Nervous 15-year-old, now co-owner Chelsey Kosicki walked into Café on the Square to start her first shift on the job in February of 2009. She didn’t know it then, but she would be trained by her future business partner and friend Lacey Koch who was 19 years old at the time. Chelsey worked as a waitress all through college while pursuing a degree in business administration at Peru State online while having kiddos. Lacey attended the University of Nebraska where she pursued a degree in accounting while communing daily to work at the Café. After graduating college, Lacey took a few years with her accounting degree and joined an accounting firm in Lincoln. Chelsey stuck around the Café for those years but both always stayed connected and stayed friends.
After 15 years of business, Café on the Square closed in 2016. Months went by and seeing the Café closed bothered Chelsey and Lacey. They no longer could see the restaurant closed and in March of 2018, they decided to purchase and run the Café on the Square themselves. They completely flipped the interior of the building into the unique design it has today and bought out the building on the side of them to build a larger kitchen.
Lacey and Chelsey believe their success from the start was attributed to the amount support from their community and family. Lacey and Chesley repeatedly said that “we are just so thankful and blessed to have such a caring and supportive community.” When Lacey and Chelsey first started with the Café, they didn’t think this was going to be their career path for them but they both always felt at home at the Café and Seward.
When asked what makes the café unique, they both answered with “we pride ourselves on great servers and on creating long term relationships with our customers. We want to create a friendly environment here.” The future is looking bright for Café on the Square as they plan to make their building bigger to feed more happy Seward customers.
