owner of the space’s business, Missy’s Misc, had decided to move on from the space she’d occupied for years and had put the sign up just night before. I called her and four days later signed the lease for the retail space as well as the apartment above it. And a month later I opened From the Ground Up,” Chadbourne says. As a devoted rockhound for the past 40 years, Chadbourne found most of the stones, fossils, bones, feathers and piece of petrified wood now on display in her lovely little store herself. Her granddaughter, Harper, helped her come up with the store’s name. “I didn’t want to sell just rocks” in From the Ground Up, Chadbourne added plants to her inventory as well as a small coffee bar and kitchen. “The difference between a
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