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Northshore October 2025
  Like a lot of kids, Alex Cekala and his brother, Chris, spent their days after school helping out with the family business. For them, that meant cooking chicken, making chicken pies and chicken salad, washing dishes, and sweeping up the parking lot on a property nestled among weeping willow trees. Unlike a lot of kids, though, Alex and Chris were the third generation of a business that is an icon of New England food: Willow Tree, beloved for its chicken pot pies and chicken salad. “It’s all still made the same way that my grandparents were making it,” says Alex Cekala, who’s now general manager of Willow T
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