Who We Are

Ken Miller & Greg O'Neill

Owners & Founders

Partners in life for almost eighteen years, Ken and Greg have been corporate nomads, with jobs taking them to places as varied as New York, Hamburg, Boston, Budapest and Chicago--their favorite place and adopted home. They love to eat and can think of nothing more enjoyable than making a meal out of fantastic cheese, bread and wine (and everything that goes with it) and meeting others who enjoy the same!

Ken Miller

Co-Owner/Founder

Ken’s background spans from culinary to computers. He earned his BS from the College of William & Mary and is a graduate of New York’s Peter Kump Culinary School (currently known as ICE). He studied and worked under chef David Waltuck at the award winning Chanterelle restaurant in Manhattan’s Tribeca district. Additionally, Ken ran catering operations serving the entertainment industry and practiced restaurant consulting for several celebrity clients. He has always had a love of good eating and believes that the key to great food is simplicity and perfect preparation.

He used the other side of his brain to design high-level graphic systems on nuclear submarines, complex imaging systems in the world of real estate and title insurance and software for a large technology services company. He has a hunger for learning and is always trying and tasting new things! Ken serves as Pastoral’s CFO and CTO and is responsible for our physical plant and special projects.

Greg O'Neill

Co-Owner/Founder

Greg’s professional experience includes executive marketing positions with Motorola, Colgate-Palmolive, Verizon, Polaroid and Macy*s Department Stores. He holds an MBA from Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business and a bachelor’s degree from Rutgers University.

While Ken knows how to create great food, Greg prefers to eat it, enjoy it and share it with others! After a successful 20-year global career in marketing for some of the world’s great consumer brands, he decided that the next chapter of his career would involve something for which he has a passion. Through his travels to forty-plus countries, he has come to understand that consumers around the globe appreciate the value of quality products, the world over and Chicago is no different.

Greg serves as Vice President of the American Cheese Society, the leading organization promoting and supporting cheese in North America, and he is also very involved with the National Association for the Specialty Food Trade (NASFT) the largest specialty food trade organization in the Americas. He is also on the editorial advisory board of Culture Magazine, the premier publication for the cheese world in North America. Closer to home, he also actively volunteers and serves on boards with a number of local and civic organizations. At Pastoral, Greg serves as COO, and is responsible for Marketing and Procurement.

The Pastoral Team

Cristi Menard

Senior Buyer

Born and raised in rural Kansas, Cristi has long been dedicated to expanding her horizons. At Boston University, she studied International Relations and later taught English in rural Japan. She continues to travel to exotic locales, and spends her spare time cooking, reading books about goats and driving fast cars. If she could take a single cheese plate to a desert island, it would feature a Wabash Cannonball, Pleasant Ridge Reserve and Montgomery's Cheddar. 

Cristi joined Pastoral from Whole Foods and she has held positions of increasing responsibility including store manager for Lake Street, serving as manager for the launch of our newest Chicago French Market location, and overseeing our Broadway location and E-Commerce store. She recently stepped up to be head of Pastoral's procurement team.

Nicole Bucci

Senior Manager for Store Operations

Nicole was born with a love for food. As the child of a Hungarian immigrant mother and an Italian American father, she was raised to appreciate good food from all over the world. She ventured out to continue her studies in English Literature at the State University of New York at Buffalo and subsequently pursued a career in culinary arts at The Illinois Institute of Art at Chicago where she received her Certificate in Bakery and Pastries.

Mark Hayes

Wine, Beer and Spirits Buyer

A Michigan native, Mark's career in wine started in restaurants around the campus of his alma mater Michigan State University where he studied Economics and Human Resource Management, but mostly wine and beer. After graduating, he moved to southern California and had his 'epiphany' that wine would be his path over a bottle of 1997 Dauvissat Les Clos Chablis Grand Cru.

Mark has managed the beverage programs for restaurants in both Chicago and San Diego and now finds himself at home at Pastoral. A self trained but fortuitously mentored advocate for authentic and terrior-driven wines, Mark is more eager to share a pour of his latest discovery and liken it to Teddy Pendergrass than talk about its more quantifiable traits.

Lisa Futterman

Wholesale Accounts

A graduate of the The Restaurant School in Philadelphia and the University of Pennsylvania, Lisa has cooked at fine dining restaurants in Philadelphia and the San Francisco Bay Area before becoming a cooking teacher and helping run cooking schools in California and Chicago.

In her spare time, Lisa writes about food and spirits for several local and national publications. She wrote a TimeOut Chicago column, The Roquefort Files and served as a contributing reporter in Food & Wine Magazine. She had the good fortune of serving as culinary assistant on Bravo’s “Top Chef Chicago” just before joining Pastoral. Lisa joined us in the Fall of 2007, and took the reins of our wholesale cheese program in February 2008.