Not Easily
Defined
Meet the woman behind Maisie’s Green Brae.
You Might Not Place
Where She’s From
Talk to Christine G.D. Schaefer for five minutes and you might not be able to place where she’s from. Get her down South and a twang shows up. Get her up North and it goes clipped and Philadelphia-fast. She comes by all of it honestly. Her mother’s people are from near Philadelphia, her father was born in Texas and raised in Mississippi, and she grew up outside DC in a town where the neighbors changed every year. She made new friends constantly because she had to, and she liked just about all of them. That turns out to be a decent way to raise someone who’d go on to run a restaurant.
She earned the rest of it the hard way. She worked full weeks of fifty and sixty hours while putting herself through school at night, stretching a four-year degree across six because she took the fewest credits that still kept the tuition help coming. She graduated cum laude anyway. Then she went back for a master’s in sociology, studying how communities actually hold together. Somewhere in there she spent a few years as a youth minister, and a good many more in technology companies, learning sales and marketing and operations from the inside.
That looks like a scattered résumé until you see what she built with it. Maisie’s Green Brae does a lot of jobs at once. It’s Sunday brunch and a live-music venue and the place a business books to host its whole team, on top of the everyday work of being a good neighborhood table. Running all of that takes someone who understands people, numbers, a room, and a P&L in equal measure. Christine spent a lifetime, without quite meaning to, becoming exactly that person.
Officially she’s Head of Operations, which mostly means everything. The strategy and the marketing, the money and the HR management, the technology that ties it all together. She’ll happily put a business degree and a sociology master’s to work figuring out where you’ll want to sit.
If it has a plug, a password, or a spreadsheet, odds are it’s hers.
Here’s the part she won’t say out loud. We tell people the restaurant is named for the dog, the one-eyed foxhound she and Karl adopted, who greets strangers like they’re the best thing that’s happened all week and will not be told no. All true. It also happens to be a fair description of Christine. She built the place on a simple hunch, that people are a little tired of arguing on their phones and would mostly rather sit outside with good food, some music, and their neighbors.
She isn’t in it alone. Karl, her husband and co-founder, designed the whole place around her idea of it. Their son named the dog. Their second oldest daughter keeps the social feeds running. Their oldest daughter and grandson pitched in getting gardens outside set up. Her Mom has painted, weeded, and gardened as well. A family thing that grew into a whole-town thing.
She’ll tell you she is not easily defined, and she’s right. But the short version is easy enough.
She’s the neighbor who saved you a seat.