| January 16, News Story
Micheale Howe (at left) and Ginger Holtkamp work in the kitchen of their Chocolate Strawberry Café.
Sisters Realize Retaurant Dream
Whether it’s French onion, cheese, or “soup of the day,” whether it’s mandarin or broccoli-raisin-pecan salad, if it’s a chicken-pecan-salad sandwich or the traditional club, if it’s a specialty dessert or a homemade and luscious cookie or cappuccino or latte – all topped off with a “chocolate strawberry” – in short, if it’s homemade and delicious, you’ll know you’ve come to the right place when you visit the Chocolate Strawberry Café in downtown New Knoxville for lunch, breakfast or dinner.
At the same time you’re enjoying yourself immensely, you’ll also be helping two sisters live out a life-long dream. And in case your dream is to start your own small business or you need help with a business you already have, you’ll come to the right place for this service if you contact the Business Enterprise Center (BEC) at the Lake Campus of Wright State University.
At least that’s the way Ginger Holtkamp and Micheale (Mike) Howe will tell it. They just recently opened the restaurant of their dreams in an old brick home in New Knoxville, and they say they don’t believe they could have done it without assistance and training from the Business Enterprise Center at the Lake Campus.
The sisters took advantage of the “how-to” advice the Center has to offer. “The business planning sessions and advice the center has available were a ‘god-send,’ especially the advice of Mr. Fawcett (Keith Fawcett, Banking & Loan Analysis advisor),” say both Holtkamp and Howe. “He was very systematic and positive through the planning. With his help and the training available we learned the “how to” we needed to start our own business.”
Part of the sisters’ early planning included “stewing” over what to name the restaurant. Together they sat down and “brain-stormed” for a long time, coming up with everything from The Cow’s Tongue to The Tea Cup. Then Ginger remembered Mike thought it would be nice to serve strawberries dipped in chocolate and the name stuck.
The sisters are starting out slowly, just as BEC training advised them, serving just homemade soups, sandwiches, salads, and a special dessert each day. “That’s our menu for now, and we’ll stick to it until we have that mastered. Then we’ll move on to a bigger menu and some of the other plans we have,” says Mike, the “bookkeeper” for the twosome. The other plans will have to wait awhile – the sisters say they “expected customers to dribble in at first but had to call Mike’s daughter and Ginger’s granddaughter to come and help the very first day.
The café will offer gift certificates, and in a couple of months it might be ready to offer meeting or private dining rooms upstairs and outside dining on the yet-to-be-completed patio. The sisters would possibly like to have a game day when people could come in, have lunch, then play cards or board games, perhaps an after-school study time, or a morning reading hour for children. Mike’s husband Dick says when they are ready to expand upstairs, he’s gonna act as their “dumb waiter.”
Both sisters have specific experience in the restaurant business. Ginger once managed a Stucke’s restaurant in Illinois, and she has worked in numerous restaurants over the years, as a cook, a waitress, and a manager. Mike’s experience was in the office of a downtown Wapakoneta restaurant, so this was her first experience waiting tables and cooking. “That first day was a real eye-opener for me,” she exclaims. The restaurant is open seven days a week, and “we’re in here from 7 a.m. till 8 or 9 at night.”
By the way, in off-season the “chocolate strawberries” the restaurant is named after are in reality delicious homemade strawberry mints topped with a drizzle of chocolate. Just as good as real strawberries, though, as are the rest of the items on the menu. Just ask any satisfied customer, who by the way can’t say what their favorites are yet. They’re still happily “taste-testing.”
The Business Enterprise Center offers twice-monthly pre-business planning seminars called “Starting Right” for anyone interested in starting a new business. The Center also offers a variety of business training topics that cover important business skills needed today. For more information about “Starting Right” seminars and classes and advising services the Business Enterprise Center has to offer, contact Marketing Consultant Julie Miller, 419-586-0375; or BEC Director Jon Heffner, 419-586-0310; or 1-800-237-1477.
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