By Rick Hynum
As PMQ’s editor in chief, I’ve told some of St. Louis restaurateur Katie Lee’s story in two past cover articles—the first in May 2017 (when she was going by her then-married name, Katie Collier) and the latest in May 2025.
But it turns out that Lee, the pizzaiola and entrepreneur behind Katie’s Pizza & Pasta restaurants and a nationally distributed line of Italian foods, saved the juiciest parts for her book: Unemployable: The Katie Lee Story.
And what a book it is.
Unemployable, released by Swan Bluff Press, will initially be available in hardback edition exclusively at Target stores across the U.S. beginning September 27 through October 31. The book, selling for $24.99, will be featured on end-aisle displays along with her line of pizzas, pastas, sauces and olive oil.
Katie’s team sent me an advance copy. And let me tell you: It’s a riveting read, penned in a brisk, accessible style—but with the flair of a born poet—and a voice that feels achingly real and raw, fierce and tender, intimate and no-nonsense. Like a late-night sit-down over cocktails with Katie herself except she doesn’t drink anymore—because alcohol is what led to many of the travails covered in the book in the first place.
Well, that was part of it anyway.
The title comes from Katie’s ne’er-do-well father, Tom Lee, who used to tell his little girl, “Katie, you’re just like me. You’re unemployable.”
Related: How Katie Lee Did the Impossible: 400,000 Handmade Pizzas in 96 Days for Target Stores Nationwide
Not exactly the kind of fatherly advice a daughter needs to hear. Tom, a self-employed, hard-living “hustler” and epileptic with brain damage, was certainly no positive role model, much less a great provider for his family—if anything, Katie had to look after him as well as herself during much of her chaotic youth.
As Katie describes him, Tom could be charming and funny, a raconteur who, due to his mental issues, often told the same off-the-wall stories—and dispensed the same streetwise advice—again and again. As a sometime-bar owner and restaurateur himself, “he knew enough about restaurants and more than all of us about making a buck.”
But he also spent a lot of time picking through other people’s junk to earn extra cash.
One thing Tom Lee was not was boring. As one memorable chapter in the book illustrates, every car ride with Tom behind the wheel was a bracing adventure, although things could go sideways fast.
“One minute I exist, right next to him, the next I don’t,” Katie writes. “All in the car. To keep up is an exercise. Luckily, the exercises repeat. Luckily, exercises make you stronger. That’s why I’m in the car. To stay in the car is a balance. I don’t want to get kicked out and walk home. It’s happened. Sometimes I’m kicked out. Sometimes I jump out. I won’t let it happen today.”
In Unemployable’s opening “Note to the Reader,” Katie explains, “This is not an autobiography or even a memoir. It’s not an advice, self-help or a ‘how to be successful in business’ book. That’s not what this is. It’s more of a song. A Country-Western one.”
And that’s about right. It’s also a wild ride, like the kind she used to take with her troubled and mercurial father. Unemployable starts with Katie at rock bottom, addicted to booze, homeless and checking into a halfway house against her will, all the while casting her gaze about for possible escape routes. But by the end you’ll discover how she became one of the most successful independent pizzaioli in the U.S., with four celebrated restaurants in St. Louis and her own line of high-end frozen pizzas and pastas in more than 6,000 stores, including Target, one of the country’s largest retailers.
Along the way you’ll also meet other lovable characters from her life, like her artist mother Belinda, her colorful aunts Carrie and Ava, and her best friend Rolando Colon, a former pro baseball player from Cuba turned dishwasher who eventually became Lee’s restaurant partner—and something of a guardian angel to her.
Here’s how a press release describes Unemployable, and, mind you, it’s accurate:
“From that halfway house, Unemployable follows Lee’s path through waitressing, a first business built on borrowed money and fabricated confidence, the opening (and closing) of Katie’s Pizza, a Kickstarter campaign, and the sudden loss of her best friend, Rolando Colon, days before COVID-19 shut down the restaurants she’d spent a decade building. The book doesn’t skip the ugly parts—family dysfunction, relapse, grief and the terror of nearly losing everything—and doesn’t dress up the good parts either. It closes with an epilogue set in Italy, a quieter, tender addition about Lee and her daughter, Nadia. Despite recounting the chaos and difficult experiences of her early life, the book offers readers hope, coupled with a reminder that redemption is always possible.”
I’m not a literary critic and have no idea how to write a real review, but on a personal note, I will add this: Unemployable is unlike any successful restaurateur’s memoir you’ll ever read. It’s way, way better because it’s real, unflinching and unsentimental storytelling—none of that self-mythologizing propaganda for Katie Lee.
It’s a terrific damn book, beautifully illustrated with original artwork and teeming with heartbreak and humor and smarts and wisdom. My prediction: If you read it, it will stick with you for a long, long time.
Rick Hynum is PMQ’s editor in chief.
