Natalie Allesee is the face behind Rowan & Dough, offering culinary classes, meal prep services and private dining. Photo: Chris Emeott
Rowan & Dough’s Natalie Allesee has a wealth of restaurant experience under her belt, but her love of food and entrepreneurial spirit go back much further. “I was the kid trying to sell cans of soup on my front lawn,” she says. “I was always trying something.” In college, Allesee joined the rugby team but found more joy in cooking elaborate meals for her teammates than studying, so she traded the University of Minnesota–Duluth for Le Cordon Bleu College of Culinary Arts in Mendota Heights (now closed).
Allesee landed her first restaurant gig at The Signature Cafe in Minneapolis’s Prospect Park (now closed). “It’s fascinating to have a job where you never stop learning,” she says. She went on to work at Trotter’s Cafe in St. Paul (now closed) and then the Birchwood Café in Minneapolis (now closed). “Everything was locally sourced there,” she says. “I met so many of the farmers I still use to this day.”
From there, Allesee worked at Lenny Russo’s James Beard Award-nominated Heartland in St. Paul (now closed). “That’s truly where I fell in love with food,” Allesee says. With its daily-changing menu, she learned how to create dishes based on “intuition, feel, taste and pure adrenaline,” she says. “It was a high-octane environment.” She further notes, “We were always creating something from scratch. You had to be vigilant about making sure the food not only tasted good but sounded good … Talk about really putting love into something.”
Not long after Heartland’s closing and working at the Hewing Hotel, Allesee took a break from restaurants but not from cooking, and moved to Duluth. “I read cookbooks and played with recipes,” she says.
After stints in Duluth and coastal Maine, COVID-19 brought Allesee back to Minnesota in 2020, when she started working as the executive chef at Waldmann Brewery & Restaurant in St. Paul. There, she helped develop a Community Supported Brewing Program, akin to Community Supported Agriculture programs, in which Allesee prepared four weekly take-home meals to be paired with a crowler of beer. “That planted the seed for what a prepared take-home meal can be,” she says.
After two years as executive chef at The Lynhall’s two locations (Edina closed.), Allesee missed cooking, so she resigned. “A friend asked me to come in and cook dinner for them,” she says. “And then they referred me to someone else. I kept saying, ‘Yes.’”
