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Grilled peaches and plums with bocconcini, Thai basil and ponzu reduction from Mother’s. Photo by Vanessa Rose.
Some people are born with perfect pitch. Others, with inherent athletic abilities. Vanessa Rose‘s gift is her culinary talent.
But she’s not content just to serve delicious food, she’s determined to revolutionize the restaurant industry.
The chef, who works side-by-side with Justin Carlisle at Ardent, launched her own concept, Mother’s, in March.
The long-planned project operates as a Sunday pop-up in the Ardent space, 1751 N. Farwell Ave., serving globally-inspired comfort foods with fine dining flair.
Rose traces her journey back to a childhood spent at her mother’s hip in the kitchen, assisting with “a prolific amount” of candy making and Christmas cookie baking.
And when her “very Midwestern mom” declined to prepare snacks before dinner, Rose started making her own. Peanut butter and jelly sandwiches became boxed Kraft mac and cheese, which quickly evolved into chicken breast and other full-scale meals.
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“Before you know it, I was making the occasional dinner during the week,” she said. “By the time I was 15, I was doing family holiday dinners — all of Thanksgiving, all of Christmas.”
Rose’s mom was also one of the first to notice her budding talent in the kitchen, often inquiring about the thought process behind certain combinations of ingredients.
“My mom would be like ‘how did you know those things could go together? I never would’ve thought.’ and I was like, ‘I don’t know, they smell good together,'” Rose said. “It’s been curated and it’s been experimented with, but I’ve always gravitated toward it.”
After studying history, sociology and political science at the University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee, Rose returned to her culinary roots in 2018, taking a job at just before St. Patrick’s Day.
“I basically peeled potatoes for two weeks,” she said. “So many potatoes; 10-gallon buckets on 10-gallon buckets.”
Rose made her way through the ranks, from dishwasher, to line cook, to line lead, and finally to baker. “I had this very classic chef attitude where it’s like ‘no, I’m gonna get it done, nothing can stop me.'”
After cutting her teeth at the Irish pub, she moved into a new role at Braise, working for just a few months before the COVID-19 pandemic effectively shut down the city’s restaurant scene.
As businesses began to reopen, Rose secured a job as sous chef at Amilinda, the Spanish-Portuguese restaurant led by Gregory Leon. She went on to work at Odd Duck and Balzac, serving as executive chef for the latter before taking her current position at Ardent.
But Rose’s time at Amilinda was uniquely transformational. “That was very early on in my transition,” said Rose, a queer and trans woman. “Greg, as a gay man in his 50s, was an instrumental queer elder for me, especially when it came to being in restaurants.”
It was Leon who recommended Rose watch “Pose,” a television series about New York City’s underground ball culture amid the AIDS epidemic.
“A lot of that, I was relatively familiar with,” she said of the show. “But as a newly minted trans woman, watching trans actresses talk about the trans experience in what was a very hard and heavy time introduced the queer scene to me in a way that I didn’t realize I identified.”
Rose began conceptualizing Mother’s during her time at Amilinda, choosing the name as a nod to ballroom culture, particularly its emphasis on kinship and chosen family.
Ballroom culture in the 1980s was formed by Black and Latino members of the LGBTQIA+ community, particularly trans women. Individuals within the scene created family units, or “houses,” which were led by more experienced “mothers” and “fathers.”
Rose feels a connection to the culture, but is careful not to overstep. “As a non-melanated person, it is really difficult to walk the line between celebration and appropriation,” she said.
“I want to be able to prioritize community here. With the threat of things like Project 2025 in the mix, I think it’s really important for us to get together, to grow together, to better understand what it means to be such a diverse community.”
“Here” is subjective, for Rose, who welcomes guests to Ardent every Sunday for her pop-up, infusing a bit of the Mother’s philosophy into every dish served.
Her menu, which draws from a wide variety of global cuisines, is comfort forward. A heap of cooked rapini gets spice, texture and a salty kick from gochugaru, fried shallot and grated manchego, while a meaty pork shoulder tostada pops with Szechuan chili oil and toasted pepitas. Additional dishes include saucy papas bravas, aji amarillo and parsnip tart and mung bean jelly cake with compressed cantaloupe, doenjang (fermented soybean paste), chili crisp, scallion and cilantro.
“I am much more about exploring than staying still,” Rose said of her cooking style, particularly when it comes to intersectional, or fusion cuisine. “It should be more global, it should be more experimental and it should be more playful.”
If all goes well, she plans to expand the pop-up to weekdays — possibly Wednesdays and Thursdays — in the near future.
“This has been going on now for about five months, and the response we’ve gotten has been so overwhelmingly positive.”
Future Plans
Rose’s long-term goal is to have a space of her own, and she’s currently scouting out sites in Riverwest, Bay View and Walker’s Point.
Rather than a fine dining focus, the standalone Mother’s would function as a “queer-led third space,” providing a welcoming community environment for patrons to gather, talk, eat, drink and make art.
Rose would also continue her tasting room concept under the name House of Bridges, but that’s just one part of the vision, she said.
“The rest of the food is meant to be global comfort food,” she said, listing dishes such as ramen and empanadas. “As a community whose demographics go way past race or gender or sexuality or culture or religion — or any of it — we want to be able to offer comfort food that you now as an openly-queer person might not have access to because you’ve been excommunicated. We want to be a place where you can re-establish that sense of community with people who aren’t going to judge you for your politics or who you’re attracted to or how you identify.”
The multi-faceted business is a work in progress, but Rose has strong ambitions for the final product. One thing she’s not worried about, though, is attempting to be palatable to everyone.
“I’m more interested in being a few people’s shot of whiskey than everyone’s cup of tea.”
For more information about the upcoming business, or to donate, visit Rose’s GoFundMe page.
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