OUR STORY

Heather Houck

OWNER · WILD FORK CATERING & BLEU SAGE NOSHERY

HER STORY

From the dining room floor to the kitchen she owns.

Heather Houck grew up behind the scenes of the restaurant industry — not in culinary school, but in the thick of it. She learned to shuck oysters at The Broadmoor in Colorado, discovered béarnaise and Oysters Rockefeller, and somewhere between Pennsylvania pierogis and prime rib, fell completely in love with what food could do to a room. When she and her husband Zach packed up and ran away to Alaska in 2012, she brought that love with her.

She waited tables across Anchorage — Campobello, Moose’s Tooth, Romano’s — and her very first job in the city was in the space that would one day become Bleu Sage Noshery.

In 2015, she launched her own catering company. Two years later, she met Dianne — the woman who had spent nearly three decades building Wild Fork Catering into one of Anchorage’s most trusted names. When Dianne was ready to retire, she didn’t want to see what she’d built disappear. Heather didn’t either.

Nine days after Heather signed the papers, the world shut down.

She pivoted hard — large events gave way to dinners for four, private parties for six, and grazing boxes that quietly kept the lights on. By 2022 they were booming. Wild Fork grew steadily from there until Heather took on the front space next door and opened Bleu Sage Noshery — funded entirely out of her own pocket, no loans, just reinvested earnings.

She’s built her own signatures into the menu alongside Dianne’s beloved recipes — the honey whole wheat bread and double fudge brownies still have their place, right alongside Heather’s poke nachos, hot artichoke spinach dip, and the caviar presentations she’s become known for.

Her best friend and GM, Renee, has been beside her from the very beginning. “She’s an artist,” Renee says. “Nothing is ever just good enough. It always has to be an experience.”