Bluestem’s Megan Garrelts talks about Vegas freezers, Colorado lamb and how her life changed in Chicago

It’s a hard thing to tell your parents that you don’t like school. It’s even worse when they’re both teachers. Bluestem’s co-owner and pastry chef Megan Schultz Garrelts knew she wanted to be a chef at 15 years old. Her parents needed some convincing.

“They were worried that I wouldn’t get a pension. And they wanted to know what I would do about retirement,” Garrelts says.

They found middle ground 850 miles away from her hometown of Naperville, Illinois, when she enrolled in the Culinary Institute of America in 1998 to study as a pastry chef.