Today we’d like to introduce you to Michael Lombardi and Kevin O’Donnell.
Michael graduated from Boston University in 2008 and decided to attend The Culinary Institute of America to learn how to cook. After one year in the program, he scheduled his externship in Orvieto, Italy. Upon arriving, he met another American cook, Kevin O’Donnell. Kevin had found himself in Orvieto during an externship for Johnson and Wales University and decided to return to Italy later to become a Sous Chef. The two became good friends and after cooking and traveling together, they decided to move back to the states.
Kevin did a season at Castle Hill in Newport and Michael went to Manhattan to work at Del Posto under the leadership of Chef Mark Ladner. Kevin moved to New York, slept on Michael’s floor, and joined the team at Del Posto as well. The restaurant was known for its fine dining take on rustic Italian food. This is where the two learned to refine the home cooking dishes they learned in Italy. After a couple of years working at Del Posto, they received an opportunity to open a bistro in Paris. L’Office opened in 2012 and was quickly a major success.
Owned and operated by Charles Compagnon, Michael and Kevin helmed the kitchen and all the responsibilities associated with it. They moved to France on short notice, without being able to speak any of the language, and no experience in Paris before. The local paper reviewed it with 3 out of 4 hearts and numerous publications featured it as their restaurant of the week. It was named Bistro of the Year for 2012 and featured in Bon Appetit and New York Times Magazine when they did their Paris roundup.
With the confidence to be able to express themselves through their own cooking, the two moved to Boston. Leading the kitchen at The Salty Pig, they met owners Jim Cochener and Michael Moxley, who eventually would be their partners in SRV. The four went to Venice to share in the experience of the wine bar culture that Kevin and Michael had loved during their time in both Italy and France. After a few years of planning and development, SRV opened.
Michael and Kevin oversee a team of 20 people in the kitchen (a big change from the days of just the two of them in Paris) and are challenging the way that people experience Italian food.
We’re always bombarded by how great it is to pursue your passion, etc – but we’ve spoken with enough people to know that it’s not always easy. Overall, would you say things have been easy for you?
Finances are tough when working as a cook. During their time in NYC, the two lived in apartments that had more people than bedrooms. People slept in living rooms and on couches. When the two moved to Paris they had a small apartment across from the restaurant that the owner found. Kevin and Michael slept on air mattresses and kept a small footprint.
Learning to cook in New York is high pace and high intensity. Anyone who has worked there knows the hours are long and every service feels like a Friday or Saturday. The amount of people that eat out in New York is endless. Sleep is hard to come by and friendships are hard to keep with people outside of the industry.
In France, we didn’t know the culture or the language. We had to translate all the food that we needed to order into French using a dictionary and then have the owner call the purveyors to get the food in. Ingredients that were more obscure in name took us a long time to figure out what the French word was for it. We had to ask other chefs and look in butcher shops and the such to ask people what they called the things that we had used before.
There was a lot of learning curves along the way for each and every job. And being an owner has been a whole new learning curve.
We’d love to hear more about your business.
SRV is a Venetian inspired restaurant in the South End of Boston. We take pride in our grains and mill all of our own flour for pasta and bread as well as cook all of our rice for risotto to order. Cicchetti is the small bites one would eat while standing in a wine bar in Venice, and we take pride in that too. We were one of the first restaurants in Boston to have a standing only section that allows people to experience eating out and drinking in a casual and energetic way.
Our company takes pride in our people. We have rather a low turnover for the restaurant industry, and we tend to have people move on from our company due to life changes rather than just joining a new restaurant team. Our kitchen staff is large and we try to treat them all like family. When Kevin and Michael were cooks, requesting time off was almost unheard of. They missed family and friends’ events and milestone celebrations all the time. You couldn’t make plans for a Friday night concert or sporting event, even if you knew it months in advance. We work hard to make sure people have those opportunities.
Our style of food is also unique. We don’t serve a North End style of Italian cuisine. A lot of guests don’t recognize us as Italian the first time they read our menu. Dining at SRV is about us utilizing Italian ingredients and techniques that maybe people are less familiar with and blending that with New England attitude too.
What were you like growing up?
Michael was overly energetic. He played lots of sports and didn’t like to study. Cooking was a family activity that he enjoyed, mostly because the final outcome was usually a big party.
Kevin grew up in Rhode Island and knew from a young age he didn’t want to go the traditional college path. He enjoyed time with a close group of friends and he got into cooking as a way to keep him hanging out with his buddies while working in a local pizza place.
Contact Info:
- Address: 569 Columbus Ave
Boston, MA 02118 - Website: www.srvboston.com
- Phone: 6175369500
- Email: michael@srvboston.com
- Instagram: @srvboston
Image Credit:
Morgane Ione Photography
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