Chef Karen Akunowicz’s Long, Strange Trip Back To Italian Cooking

Karen Akunowicz has one of the most intriguing resumes of any chef in America. She’s won a prestigious James Beard Award and was a fan favorite on a popular season of Top Chef—but those achievements aren’t what make her unique. She’s a young woman with her own wildly successful restaurant, Fox & the Knife enoteca in South Boston, and while this is admirable, it’s also, happily, a more common occurrence these days.

So what makes Akunowicz’s backstory so unusual? Let’s start from the beginning of her career, when, as a culinary school student looking for a bartending job at a Boston Italian restaurant with a menu written entirely in Italian, she decided to memorize every word and learn its pronunciation. “That was my indoctrination into Italian food,” she says. “I quickly fell in love with it."

From there, the chef’s tale takes some unusual twists and turns. From her stint as a bartender and cook at that Boston restaurant, she heads for a stage in Modena, not entirely sure if the chef who invited her—who had stopped returning emails or answering calls—was still willing to let her work for free. She got her first kitchen experience at Osteria Stallo del Pomodoro, then spent three months mastering pasta at a small shop before getting an offer to run the kitchen at Modena restaurant L’Avian Blu.

“I spent the next seven months working there, which was great because I got paid, which is not something that often happens when you move to another country to learn skills,” she says. Then, after a thoughtful pause she adds, “Italian food for me, not just the food I learned to make and that I studied and that I practiced while I was there, but also the culture of living in Italy, is not only very important to me but was a very formative part of my education as a young cook."

Nevertheless, when she returned to Boston from Modena, Akunowicz took another detour. Rather than settle back into an Italian kitchen, she landed a sous chef position at the popular Cambridge Middle Eastern restaurant Oleana, cooking with acclaimed chef Ana Sortun.

Next up, another culinary excursion, this time to explore Asian flavors. It was during her seven years as chef at Myers+Chang that Akunowicz would rise to national prominence, cooking not nonna-inspired pastas but Chinese, Taiwanese and other Southeast Asian dishes.

“When I was leaving Myers+Chang and branching out on my own, everybody asked me, what kind of restaurant would I open, knowing that I had cooked at a modern Middle Eastern restaurant and a modern Asian restaurant and had lived in Italy,” she recalls.

“I wanted to open an enoteca, I wanted someplace where people could come together, something that embodies that sort of spirit,” she continues, noting that the space she found in South Boston, what became Fox & the Knife, spoke to her. “I knew that this is what this restaurant was."

What is it? An Italian-American restaurant that landed on national critics’ radars and top-10 lists not long after opening in 2019, with an inventive menu that nods to traditions learned cooking in Modena and other Italian kitchens, but which isn’t beholden to them. Cases in point, a play on cacio e pepe, which she lists as pepe e cacio because it’s not totally authentic, featuring “this beautiful goat butter,” and a spaghetti con vongole in which she cooks the noodles in dashi—a technique that nods to her past as a chef cooking Asian cuisine.

Not that you’d know any of this from looking at the menu, which reads like a straight-up modern Italian restaurant. That’s because while Akunowicz doesn’t hold back from using her experience and diverse palate, she doesn’t want to seem gimmicky. “I don’t want anything perceived as menu value, aka I put this ingredient in because it sounds cool on the menu,” she says. “That’s against what I believe. But having been able to look at food through a very wide lens, there are things that just make sense to me."

At Fox & the Knife, they’re making sense to a lot of people, and while it’s an exciting chapter in the long, strange trip that has been Akunowicz’s career, you get the sense that her story will offer more twists and turns ahead.

That said, for now Akunowicz seems content to take her place amid the growing pantheon of Boston chef-entrepreneurs who happen to be women. Asked about this, she perks up, citing Lydia Shire as an inspiration and crediting Jody Adams of restaurants such as Trade and Porto as a mentor. She also mentions Fortun, Barbara Lynch, Joanne Chang, Tiffany Faison and others.

“I grew up in this city watching all of these strong, amazing, wildly talented, James Beard Award–winning women own and run their own kitchens,” Akunowicz says. “So even though I knew how hard it was to run a restaurant, it didn’t occur to me that it was something I couldn’t do."

So she did it.

(Photo Credit Portrait: Kate Grewal)