Giusto Brings Exciting Italian Cooking to Newport, Rhode Island

Rhode Island has the highest percentage of Italian Americans in any state, at 19 percent. So when Kevin O’Donnell was ready to return to his native state after cooking at award-winning Italian restaurants like Del Posto in New York City and SRV in Boston, he knew his first solo venture would feature the cuisine of his mother’s Italian family.

Giusto opened inside the Hammetts Hotel in Newport, Rhode Island, during the pandemic last year, closed for the winter, and reopened this spring. Chef O’Donnell calls his food here “Freestyle Italian,” and describes it as an homage to Italian cuisine through the lens of New England.

Growing up in North Kingston, Rhode Island, O’Donnell’s mother’s family was Italian-American, and he learned to appreciate food from them. “My grandmother was really good at coming up with magic out of the fridge. My great-grandparents had a garden and I remember that they made wine, and all that good stuff,” says O’Donnell. “I grew up just loving simple, delicious food.”

While attending culinary school at Johnston & Wales, O’Donnell had an internship in Italy, which he says changed his life. “It really opened my eyes to good products and the culture of eating and drinking, and I totally fell in love,” he says. He returned to Italy after finishing school, living outside Orvieto for several years. He traveled the country in a car he bought there to discover regional Italian food.

“I've actually seen more of Italy than I have of the United States, which is kind of embarrassing, but I would have a day off and I’d look at a map and say, ‘Okay I want to learn about where Amatriciana comes from,’” he remembers. “So I’m going to wake up today and drive to Amatrice, and I’m going to eat at three different restaurants, and I’m going to have Amatriciana at all three restaurants and see what the similarities are, what the differences are. I’m going to buy a bunch of guanciale and pasta and bring it back to Orvieto, and cook it myself, and that’s how I learned about regional Italian cuisine.”

After a few years in Italy, he came to NYC to cook at Del Posto under Chef Mark Ladner, who he counts as one of his mentors. There, he refined his technique and garnered his fine-dining chops, which he then took to Boston, when he started SRV with his partners. SRV, which stands for the Serene Republic of Venice, is a temple to Venetian food. After four years, O'Donnell and his wife were expecting a child so they decided to move back to Rhode Island to be near family. They were drawn to Newport to be close to the beach, but also because there seemed to be a lack of Italian restaurants compared to Providence, where the Federal Hill neighborhood is known as an enclave for Italian immigrants.

When he got the deal to be inside the new Hammetts Hotel (the restaurant is independently owned and operated from the hotel), he decided to focus on different regions in Italy, changing the menu based on the seasons.

“In the wintertime, we’re influenced more by Northern Italy and have more hearty, rustic dishes from regions like Piedmont or Lombardia,” says O’Donnell. “And then in the spring it’s starting to lighten up a little bit, maybe it’s a little more Tuscan, maybe Bologna. In summer, we go to the islands and the coast.”

So what makes it freestyle? Allowing himself to cook outside the lines, and put a dash of New England tradition into some of the dishes. For example, there’s a dish of steamed littleneck clams, a Rhode Island staple, thanks to the abundance of them in Narragansett Bay. Of course, clams are also popular in Italy’s coastal towns. So to combine the two culinary cultures, O’Donnell first steams the clams in an Italian style, with guanciale, garlic, and white wine. To make it more familiar to locals, he adds mascarpone and potatoes, a reference to New England clam chowder. It’s topped with Sicilian olive oil and fresh lemon and served with a Garlic Doughboy, a play on a classic Rhode Island snack. Classic doughboys are fried dough discs that are typically sweet, but here it’s savory, with a cap of dried yogurt to recall the powdered sugar that’s standard.

Another mash-up New England-Italian dish on the menu is Giusto’s version of calamari, which is actually the official state appetizer of Rhode Island, mostly because the majority of squid landed in the U.S. comes from southern Rhode Island but also because of the Italian immigrants who were already familiar with cooking squid. Found on almost every menu in the state, calamari are typically dredged in flour and deep fried. At Giusto, O’Donnell cooks them in a tempura batter made with squid ink and then serves them with a sauce made from garlic, white wine, Sicilian tomato paste, butter, capers, and cherry peppers. The result is a fluffier, more umami-forward calamari with a sauce that’s both rich and bright at the same time. 

“Estratto di Pomodoro is this tomato paste from Sicily, and it’s one of my favorite ingredients,” says Chef O’Donnell, who sources various ingredients from Italy. “It’s made using really high-quality tomatoes that they make into a paste and then dry in the sun on rooftops, so it’s like this sun-dried tomato paste that’s just full of umami and delicious tomato flavor that’s really intense.”

The dessert menu features an ode to two Rhode Island staples with an Italian twist: Del’s Lemonade and coffee milk, in the form of handmade gelato. Del’s Lemonade is a summertime classic found across the state in frosty cups loaded with real lemon chunks, while coffee milk is made from a coffee-flavored syrup by a local brand called Autocrat, which is added to milk in a spin on chocolate milk. At Giusto, O’Donnell makes an espresso gelato swirled with Autocrat coffee syrup and candied lemon peel.

In the end, O’Donnell wants to honor his two culinary backgrounds while using the best possible ingredients.

“I’m on a never-ending mission to find great ingredients,” he says. “I want to present them in a simple, elegant, straightforward way that is slightly different than what people may be expecting.”