We were lucky to catch up with Amy Kunstle recently and have shared our conversation below.

Amy, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Was there a defining moment in your professional career? A moment that changed the trajectory of your career?

Defining moments are the epiphany of the soul when you rise above the noise and ask yourself the deep and meaningful questions without the normal distractions that might keep you from a true and honest answer. My defining moment to move forward with my life, following a very difficult time period caring for and losing both of my parents, came high above the clouds on an airplane flight taking my oldest to college his sophomore year.

I sat with my notebook and wrote down a timeline of my life and my decisions. The happy choices, the dead ends, the unexpected twists and turns, the high points and the low. I wrote down all of the parts of my life that I loved and treasured as well as the areas that made me feel unhappy and unmotivated. I explored my hopes and dreams of what it could look like as a parent of young adults and faced the grief I felt over arriving so unexpectedly into the rest of my life without the opportunity to share it with my folks. My timeline had patterns to it and my list of what I loved gained focus.

I wrote a vision of what I would love to be able to do to create a life that would fill my soul with the love and caregiving that I could continue to bring forward into my life. My clinical world of back to back appointments as a registered dietitian and certified speech-language pathologist no longer fit me. My soul craved movement, creation, opportunities to give back in a way that would help people find their dreams more easily with fewer barriers. I needed to find a way to care for people and shelter them with the anonymity of good food and drinks and service that would help give them respite and an opportunity to find themselves again to be able to give more to their own lives.

I created the template for my hopes for Pop with the joy of finally having my own cafe and coffee house surrounding a culinary incubator and shared kitchen equipped to reduce barriers for culinary professionals and dually provide a warm landing spot for the community that I hoped to serve.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

I was born and raised in Pueblo, Colorado in a family that was fueled by the entrepreneurial fire of creative business pursuits by necessity and desire. My great grandmothers both created and catalyzed businesses during the Depression, both of my grandfathers were small business owners and my Dad was a new and used car dealer with an exemplary reputation for customer service. I grew up in a culture of work hard/play hard commitment to the car business and customer service. My Dad’s generosity in service to his customers and my Mom’s kindness and wisdom in her interactions with her patients and co-workers in her job as an ophthamology assistant created a template for the kind of professional I wanted to be.

My initial passion was nutrition and I completed my undergraduate degree in Nutrition & Dietetics at Colorado State University, practiced as a clinical dietitian for three years in nutrition support and in-patient care, then married my sweetheart and moved to Chicago to complete a Master’s degree in Speech-Language Pathology at Northwestern University. My goal was to specialize in treating feeding and swallowing disorders to address the needs of my nutrition patients who were no longer able to eat without remediation. With rigorous study, I discovered the many interfaces between the two fields and was thrilled to create a hybrid specialty that resulted in the launch of my private practice, Bellwether Nutrition & Speech-Language Pathology Services, Inc.

I loved my work, but found that I needed more and more creative opportunities to satisfy my desire to create more connections and interesting experiences for my patients. I began developing specialty materials and eventually language and literacy subscription boxes to support professionals in their work teaching children language concepts. Using story books to connect concepts for children, was delightful, but the most fun was creating culinary experiences to teach them concepts that also translated good nutrition principles and practical learning opportunities for daily skills and wellness.

My calling to integrate the two fields of nutrition and speech/language pathology with my lifelong passion of business incubation and culinary pursuits led me to enroll in culinary school and begin the education and practical application of skills building forward into opening my first restaurant and culinary incubator/shared kitchen. I have completed a certificate program in food service management with credits building toward a future that hopefully will eventually result in a culinary degree!

Pop Kitchen & Events is the culmination of a career of joyful, continued commitment to feeding people successfully, reducing barriers across different genres and providing support for business incubation, Our mission is to provide a coffee/botanical tea house and cafe with carefully planned menus and beverage service designed to provide beautiful experiences focused on well being while also supporting small culinary businesses in our shared kitchen/culinary incubator space. Our restaurant is meticulously designed to meet culinary businesses exactly where they are in their growth stage from cottage-based industry to established restaurants needing additional space to test market new menus, explore new concepts, etc. Our job is to reduce barriers by providing comfortable, well equipped and beautiful space for them to grow and cultivate what calls them to be their best. It is also to provide mentorship opportunities, social impact partnerships to improve community nutrition and reduce hunger as well as be a strong partner in the beautiful community of Old Colorado City.

I am so grateful and proud to have the opportunity to create this dream within another equally vital dream, to place this business in a beautiful historic building that we renovated and repurposed to provide a fully accessible and equitable experience for all people.

Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?

I have lived an immensely privileged life. I grew up in the community of Pueblo surrounded by the most wonderful people, culture of hospitality and interconnections of friendship and family. My childhood was magical filled with such love and support from my family and friends. I enjoyed the opportunities of a wonderful education, the ability to start a thriving business, good health and love and marriage with the blessing of two great kids. My world was full of absolute happiness.

In 2015, I was diagnosed with breast cancer which was successfully cured with surgery. During my recovery, my Dad suffered from severe memory issues resulting in him needing memory care for his protection. Circumstances changed for our family and we moved to Colorado Springs. Shortly after our move, my mother was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and both of my parents passed within the next two years. I closed my private practice while caring for my folks and helping my kids adjust to our move.

This time period was one of the most devastating periods of my life. I was grief-stricken with so many stressors, losses, uprooting from my community, family and friends and feeling so completely lost in my understanding of my path forward. I was too heartbroken to try to work in my attempt to reopen my private practice and could not bear to commute to my remaining consultative work at a private ENT practice in Pueblo.

I desperately needed to find gratitude for my life as a whole and appreciation of the life that I could create from the amazing platform of love and professional happiness that I had always enjoyed. I sought help from a professional therapist who listened with such compassion and then guided me to use gratitude to develop a Dream Builder’s perspective to heal my life. I worked through the Dream Building process, leaned hard on gratitude, knit my parents memories and love deeply into the DNA of my decisions for my future and got to work on honoring the legacy that they left me and the pathway forward to live my best life.

Gratitude paved the way to resilience. It made me whole when I was broken and allowed me to count each day as valuable.

If you could go back, would you choose the same profession, specialty, etc.?

I am so in love with the opportunity ahead of me to open a business that encapsulates my personal and professional values and passion that it is hard to contemplate a path that would be any different. Each experience has given me the tools and commitment to fuel this new adventure and it would not be the same without all of the parts.

I would not choose different professions or specialties with the exception that I would have loved the opportunity to begin my culinary education earlier. I am very honored to have the opportunity to learn from my restaurant-based mentor chefs and the culinary professionals at Pikes Peak State College. They have been amazing mentors and so kind to me as I work to absorb and apply concepts within the scope of my career.

Contact Info:

• Instagram: @popkitchenandevents
• Facebook: popkitchenandevents