“I didn’t want to be bound by doing the same thing day in and day out,” Chase says.

Instead of a generic career path, Chase moved back to Nantucket and opened her first restaurant, which she named “Que Sera Sarah.” The store name was ambiguous enough to reflect a variety of endeavors, Chase says. In this way, she reasoned, if the food venture failed, she could turn it into something else and retain the name.

“This was a question on my mind always in those days,” Chase says. “What ever will be me?”

Yet the venture was an instant success with Nantucket residents, as it provided a broad range array of Mediterranean dishes to an elite clientele. Chase says that the original menu included couscous salads, wrapped grape leaves and pizzas—“anything that appealed to my taste buds.”

Chase says that she modelled her store after European cuisine.

“I went on a bicycle trip from Paris to Vienna one year and fell in love with the European way of living,” she says.

Toby A. Greenberg has been a Nantucket summer resident for 40 years and says that Chase created a “happy environment” in her new store.

“The food was wonderful, always delicious and fresh,” Greenberg says. “Sarah was brilliant, she never took culinary classes but just learned by doing.”

Chase was only 27 when she started a venture that would earn her fame in the culinary world. At that age, she was invited to join a new cookbook project,

The Silver Palate Good Times Cookbook. Within weeks Chase’s writing skills—honed at Harvard—brought her into the spotlight. Seeing that Chase was the best writer among the team of culinary experts, the project directors hired Chase to actually pen the cookbook. In a very short time, Chase went from small town business owner to minor celebrity.

“Driving down Fifth Avenue in a limousine, I got such a thrill from seeing my book in Saks and in the bookstore windows,” Chase says. “I realized how much I liked writing about food, and now I had an entree into the publishing world.”

BLENDING FAMILY AND CAREER

Chase continues to earn recognition as a top name in food circles. After selling Que Sera Sarah in 1989, she assembled a new career from a variety of her interests: travel, freelance writing, teaching and consulting. During this time, Chase says she met her husband, who was also in the food industry, at a Burgundy wine tasting dinner on Nantucket. They were married in 1995, and their son, Nigel— “the best thing we ever cooked up”— arrived in 1997.

Chase says she envisions herself more as a guardian of old American cultural traditions than as a revolutionary in the gourmet world of cooking.

“I see my work as part of a way of life that is fading from our modern lives,” she says.