He was sixteen years old, court-ordered to an alternative school in Rhode Island, looking for a way to pass the time. A retired Johnson & Wales chef named Andy ran a vocational culinary program there. Kevin signed up. Chef Andy saw something in him. And that was the beginning of everything.

Chef Kevin O'Donnell is a multi-time James Beard Award nominee and the owner of Giusto and Mother Pizzeria in Newport, Rhode Island. Giusto is his flagship restaurant at Hammett's Hotel on the Newport waterfront, serving what Kevin calls freestyle Italian cuisine: not Roman, not Tuscan, not southern Italian, but Italian cuisine seen through a Rhode Island lens, cooked with the seasons, and built around the relationships with local farmers, fisheries, and artisans that Kevin has spent a lifetime cultivating. Mother Pizzeria is his sister concept built around a 100% sourdough pizza program using stone-ground heirloom wheat from a local mill and mozzarella from the only mozzarella producer in Rhode Island.

In this episode, host Sarah Perkins sits down with Kevin for a conversation that covers one of the most genuinely moving arcs The Perfect Bite has ever told. From a North Kingstown childhood where food was about gathering rather than cooking, to turbulent high school years where his parents split and he moved out at sixteen and made choices he has spent twenty-five years building something beautiful beyond. From Ocean Tides to Junction Pizzeria to Johnson & Wales to a walk through an Italian farmers market that changed how he understood food forever. From Del Posto to Paris to a Boston restaurant nominated for Best New Restaurant by the James Beard Foundation the year it opened, to the moment he and his wife found out they were having a baby and he knew it was time to come home to Rhode Island.

This is a conversation about what cooking can do for a person. And what a person can do with cooking when they decide to give everything back.

In this episode, we cover:

• Growing up in North Kingstown, Rhode Island in an Irish-Italian-Swedish household where food was about gathering rather than cooking
• A huge childhood appetite that eventually pointed him toward the kitchen
• His parents splitting when he was going into high school and moving out at sixteen to live with a friend
• Poor decisions, difficult choices, and a court-ordered stint at Ocean Tides, an alternative school in Rhode Island
• Chef Andy, a retired Johnson & Wales instructor who ran the vocational culinary program at Ocean Tides and saw something in Kevin immediately
• Basketball and cooking as the two things that gave him structure and routine when he needed it most
• Graduating Ocean Tides, reflecting on what the rehabilitative model gave him versus what incarceration would have taken
• Junction Pizzeria in North Kingstown and chef Walter Slater, a Johnson & Wales graduate who taught him the soft skills of becoming an adult
• Walter Slater hiring only athletes because people who play team sports already know how to work together
• Going to Johnson and Wales at twenty-one through a weekend continuing education program while working two full-time jobs and paying his own way without debt
• His Johnson & Wales internship in Orvieto, Umbria at Ristorante Zeppelin under Chef Lorenzo Pellegrini: four months that turned into almost three years
• Walking through the Orvieto farmers market every morning on the way to work and understanding seasonality for the first time in his life
• Lorenzo as a well-traveled, creative chef and a traditionalist Sicilian chef in the same kitchen: learning both sides of Italian cooking simultaneously
• The quality of Italian ingredients as the single most important lesson from his time there: starting with the best makes everything else simple
• Castle Hill Inn in Rhode Island, then Del Posto in New York under Mark Ladner and a two Michelin star approach to a tomato sauce that changed how he thinks about simplicity
• An unexpected job offer to be chef at a restaurant in Paris that he could not turn down despite never studying French
• Coming back home, moving to Boston, and opening SRV (Serene Republic of Venice) in the South End in 2016 with a partner he had worked with in Italy, New York, and Paris
• SRV nominated for Best New Restaurant by the James Beard Foundation in the year they opened, building their own grain mill and milling 100% of their flour in-house
• Finding out he and his wife were expecting a baby and the decision to leave SRV and come home to Rhode Island
• Choosing Newport over Providence and why: the water, the family connection, the access to seafood, and the predictability of the seasonal tourist market
• Giusto: the name means right or just in Italian, and the whole story of how it came to be is that everything about the location, the landlords, and the opportunity felt right
• What freestyle Italian cuisine means: not tied to any region, inspired by all of Italian cooking, filtered through Rhode Island ingredients and seasons
• The Scotch meatball: a cult classic on the menu since day one, a Scotch egg wrapped in meatball batter with a tomato sauce that cooks fast and hot rather than all day long
• The fried calamari in squid ink tempura: a Rhode Island tradition elevated, with squid as one of the state's biggest fisheries
• Mother Pizzeria: opened three years after Giusto with partners Kyle Stamps and Lauren Schaefer, built around a 100% sourdough pizza program using stone-ground heirloom wheat from a Massachusetts mill
• Mother as the name of the sourdough starter culture, and why it was an obvious choice the moment Lauren suggested it
• Narragansett Creamery as the only mozzarella producer in Rhode Island and a core ingredient at Mother
• Mother's pizza philosophy: crispy outside, soft and chewy inside, less is more with toppings, and a Calabrian Luau that has become one of their most beloved and controversial pies
• Teaching at Ocean Tides, the Rhode Island Hospitality Education Foundation, Future Chefs in Boston, and the Jacques Pépin culinary arts program at Boston University
• Why being a chef is being a teacher, and why teaching forces him to keep learning
• What he is most proud of: creating a place where people want to work and seeing his team take ownership and pride in what they have built together
• Advice for founders: think everything all the way through, stress test your assumptions, and be prepared for problems before they arrive because they will

Find Kevin, Giusto, and Mother Pizzeria:

• Giusto: 4 Commercial Wharf, Hammett's Hotel, Newport Rhode Island. Instagram: @giustonewport
• Mother Pizzeria: 49 Long Wharf Mall, Newport Rhode Island. Instagram: @motherpizzeria

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