The Drama Behind Stephen Starr’s New Restaurant

After divorcing chef and partner Bryan Sikora last year, successful restaurateur Aimee Olexy—of reservation-impossible Talula’s Table—is poised to make a fresh start with Talula’s Garden. This time, she’s got Stephen Starr by her side

OLEXY STILL RECALLS the moment she decided to own her own restaurant. She was folding napkins in the kitchen of Conshohocken’s Spring Mill Café, where she swept, waitressed and sometimes cooked. She was 13. “I can’t remember my first kiss or my first bike ride,” she says, “but the memory of my first customer and the first meal I ever made is vivid.”

She grew up in West Chester, the only girl of four kids. Her mother was a nurse, her father the vice president of the Devereux Foundation, a behavioral-health nonprofit that serves the disabled. At Henderson High, Olexy skipped much of 10th grade to sell bagels with sprouts and scrambled eggs at Grateful Dead concerts. She and her older brother Josh conspired against seriousness by peddling SUPPORT THE RIGHT TO ARM BEARS bumper stickers. When a guidance counselor at Henderson told Olexy she’d have to repeat 10th grade, the 16-year-old dropped out of school and got her GED. At 17, she enrolled at St. Joseph’s University, and in 1994, she graduated summa cum laude with a degree in English literature.

When not chasing the Dead, she patched together a slender living managing inns, grills and oyster bars, eventually making home base Colorado, where she looked after an Indian restaurant and hung out with Josh, by then a 30-year-old Crested Butte ski instructor. In the fall of 1996 she attended wine school in France and became an authority on artisan cheeses. (These days, her carefully edited cheese plates are among the highlights of the tasting menu at Talula’s Table.) Soon after Olexy returned to Colorado, Josh and some friends left for a trip back east. As it turned out, their truck had a faulty exhaust system. Asleep with his dog in the camper, Josh suffered carbon monoxide poisoning. No one up front realized what had happened until they stopped for gas a few hours later. By then Josh had slipped into a coma.

He was airlifted to a hospital in Wichita and placed in a hyperbaric chamber, but never woke up. Olexy was keeping a bedside vigil when the plug was pulled. Raw grief engulfed her. “After Josh died, I worked,” she says. “I worked to please and to take care of others, to stay very busy and to keep a distance from my own emotions. Working made me feel good and kind of protected.”