Once upon a time... there was a little girl from Arkansas named Anna. She who loved food. She would follow her mom to the supermarket and badger her with questions about cooking. And as soon as she was old enough to reach the counter, she could be found in the kitchen with a cloud of flour swirling around her.

One of her earliest food memories is picking blackberries near her grandparents’ home in Northwest Arkansas. This is where she first learned to make blackberry pies and jam.

It wasn’t long before Anna was cooking for family and friends — beginning a tradition that continues to this day. And now Anna welcomes the surrounding Chicagoland communities and her hometown of North Little Rock (AR) to her table at Blackberry Market — a place to belong, a place to exhale, to grab a bite, and to connect with someone new (or old).