By Anne Ruisi
It’s not surprising that Tina Liollio would make a career in food. Her family roots are in the restaurant business and her own years in the industry made it natural to open a shop of her own.
In May, six months after Teenie’s Take-Home Market opened on Petticoat Lane in Mountain Brook Village, she gained not only a following of loyal customers, but a nomination as Retailer of the Year from the Alabama Retail Association.
“We opened on Nov. 17, and it’s been full blast since then,” Liollio said.
Teenie’s Take-Home Market features scratch-made take-and-bake meals that reflect her Greek-Italian heritage. Customers take home oven-ready meals that are heat-and-eat.
Avgolemono, the fragrant lemon-flavored chicken soup, Greek Chicken and Rice and Meat Lasagna are probably the three most popular dishes and are always available to order Liollio said. The lasagna is available in regular and gluten-free versions. It uses lasagna noodles made from hearts of palm, which are low carb.
The family-style meals are versions of her family’s recipes, tweaked a bit to produce the food in mass quantities, Liollio said.
Each week, Teenie’s features different items, which are posted on its website, coconut-beige-xjze.squarespace.com. Eggplant Parmesan and Baked Zucchini are recent examples.
There also are bakery and other items supplied by local women-owned businesses, such as gluten-free brownies from BlueRoot Co. and Dryft Coffee, which Teenie’s partners with and promotes.
Little Teenie Cakes, which grew out of an effort to make a treat similar to a glazed snack cake, debuted in December. Liollio asked a friend who is a baker to make such a cake in a Christmas tree shape.
“They were sold out. We couldn’t keep enough in the store. I think we made like 80 dozen,” she said of the treats, which remain popular and now come in different holiday themes and flavors.
Pandemic Response
The seeds for Teenie’s came about during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Liollio always enjoyed cooking and catering. During the lockdown in 2020, when she couldn’t organize gatherings, she started cooking dishes and asking friends via text message whether they wanted to sample the food.
“It’s how I kept myself going during the pandemic,” she said.
In February 2021, she had to stop cooking because the World Games were coming up and the company she founded in 2019, Local Link Bham, was involved in the event. Local Link Bham is a service that links organizations with members of the hospitality industry to help coordinate food and beverage service for events.
She met BlueRoot owner Jennifer Ryan during the World Games. About the time Liollio was thinking of starting Teenie’s, Ryan was moving BlueRoot from its space on Petticoat Lane to Pepper Place. Liollio said she reached out to Ryan in September or so and moved into BlueRoot’s vacated space just a few months later.
Handed Down in the Family
Her cooking skills began while growing up in the Glen Iris area by “learning to cook right” from her Italian grandmother and great-grandmother. Every Saturday she went to her great-grandmother’s to help her make meatballs and Italian tomato sauce for Sunday dinner.
She learned hospitality at a young age while tagging along as a child at her father’s restaurants in the Florida Panhandle.
In high school and while earning a degree in communications and marketing from Spring Hill College in Mobile, Liollio worked as a restaurant hostess and waitress. After graduation, she was hired by Jim ‘N Nick’s BBQ in 2007 as catering manager and then took on a variety of roles, including regional manager and general manager for off-premises sales.
Through Local Link, she’s working with the city of Hoover during the SEC baseball tournament and recently signed on to work with an Italian Festival in Birmingham next year. Local Link also works with area nonprofits such as Children’s Harbor and manages events for the Jones Valley Teaching Farm.
One event coming up that might force Liollio to temporarily close Teenie’s is a public works project on Petticoat Lane that will mean closing parts of the road and cutting off electricity and access to the shop.
Liollio said she’s been told the phase that could affect her business is expected to begin June 12.
“We will likely make the decision to be closed for a couple of weeks while the work is going on,” she said, noting that Teenie’s will reopen as soon as possible.
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