In 1987 she opened Malia’s, serving lunch.
“When I first opened, it was a little apartment-sized kitchen in the back of the dress shop. We had a four-burner electric stove with a little oven and a little apartment-sized refrigerator, and that was it,” she said. “And then I had three denatured-alcohol burners and I cooked in the dining room.”
The restaurant was busy from the beginning.
“We immediately had customers. It was partially because I grew up here, and my mother knew a lot of people,” she said.
“We realized that we had to serve bigger portions to attract men instead of just ladies, tea-room type people,” she said.
When the dress shop closed down, the landlords, horsemen Bruce Duchossois and Jack Wetzel, suggested she stay in place and expand the restaurant. Koelker said she owes the success of the restaurant to them.
“They said ‘Why don’t you just pay us what you can, and we’ll go from there,’” she said. “They were just my angels. They let me grow little by little.”
Guests grew accustomed to the menu and the restaurant’s routines, such as being offered a basket of warm, buttery, toasted baguette after they were seated.
They knew the menu would offer a steak salad of beef tenderloin topped with red wine demiglace and shredded mozzarella. Another mainstay was Pork Scaloppini, listed for years on the menu with an intentional misspelling as “Veel Scaloppini.”
“We called it ‘the veal with the squeal,’” Koelker said.
She married, and ran the restaurant with her husband, Robert Shackleton. His son, Matthew Shackelton, became the restaurant’s chef.
“We dedicated our whole lives to it. I worked probably 70 hours a week for 38 years,” she said.
“I’d been here 38 years, and Matthew was ready to do something else,” she said, something else that didn’t require working nights and weekends.
“I get it,” she said. “We understand that.”
Dining and Cooking