Meet Isabella Santoro

We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Isabella Santoro. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Isabella below.

Hi Isabella, appreciate you sitting with us today to share your wisdom with our readers. So, let’s start with resilience – where do you get your resilience from?
I get my resilience from both of my parents, as well as from the life experiences that have shaped me. My mom, Lorraine, opened Café Dodici 21 years ago, and it was her tenacity — and especially her resilience — that kept the restaurant thriving through the 2009 financial crisis, the pandemic, and all the challenges small, family-owned businesses face just to stay open.

My dad has been just as influential. In his mid-to-late 30s, he made a dramatic career change — leaving life as a college professor to become a chiropractor. Reinventing yourself at that stage isn’t easy, but he not only did it, he built a successful clinic that he’s run for more than 40 years. Watching him take that leap and create a second career from the ground up taught me that it’s never too late to pivot, and that courage and adaptability are powerful forms of resilience.

Both of my parents also overcame a divorce — something that is never easy for anyone. Seeing them navigate that chapter with grace and rebuild fulfilling lives afterward showed me that even painful transitions can lead to strength, clarity, and growth.

And of course, my own experiences have shaped me too. I’ve learned not to see failure as a final stage, but as an opportunity to learn and adapt. I love John Lennon’s quote: “Everything will be okay in the end. If it’s not okay, it’s not the end.” Over the years, I’ve faced financial challenges, major investments without guaranteed returns, harsh reviews, staffing crises that made staying open feel impossible, and personal health struggles that made the work even harder.

But time and again, I’ve seen things work out in one way or another. Obstacles get overcome, lessons get learned, and life continues to offer new chances to grow. Ultimately, I believe resilience comes from holding onto the perspective that challenges are part of the process — and that life, despite everything, is a gift that keeps on giving.

Thanks for sharing that. So, before we get any further into our conversation, can you tell our readers a bit about yourself and what you’re working on?

I own and operate Northside Diner alongside my wonderful husband, Ed. I also help manage my family’s other ventures — Café Dodici, Dodici’s Shop, and our Dodici Night Suites.

We opened Northside Diner on June 1, 2024, after nearly three years of hands-on renovations. The building, located right on our downtown square, had been vacant since 2006 but had a long and beloved history as Winga’s Café, which served our community from 1928 to 2006. When the previous owners chose to sell, they waited until they found the right people to carry on its legacy — and we were deeply honored to be entrusted with it.

We poured our hearts into restoring the space: bringing back the original tin ceiling and wood floors, exposing the brick walls, and building a long social counter with wood reclaimed from our local bowling alley lanes. We revived a 1920s soda fountain where we handcraft our sodas and cream sodas, and restored a 1930s walk-in cooler to working order. The result is a beautiful retro diner filled with character, warmth, and local history.

Our vision was to offer our town more variety in dining options — to bring something special without residents needing to drive 30 or 40 miles for a meal beyond the classic Midwestern bar fare. We proudly serve the diner staples — smash burgers, tenderloins, chicken pot pie, and hot beef sandwiches — but also mix in modern and global flavors: poke bowls with sushi-grade tuna, falafel wraps, cauliflower wings, curry, poutine, and bulgogi. We source our beef and pork locally and have a lovely baker who comes in early each morning to make pies from scratch using recipes passed down through generations of Mennonite women.

Our décor reflects my unabashed love of books. The walls are lined with hand-folded books from Iowa Wesleyan University, which closed in 2023. Each page-folded book was crafted and installed by me — turning history, literature, and art into part of the atmosphere (and as a bonus, the sound absorption isn’t bad either).

What makes Northside Diner truly special, though, is that it’s deeply personal and family-run. Ed and I are there every day — usually the first to arrive and the last to leave — making sure the food and service are consistently excellent. Our front-of-house staff has remained largely the same since opening, made up mostly of incredible local high school students whose enthusiasm and reliability give me so much hope for the next generation.

Each week, we feature a new special to broaden local palates — from liver and onions to halloumi sandwiches to bibimbap bowls — always with a Midwestern twist that keeps it familiar yet exciting.

For anyone curious about what’s new, follow us on Facebook — that’s where we post our weekly features and upcoming events.

There is so much advice out there about all the different skills and qualities folks need to develop in order to succeed in today’s highly competitive environment and often it can feel overwhelming. So, if we had to break it down to just the three that matter most, which three skills or qualities would you focus on?

Looking back, I’d say the three qualities that have been most impactful in my journey are experience, thoughtful decision-making, and sheer hard work.

First, two decades in the restaurant business have been invaluable. There’s simply no substitute for experience. While there will always be lessons you can only learn the hard way, a lot of pitfalls can be avoided when you’ve already lived through them once. That experience helped me tremendously in crafting a menu, setting up systems like our point-of-sale, and organizing the front of house to ensure smooth service.

Second, I’ve learned that my tendency to “overthink” can actually be one of my best tools. I make a point to explore every possible angle before making a major decision, and that habit has saved me from a lot of missteps. My advice is: don’t obsess, but give important decisions the time and consideration they deserve.

And finally — hard work. There’s just no way around it. Especially in the early days of opening Northside Diner, the hours were long and physically demanding — full days on my feet, lifting, cleaning, and problem-solving nonstop. It was exhausting, but necessary to build something lasting. Over time, we found the right balance in our hours and operations, but that initial grind was what laid the foundation for our success.

For anyone just starting out, my advice is to talk to people who’ve done it before. Ask questions, really listen, and don’t fall into the trap of thinking “it’ll be different for me.” Get hands-on experience in the field you want to enter, and make the most of the endless resources available — from Google to YouTube to AI tools. You don’t need a degree in everything; what you need is curiosity, persistence, and a willingness to learn by doing.

Do you think it’s better to go all in on our strengths or to try to be more well-rounded by investing effort on improving areas you aren’t as strong in?

I believe it’s better to be well-rounded — to know a little about a lot — rather than to focus entirely on one strength. You never know how your life might change. Your job could evolve or disappear, you might move somewhere new, or you might simply realize you don’t want to do the same thing forever. Having a variety of skills gives you flexibility and resilience when life inevitably shifts.

I once gave a speech to students being inducted into the National Honor Society, and my message to them was simple: try lots of things. While I admire people who know from a young age that they want to be doctors or teachers and follow that path for life, most of us don’t have that clarity — and that’s okay. Every time you try something new, whether you fail or succeed, you learn something about yourself. It’s just as important to discover what you don’t want to do as what you do.

Being well-rounded has served me well as a business owner. Running a restaurant requires wearing a dozen hats — and many of them were not in my comfort zone. I had to learn how to set up business licenses, handle payroll and taxes, manage bookkeeping, and understand the behind-the-scenes logistics that keep everything running. Those weren’t my strengths, but nobody else was going to do them for me.

Even in the creative side of the business, like crafting menus, I had to balance creativity with practicality — learning how to design dishes that share ingredients to maximize efficiency and minimize waste. That’s not something you think about when you first dream of opening a restaurant, but it’s one of the countless ways being curious, adaptable, and open to learning pays off.

In short, I think the more you know — even just a little — the more capable and confident you become when life throws something new your way.

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