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or Teri Zepeda, the appreciation for delicious things began as a child. She helped her father and grandfather, who were beekeepers, take their bees south to the Rio Grande Valley for the winter so they could get their pollen from the citrus orchards here and then pack them up for summers in Minnesota, enjoying the flora there in order to make the most delicious honey. As a teenager in the Valley, she worked in food service at the mall and enjoyed it so much that she says she felt like it couldn’t be a real job because she was just having too much fun. She graduated from college with a degree in social work and began working in hospice care as a social worker before she and her husband, Zee Zepeda, moved to Austin. There, he worked in media while she pursued several careers, one of which was as an Allstate insurance agent, before an opportunity arose for Zee in the Corpus Christi market working for Clear Channel Communications. “We decided we’d come down here for two
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years, then go back to Austin. That was 11 years ago,” Teri laughs. Since she didn’t expect to be in the Coastal Bend long, Teri was hesitant about going back into social work, as it takes several years to build up the network of contacts that she would have needed, so Zee suggested that instead she open up a café, as she loved to cook and enjoyed her time in food service so much. She wasn’t impressed with the idea. “I told him no, absolutely not. I have a degree; I’m not opening a café,” she says. But Zee was persistent and asked her to check out a location he had found that would be perfect. “He came home one day and said, ‘I found this quaint place. You’ll love it; there’s just 10 tables. Let’s just go look,’” she explains. It was in the now defunct Hoover Hotel on Chaparral Street, and when Zee took her to see it, Teri knew she was ready to take the plunge. “I knew it just needed some vision, just needed some paint,” Teri says. “I thought that for two years, it would be something fun to do. It was Zee’s idea for my mom to come up from Uvalde to help us get it up and running, because she had a tea room there, and it was also his idea to hang original art on the walls of the café. It had nev-