Ana Sortun

The Climb

Training at La Varenne Ecole de Cuisine de Paris gave Ana Sortun a formal base before the line moved through Massachusetts kitchens and into ownership. The sequence is practical: schooling, service, repetition, then a restaurant body of work built in public. In her case, the measure of that progression is not rhetoric but continuity across roles. Massachusetts kitchens marked the next stretch of the work, with chef posts at Argo Bistro, 8 Holyoke in Harvard Square, and Casablanca in Harvard Square. Those rooms put technique under pressure and gave the cooking a local framework. The thread through them is less about reinvention than accumulation—each kitchen adding another layer to the same disciplined vocabulary. By the time Oleana, Sofra Bakery and Café, and Sarma entered the picture, the structure had expanded without losing its center. Sortun’s career moved from one room to three, with Cambridge and Somerville as the ground beneath it. That kind of growth reads as restaurant building, not brand drift: each project extending the same point of view into a different format.

Today

At Oleana in Cambridge, Massachusetts, since 2001, the work has had a long enough run to define a standard. Ana Sortun has described the intent plainly: "The vision was to introduce Boston and the area to a broader sense of Mediterranean cooking." That line is the useful one, because it names the scope of the cuisine and the regional audience it was built for. The restaurant’s value lies in that clarity of aim. Sofra Bakery and Café, added in 2008, extended the same discipline into a second Cambridge operation. The move widened the field from one dining room to a bakery-café setting, while keeping the same local center of gravity. It shows a way of working that can scale by format without flattening the underlying approach. Since 2013, Sarma in Somerville, Massachusetts, has completed the picture with a third ownership role. Across Oleana, Sofra Bakery and Café, and Sarma, the throughline is neighborhood-based restaurant making with Mediterranean cooking at its core. The map is tight, but the body of work is broad.

In Their Words “To me, home is about being deeply connected to a sense of place. So, being really connected to land, through food, makes sense in my heart.” “The vision was to introduce Boston and the area to a broader sense of Mediterranean cooking.”