Katie Lee Grows Pizza and Pasta Empire With Restaurants and Retail Line

Katie Lee built her first pizzeria on Clayton Road in St. Louis in 2008 with her father, Tom Lee, and no formal culinary training. Eighteen years later, she is running four restaurants, a nationally distributed frozen food line, and a brand that describes itself as one of the fastest-growing pizza companies in America. The newest anchor of that operation, the fourth Katie's Pizza & Pasta location in Crestwood, Missouri, opened in early March 2026 and makes the case for what chef-driven pasta can look like when the ambition behind it matches the food on the plate.

The Crestwood restaurant sits on the former Crestwood Mall site and is the company's first ground-up freestanding building, featuring 400 seats. The design draws from mid-century modern Ridgewood homes built by Ralph and Mary Jane Fournier. Features include custom walnut millwork by local craftsman Dave Stine, artwork by Lee's mother Belinda Lee, a dedicated pasta-making room, and a European-style open kitchen. That pasta room is visible from the dining floor, a deliberate choice. Lee has long cited the time she spent in Florence with her mother, whose study-abroad program through Washington University's arts department gave Lee an early education in regional Italian cooking, as the foundation of her philosophy.

The Crestwood pasta menu runs twelve dishes, from bucatini with guanciale and artichokes to a squid ink spaghetti with prawns, shrimps, clams, scallops, salmon roe, lemon butter, and gremolata. None of it is sourced externally. "We make everything in-house, including pizza dough, pastas, desserts and sauces," Lee has said, a standard she has held since opening day.

The more striking number right now may be off the restaurant floor entirely. The Crestwood opening coincides with significant growth in Katie's national retail business, with the company's frozen pizza and other products now available in stores nationwide and plans to expand into thousands of additional retail locations in 2026. Frozen entrées and pasta bakes are up 82% across mainstream and natural channels, and the brand's marinara has earned a 95% clean-label rating on the Yuka app. Katie's has cut deals with Whole Foods, the Big Y supermarket chain in Massachusetts and Connecticut, and Sprouts Farmers Market in Arizona. In early March, the brand took its CPG line to Natural Products Expo West in Anaheim to push further into that channel.

"My mission has always been to bring clean comfort food to everyone," Lee has said. The two-track strategy, restaurant and retail, reflects exactly that. The pasta room at Crestwood produces the taste memory; the Katie's Fine Foods line puts the same sauce logic in a grocery bag. For home cooks thinking about scaling a personal recipe, Lee's marinara is the teachable model: clean-label ingredients, full transparency, built to perform equally well on a restaurant plate and a freezer-section nutrition panel. If a sauce cannot survive scrutiny at both levels, it is not ready for either.

Lee's expansion into mainstream retail while simultaneously opening a 400-seat flagship is not a common play for a self-funded, chef-driven concept. If the CPG line continues its current trajectory, it becomes one of the cleaner blueprints the St. Louis food scene has produced for turning a local pasta operation into a genuine national brand.