Ina Pinkney will forever be known as the Breakfast Queen of Chicago. Ina’s, her last namesake restaurant, opened 25 years ago on a then-industrial stretch of Randolph Street in an area of warehouse wholesale markets and not much else. Her highness closed the house that pancakes built in 2013, where there’s now the highly desirable West Loop neighborhood.
But that wasn’t the first Ina’s restaurant or her first foray in the food business. And Pinkney hasn’t quite retired. She remains a secret restaurant godmother, quietly advising restaurateurs around the city.
Not that the queen is quiet. She’s outspoken from the driver’s seat in videos on social media and her Substack, as well as a frequent keynote speaker about breakfast and the most formative part of her life. But Pinkney says the title she’s most proud of is polio survivor.
The following interview, the latest in our food icon series, has been edited for clarity and length.
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Q: What is your full name (birth and now)?
A: “Ina Marilyn Brody and Ina M. Pinkney.”
She married Bill Pinkney in 1965, and he later circumnavigated the globe as a sailor solo.
“When I divorced Bill, because he needed to live on the water after his trip around the world, and I needed to live on land — I had opened the restaurant while he was gone — we never forgot why we loved each other,” said Pinkney. “And we were connected until the day he died.”
Q: When were you born?
A: “Feb. 16, 1943.”
She contracted polio at 18 months, which permanently damaged one leg and led to lifelong health issues.
Q: Where were you born?
A: “Brooklyn, New York.”
Q: What was your first job?
A: “In college, part-time in a drugstore where I managed and worked the Barton’s candy counter.”
Barton‘s was historically a major chocolate and candy company. Pinkney was an English major at the University of Toledo in Ohio for one year, “because it was the farthest my family would let me get away,” then at Long Island University back in Brooklyn.
Q: When did you come to Chicago?
A: “1977.”
She followed her husband, a makeup artist, who had created a line of cosmetics for Black women by Revlon and was then hired by George E. Johnson to do the same for Johnson Products, which was then based in the Chatham neighborhood.
Q: What was your last business title?
A: “Chef and owner of Ina’s.”
Pinkney first got into the food business at 37 by baking chocolate cakes in her home kitchen in 1980. They were delivered by her husband, dressed in a tuxedo, in the style of a cakegram. She soon moved the operation into a production storefront called Dessert Kitchen in Lincoln Park. In 1991, Pinkney opened Ina’s Kitchen nearby. The late legendary Tribune food and wine journalist William Rice called it “the best new breakfast place since Lou Mitchell’s.” Then came the ill-fated Elaine and Ina’s in Streeterville, which she left due to differences with her business partner before it closed in 1997.More Top Picks Best Sliding Miter Saws With Dust
“I swore I would never do it again,” said Pinkney about the restaurant business. “Then a friend told me that there was a restaurant across the street from her food distribution company on West Randolph Street.”
Her last namesake restaurant opened in 2001 at 1235 W. Randolph St.
Q: What was your last restaurant’s full name?
A: “Ina’s. My grandfather always said you can trust a business when they put their own name on the door!” Pinkney said. “Ina’s was exactly the place that was between a hotel dining room and a diner.”
It was casual, but with fine dining-inspired service, and every table set with a different pair of collectible salt and pepper shakers.
“When I got there, there was nothing,” she said about the neighborhood. “Way across on the other side of the highway was Blackbird, Marché, Vivo and Graziano’s.”
Pinkney bought her restaurant’s building a couple of years later.
Q: What was your bestselling item?
A: “The Heavenly Hots Pancakes. They were small, thin, sour cream pancakes that melted in your mouth, served with a compote of peaches, blueberries and raspberries, because maple syrup would drown them and make them soggy.”
Pinkney included the recipe in her book “Taste Memories: Recipes for Life and Breakfast,” published in 2013.
She sold the restaurant property that same year to Lou Malnati’s, and Ina’s closed on Dec. 31, 2013.
“Because I was finished being a restaurateur,” said Pinkney. “Restaurants are all-consuming. So when I turned 70, I went, OK, this is the year.”
Pinkney wrote the Tribune column Breakfast with Ina, reviewing restaurants for five years until 2020.
“And I created this lovely world for myself of being a keynote speaker at food conferences for different clients to talk about the global influences on breakfast,” she said. “I never knew that could be a thing.”
Q: What is your most memorable moment?
A: “At my restaurant, after a meeting for the first Randolph Street Market with a city health inspector and chefs. When I walked them outside, chef Paul Wildermuth called out as he got into his car, ‘Thank you, chef!’ It was the first time I was ever acknowledged in that way. I can still feel it.”
That was in 2003, 23 years after Pinkney launched her first food business. Wildermuth was the executive chef at Opera and Red Light. He died at 46 in 2010.
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Q: As a Chicago food icon, what are a few words of wisdom you could share with the next generation?
A: “It takes less energy to be courageous than it does to be afraid. And ‘No’ is a complete sentence.”
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