Chef Karen Akunowicz Landed Two Michelin Bib Gourmands on One South Boston Block

By Eric Barton | Nov. 22, 2025

AUTHOR BIO: Eric Barton is editor of The Adventurist and a freelance journalist who has reviewed restaurants for more than two decades. Email him here.

By the time the first Negronis hit the bar at Fox & the Knife, Karen Akunowicz has usually already done a full day. There is the kid drop-off, the ping of a text about a busted dishwasher at Bar Volpe, a menu tweak for her Logan restaurant Fox & Flight. Somewhere in there she still finds time to stand in front of a pasta board, pink hair up, hands buried in flour, doing the thing that turned her into Boston’s unofficial lord of pasta.

Last week, the Michelin Guide finally turned its attention to Boston and dropped a neat little verdict on Akunowicz’s corner of Southie: two Bib Gourmands on one block, one for Fox & the Knife and one for Bar Volpe. On a few scruffy streets that not long ago were better known for shot-and-a-beer bars than saffron-laced soffritto, you can now wander from one Akunowicz dining room to another under that red handbook’s idea of “reasonable” and eat pasta that feels like it came straight out of Modena. South Boston did not just get a glow-up; it got a pasta district with her fingerprints all over it.

Chef Karen Akunowicz

Akunowicz did not start out as the obvious future of South Boston dining. She grew up in Kearny, New Jersey, with a mom who was a children’s librarian, in a house where books were as common as cereal bowls. “Growing up with a mom who was a children’s librarian meant that I lived in a world where stories were currency, imagination was encouraged, and reading was considered a kind of superpower,” she told me. Libraries were her safe place, and she spent hours inside stories about faraway places. Later, when she started cooking, she realized that food could feel like those books: rooted in tradition but always curious, always looking around the corner.

Like a lot of families, hers was “loving but imperfect.” They did not have money, but they had loyalty, and they had expectations that she would figure things out. She says she spent years feeling like she did not quite fit, until she stepped into a kitchen and felt something click. “Cooking became the place where I felt grounded and strong,” she said. “It was the first thing in my life that made sense, where I could channel emotion into something beautiful.”

Scallops in corn broth

Chef Karen Akunowicz Boston Michelin Guide Spaghetti at Fox & the Knife

The first mentors she found were on paper. She still keeps the same oil-stained copies of Sunday Suppers at Lucques, The French Laundry Cookbook, the Barbuto cookbook, Mozza, Chez Panisse Vegetables, and Bugiali on Pasta on a shelf next to her desk. Those books, she says, “taught me technique, restraint, curiosity, and reverence for ingredients,” long before she worked in the kind of kitchens that demand all four.

Spaghetti and clams

Tortellini

College brought her to the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and then to Boston, where she flirted with social work before admitting what she really wanted was the heat and structure of a professional kitchen. She went to the Cambridge School of Culinary Arts, then took the long road: local restaurants, a formative stint in Modena, Italy, and eventually a job that would put her on every Boston food nerd’s radar. At Myers + Chang, she became executive chef and partner, and in 2018 she walked onto the James Beard stage in Chicago and walked off as Best Chef: Northeast.

In the middle of all of this, there was TV. Top Chef: California, then Top Chef All-Stars L.A., then a turn on Guy Fieri’s Tournament of Champions. She showed up on screen as she is in real life: a queer femme with bold lipstick and bigger opinions, talking as much about her cooks and her community as about her own résumé. Visibility matters to her in a way that feels practical rather than performative; she knows exactly how many younger cooks were watching.

Her real statement, though, is what she built after she left Myers + Chang. In 2019 she opened Fox & the Knife, an enoteca inspired by her time in Modena, where handmade pastas, bright antipasti, and amaro are the core text. The place landed on national Best New Restaurant lists and became a James Beard finalist in its own right. Two years later she added Bar Volpe a few blocks away, a Southern Italian restaurant and pastificio that obsesses over wood-fired seafood and long, springy strands of pasta. Fox Pasta Co. followed, and then Fox & Flight in Terminal A at Logan, a way to eat serious pasta before a flight to anywhere else.

Truffle-roasted chicken

When the Michelin news came in, she did what a lot of chefs do in that moment: she cried. “To have one restaurant recognized is incredible, but to have both Fox & the Knife and Bar Volpe land Bib Gourmands on the same night felt like lightning striking twice,” she said. The restaurants feel different in the room, but she says they share DNA: “exceptional hospitality, and fantastic food we pour our souls into.” The recognition, she insists, did not change the mission so much as confirm it. “We’re still cooking the food we love, rooted in regional Italian traditions with a South Boston pulse.”

Sardinian culurgiones

Chocolate peanut butter semifreddo

Ask her what it means to represent Southie and she gets almost protective. The neighborhood, she says, took a chance on her twice: first with Fox & the Knife during a moment of renewal, then with Bar Volpe, which opened in a sprawling space in the middle of the pandemic. South Boston, in her telling, is “loyal, proud, scrappy, and full of heart,” and she talks about feeding the locals the way she would feed her own family.

These days, she is a James Beard winner, a Top Chef alum, and a mom, sharing life with her spouse LJ Johnson and their daughter, Rogue. She very deliberately calls herself a queer femme. That is not branding; it is a signal. “I want to build kitchens where people can show up fully as themselves,” she said. She did not always have that early in her career. Now, in the South Boston pasta universe she runs, she wants queer cooks, people of color, women, immigrants, everyone, to see leadership roles as theirs, not just the last stop after a lifetime on the line.

Akunowicz

The pasta brings in the reservations and the guidebooks bring in the tourists, but what she is really trying to engineer is a different kind of kitchen math. It looks like a line cook who can be out at work without bracing for the fallout. It looks like a young woman who can imagine owning the place instead of just closing it down every night. It looks like a parent who can make a Saturday service and still feel like they have a life on either side of it. If the next generation walks into one of her kitchens and assumes that kind of balance is normal, that will be the quiet win that outlasts any recognition.