Ann Hoskins grew up in Ohio County watching and helping her mother in the kitchen. Her very first cookbook was a red-checkered covered Better Homes and Gardens.
“I still have it. I love making recipes out of it because it has recipes that I could make as a kid,” Hoskins said. “The first thing I made was banana pudding. It was my favorite thing to make as a kid.”
As she got older she started trying different recipes and putting different things together. She just enjoyed cooking and being in the kitchen.
Her dream was to be a chef or go into restaurant/hotel management. As a senior in high school, she gave a presentation about being a chef. She even got a scholarship to go to Johnson and Wales Culinary School in Charleston, S.C.
Unsure if cooking was really her passion, she took a couple of years way from the kitchen and attended Western Kentucky University majoring in English with plans to become a teacher. While in school she began working at a restaurant where she found out she really liked the business side of running a restaurant as well as the fast pace of the work.
There’s nothing better than a restaurant that is ran well and working like clockwork,” she said.
She left school and started working for the management program of a chain restaurant and got her first store in Indiana when she was 21. She ended up back in Beaver Dam and took a couple of years off with her son before moving on to the training department and management of three different fast-food chains.
With a desire to spend more time with her family and work her own hours, Hoskins decided to start her own business.
“I had been talking about it for a long time,” Hoskins said. “I would talk to (her best friends) about what I wanted to do and my friends finally were tired of hearing me talk about it and they finally said ‘why don’t you just do it.’”
Her husband followed with the same advice.
Hoskins started with $100 and bought her first round of food. She began working out of the kitchen at a friend’s shop cooking and delivering meals on Fridays. She booked a couple of catering jobs and business began to take off. Soon a location on Center Street in Hartford became available and she “ran the numbers” in her head and decided to take her leap of faith in opening her cafe known as Foodie Call in January of 2020.
“Taking chances can be scary, but I just thought if I cooked good food and had good service and made a place where people wanted to come in it would be successful.”
Foodie Call was recently awarded the New Business of the Year Award for 2020, in a presentation that was delayed for over a year because of the coronavirus pandemic.
The menu ranges from classic dishes to some of Hoskins’ favorites to some experimental recipes. She gets her recipes from cooking shows, things that sound good to her or things that she made in the past with her mother and recipes from her red-checkered cookbook. Everything she makes is homemade.
While she didn’t take the original path towards being a chef and running a restaurant, Hoskins believes it worked out for the best.
“I think the path I led was better. I am not a very creative person per say. I don’t have that in me to say ‘let’s try this and this (with recipes).’ I think culinary school could have helped me with that. I just felt like culinary school was for really creative people and that wasn’t me,” she said. “A lot of creative chefs don’t run their own restaurants. They have people running their restaurants while they are in the kitchen creating.”
So with the knowledge Hoskins gained while working in restaurant management, she said she can now run the business side while still getting to cook too.
She wants people to walk away from her place full and happy.
When customers comment, “it tastes just like my grandmother used to make,” that’s an added bonus, she said.
