Evanston RoundTable, Aug. 16, 2026

There’s one word people who have worked with Susan Trieschmann, founder of Curt’s Café, use consistently.

Trieschmann started the cafe at 2922 Central St. in 2012 to help at-risk young people — many who had been through the juvenile justice system — learn the restaurant business and, more importantly, valuable life skills.

“She was a visionary,” said Dickelle Fonda, a psychotherapist who helped Trieschmann assemble a team of mentors to guide the young people who worked there. “She saw this needed doing, filling a gap in Evanston. Susan was able to tap into a lot of volunteer energy and inspire a lot of people to jump on board to help out.”

Rick Marsh, president of the Curt’s board of directors from 2017 to March 2026, agreed: “She was a visionary. She was sensitive to the plight of young folks. And she had the business background and aptitude to make it all work.”

Marsh added that “Youth development is important to me. These young people need that kind of support, and Susan had that kind of vision.”

Said Frances Griffin, who in 2020 starting working directly with Trieschmann as a back office volunteer, “I admired her greatly for her vision to start Curt’s, and the foresight to keep it running, helping the students get whatever they needed to succeed — If they needed a GED for school or a birth certificate for Social Security or a heavy coat for winter — anything within the realm of possibility, we would provide to ensure the success of the program.”

Notwithstanding this gusher of praise, Trieschmann herself seems reticent to discuss her accomplishments. Her name doesn’t appear at all on Curt’s website. In interviews, she talks as much about the nonprofit’s challenges as its achievements.

Background

Trieschmann was born in Hialeah, a suburb of Miami, in 1957, the third of seven children. When her father died in a scuba diving accident in 1964, her family moved to a three-bedroom house in Deerfield, Illinois. Money was tight, so at age 13 she started waitressing at Exmoor Country Club in Highland Park.

She enjoyed the work. “I loved how alive the restaurant industry was,” she said. “I still love the industry. The work is hard, but it’s never boring. You meet people who are there to have a good time and like to chat.”

Though she confesses to being an introvert, she never felt that way at work. “When I waitressed or bartended, I could talk to you for an hour. It was a safe space for an introvert,” she said. She worked at a number of area restaurants over the years, including Sinclair’s in Lake Forest and R.J. Grunts in Glenview. She was director of catering at the Pump Room in Chicago from 1980 to 1983.

Learning the business

During all these jobs, she was learning the business from the ground up — from hosting and cooking to serving and cleaning — including the finances of running a restaurant.

It was a huge challenge. “We were living on credit cards for many years,” she said. “The only way we survived was working 18-hour days.” But over time, the business started to gain traction. A huge breakthrough was winning the contract to run the food operation at the Chicago Botanic Garden in Glencoe.

When she sold Food For Thought to her sister in 2004, it was grossing $30 million a year and employed 400 people full- and part-time.

Her brother-in-law Curt died of lung cancer the same year at age 53.

“He was a helluva good guy,” she said. “That’s when I started wondering if there was something else I should be doing.”

Trieschmann took classes at Oakton Community College, getting an associate degree in 2005. The next year, she started attending DePaul University.

Life-changing course

Thinking she was signing up for a real estate class, she mistakenly clicked on restorative justice in the course catalog. The class proved inspiring. For her final exam, she sat in a circle with 18 youth offenders as they talked about their lives.

Originally, she had hoped to convince someone else to run the operation, but couldn’t find anyone to take it on. So with half a dozen staff and a handful of volunteers, she opened it herself on April 20, 2012.

She said at first there was some “pushback” from apprehensive neighbors. But once the operation was up and running, opposition disappeared.

Though the restaurant bears the acronym CURTS, for “Cultivating Unique Restaurant Training” (a slogan her son Trevor came up with), it was really named after her late-brother-in-law, Curt.

Trieschmann said she found Curt’s students — so called because they’re learning the business — through people she knew in the youth prison system, such as parole and probation officers. Her mission, she said, was simple: “To provide services to help young people stay out of trouble, to give them the life skills they’d need to make more responsible life decisions.”

To that end, mentors and social workers were enlisted to help teach life skills to the students.

Early challenges

It was hard at first. “People didn’t think young men who had done something wrong were capable of turning their lives around,” she said. “But I kept meeting young people who said if they had a job, they would stop engaging in criminal activities. So we took a chance.”

She worked without a salary the first five years and financed a lot of the operation with her own money, partly by mortgaging her house. Asked about the financial pressure, she simply said, “I’d do it again.”

In 2014, Trieschmann opened a second Curt’s at 2019 Dempster St. as a training program exclusively for young women at risk. The Dempster location operated for five years, after which it was closed, partly at the request of the young men and women, who preferred to work together in one place.

“They wanted it to be like real life. We made every decision based on what the kids wanted us to do,” she said.

In 2019, she opened another Curt’s location in Highland Park to serve Lake County.

In its first 10 years in operation, Trieschman estimates the three locations helped some 500 young people, providing mentoring, tutoring, social services and life skills in addition to restaurant training.

Time to go

Trieschmann left Curt’s in 2022, in part from a form of PTSD. Nine former students were killed that year in random shootings. After going to three funerals, she said, “I kind of lost my mind,” and needed some space to decompress and recover.

She also worried about so-called “Founder’s Syndrome,” when the person who starts an organization stays on too long. “It becomes their place,” Trieschmann explained. “I wanted it to continue without me.”

The current executive director, Tanya Jenkins, was an Evanston police officer from 2002 to 2022, working for a time as a school resource officer in District 65.

Jenkins said one of the biggest challenges at Curt’s nowadays is financial. “The food costs are astronomical,” she said. “Then there’s maintenance: things break, we need a new roof. And there are always the social-emotional issues facing the students.”

Jenkins said she uses Trieschmann as a “sounding board” for ideas and to help solve problems. “She’s been great. I’m so appreciative of her.”

Since leaving Curt’s, Trieschmann has stayed busy. She started another nonprofit called Save Small Shops to place at-risk youth in small businesses and generate a directory available to shoppers. She works part-time as a job coach at the Chicago job placement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas. And, she added, she does a lot of babysitting for her two grandkids in Evanston.

Looking back, she said starting and operating Curt’s was one of the most rewarding experiences of her working life, which she attributed to the students.

“Watching them step up to opportunities and work so hard to achieve them and move forward gave me the strength and passion to do the hard work required to run Curt’s,” she said. “To this day, when I face an obstacle, I think about the much bigger obstacles they had to deal with, and that helps me move forward.”