Cassie Piuma

Training at Johnson & Wales University set the base for Cassie Piuma’s work, but the kitchens that followed did the heavier lifting. At Al Forno in Providence, Rhode Island, she began as a cook and started building the discipline that production kitchens demand. The same held at The Butcher Shop in Boston, Massachusetts, and at Sel de la Terre in Boston, Massachusetts, where repetition, pace, and standards shape a cook as much as any classroom.

Head Chef work at Oleana in Cambridge, Massachusetts until 2013 marked a clear step up in responsibility. In that role, Piuma had to carry the full weight of the line: timing, judgment, and the ability to keep a kitchen coherent under pressure. The title mattered, but the craft behind it mattered more. Since 2013, she has been chef and co-owner of Sarma in Somerville, Massachusetts. That long run has turned the job into something larger than a post: a place where technique, menu building, and day-to-day consistency have to stay in balance. Her career reads as accumulation, not reset—one kitchen after another, each adding a layer to the work.

Meze gives a useful frame for Cassie Piuma’s cooking, and she says so plainly: “This Beard House dinner is inspired by the small plates, or meze, of the Eastern Mediterranean region, but I've incorporated some new flavor combinations and a fresh perspective to the menu.” The structure is clear. The source is clear. The intervention is clear. That kind of menu thinking depends on knowing what to keep intact and where to shift the register.

At Sarma, that approach holds together through contrast rather than decoration. Tradition is present, but it is not treated as fixed copy. New combinations enter without breaking the reference point, which is exactly the kind of calibration a chef needs when working from regional forms while still making the food her own.

Cassie Piuma’s signature dishes include crab and red lentil kibbeh and Brussels Sprout Bravas. The pairing says a lot about range: one dish works through structure and layering, the other through a sharper, more direct push of flavor. Taken together, they point to a kitchen that can move between restraint and assertiveness without losing its footing.