Karen Akunowicz brings a taste of Italy to South Boston at her two award-winning restaurants
Chef Karen Akunowicz helms Boston’s Fox & the Knife. Photo by Nina Gallant.
Karen Akunowicz is serious about pasta. Her obsession started where many stories about falling in love with food start: in Italy. After a college-era visit to a friend’s distant relatives in the Piedmont region, she was hooked on Italy’s food and friendly people. “This little old woman welcomed [three of us] into her house, not knowing any of us … and it was that level of hospitality culture that completely drew me in,” Akunowicz says. “I was like, I have to understand this, I have to live here someday.”
She moved to Modena in the Emilia-Romagna region (aka the birthplace of Parmigiano Reggiano) in her late twenties after finishing culinary school and beginning her career as a chef in Boston, first at Ten Tables under Katherine Barrett and later at Michael Schlow’s Via Matta. “I had an apartment in Bay Village, so I sublet it, put everything I owned in storage, and packed a single carry-on suitcase,” Akunowicz says. “I moved [to Italy] with nowhere to live, and I could only say food words in Italian.”
Despite not knowing the language, Akunowicz managed to carve out a place for herself in the local food scene. After a stage at a restaurant that had been arranged by one of her Boston chef connections, she put her pasta-making skills to the test at a pastificio (pasta factory), where she made tortellini every day starting at 3 a.m. For her final post in Modena, she worked as the sole chef at L’Avian Blu Enoteca, a 30-seat restaurant that was equipped with a four-burner electric stove and not much else.
“I did all of the shopping, all of the menu writing, all of the prep, and cooked all of the food,” she says. It was this holistic approach to hospitality and the overall restaurant experience in Italy that informed the culinary ethos of her restaurants, Fox & the Knife and Bar Volpe, which she opened in South Boston in 2019 and 2021, respectively.
The New Jersey native and James Beard Award-winning chef always knew it would be Boston when it came time to open a restaurant. “I have the career I have because of this city,” Akunowicz says. “I feel like Boston has been a champion for me, so in return, I want to be a champion for Boston.” Akunowicz and her partner, LJ Johnson, have also long prioritized Boston as the place where they’d live, raise their daughter, Rogue, and open restaurants. “It’s a fantastic city full of people who are really loyal, and I feel lucky that we’re able to own and operate our restaurants here.”
The bar at Fox & the Knife. Photo by Nina Galant.
To be fair, it’s easy to be loyal to restaurants that serve such delicious food—especially when there’s copious amounts of hand-grated (yes, hand-grated!) Parmigiano Reggiano and Pecorino Sardo involved. At Fox & the Knife, you can choose from signature dishes like their Taleggio-stuffed focaccia (think grilled cheese with an Italian glow-up) or a stunning house-made ricotta-stuffed raviolo that gets the carbonara treatment with guanciale, farm egg, and brown butter. And if you’re wondering why they make their ricotta in-house, you’re not alone. “People always ask me, ‘Why don’t you just buy it?’” Akunowicz says. “We season it and drain it to exactly the consistency we want; when you’re using ingredients that are so simple, they have to be the best.”
At Bar Volpe, Akunowicz’ very own pastificio, you’ll find plenty of opportunities to eat formaggio-filled pasta, including impossibly delicate and delightfully decadent ricotta gnocchi with lemon butter and caviar. When asked how they get their gnocchi so exquisitely pillowy, Akunowicz says they’re “bound together by hopes, dreams, and stardust”—in other words, they use as little flour as possible. “This dish is my version of caviar service reimagined,” she says.
Bar Volpe’s caviar service involves light, fluffy gnocchi. Photo by Alyssa Blumstein.
One day, Akunowicz was teaching her pasta maker how to create light, fluffy gnocchi when an idea struck—“What if the gnocchi became the caviar service itself?” she thought. The ricotta in the gnocchi stands in as the creamy dairy element, which gets topped with zippy lemon butter sauce, a sprinkle of chives, and a few hefty dollops of caviar. “This dish is proof that sometimes, the best ideas come when you least expect them.”
If you manage to catch Akunowicz on a day she isn’t at one of her restaurants, prepping for her next food competition show appearance, or traveling for one of the many culinary excursions she leads, you’ll likely find her in the kitchen with her daughter, a budding cheese connoisseur. “Kids love cheese sticks, right?” Akunowicz asks. “Not my kid—she loves Parmigiano Reggiano.”
Madison Trapkin
Former Editor-in-Chief Madison Trapkin is an Atlanta-bred, Boston-based writer. She graduated from Boston University’s Gastronomy master’s Program in December 2018 and started at culture in March 2019. She is passionate about The Feminist Agenda, pizza, and regularly watering her houseplants.
