Trisha Perez Kennealy

The Path

Business training and culinary schooling sit at the center of Trisha Perez Kennealy’s work, and the two disciplines show up clearly in how Inn at Hastings Park is run. Harvard Business School and Le Cordon Bleu Culinary School in London gave her two modes of thinking to work with: one built on analysis and structure, the other on technique and craft. That combination later carried through commercial banking at New York in New York and investment banking, before she brought both sets of skills into hospitality. The useful part of that background is not abstraction; it is how it translates into practice. Financial discipline, culinary training, and hospitality management all remain in play in the way Trisha Perez Kennealy approaches her role as founder and owner of Inn at Hastings Park in Lexington, Massachusetts, a position she has held since 2010.

The Work Today

At Inn at Hastings Park, Trisha Perez Kennealy works as both owner and culinary educator, and the pairing defines the property’s tone. Leadership and teaching are not separate lanes in her model; they operate together. That is what gives the work its structure: oversight from the owner’s side, and instruction from the educator’s side, each strengthening the other. Culinary education sits at the core of her philosophy. Trisha Perez Kennealy treats foundational cooking as practical knowledge, not extra credit, with an emphasis on basics that can be used again and again. Her focus on chicken soup and chicken stock points to a larger trade principle: the most durable kitchen skills are the ones that build range from simple methods. The teaching is direct, useful, and built to travel beyond one service or one menu.

Signature

Trisha's signature dishes include mofongo and matzo ball soup. Together, they point to a kitchen language shaped by Puerto Rican and Jewish home-cooking traditions, with each dish carrying its own texture, memory, and cultural weight. The pairing reflects a cook who works comfortably across lineages without flattening them, letting each dish stand in its own register while still speaking to the same table.

In Their Words “I am a big believer that everyone should know how to make chicken soup, because it’s the base; chicken stock can be used to do so many different things.”