Meet Chef Ed Rome, the New Power Behind the Stove at Rivers

“When I was 7, I baked a cake,” Rome recalled on a recent Friday afternoon. “I really enjoyed it, and after that, I decided I wanted to be a chef.” Today, he is living out that childhood ambition in the Kraft Dining Hall kitchen, having joined Rivers over the summer. As executive chef, he oversees lunch menus and meals for the on-campus community throughout the week, as well as countless catered events throughout the year. A couple of weeks into the school year, we caught up with Rome to chat about his new role, his approach, his path to Rivers, and his plans for campus dining going forward. 

After baking that seminal first cake, he said, other formative experiences followed: Rome’s mother taught him to make hollandaise sauce when he was 9; at 15, he held his first restaurant job, at a Howard Johnson’s on the Mass Pike. Following high school, he earned a bachelor’s degree in food-service management and an associate’s degree in culinary arts from Johnson and Wales University in Providence. He worked at various restaurants in Providence, including the storied Capriccio, and then, pursuing what he called a “lifelong dream,” he opened his own restaurant—a New York–style deli in his hometown of Natick. 

The restaurant business can be tough and capricious—and as if that weren’t enough, Rome was also running a hot-sauce business at the same time, garnering six “Scovies,” the Oscars of hot sauce, for his specialty products. After two years, Rome decided he’d had enough of being a restaurateur and took a food-service job at the College of the Holy Cross. 

He spent 23 years there, starting as banquet chef and making his way up the ladder, eventually serving as interim director of food service. But being director, he says, was “not my cup of tea”: too much bureaucracy, too little cooking. When he heard about the opening at Rivers, he jumped at the opportunity.

Compared to providing three meals a day, seven days a week for a residential population, overseeing only lunch and catering is a piece of cake, as it were. But Rome is cognizant of having “big spoons to fill,” as Head of School Ryan Dahlem put it at a start-of-school gathering: His predecessor, Chef Michael Clancy, was a high-profile and pivotal member of the community whose food was enjoyed by all. And for now, Rome is working from the Clancy playbook, an approach facilitated by the fact that Chef Clancy left behind a school year’s worth of menus. 

“My plan was not to reinvent the wheel,” says Rome. “Mike Clancy did a fabulous job, and everyone loved what he was doing. The bar was set pretty high.” Rome had the opportunity to work alongside Chef Clancy for a month over the summer, and, he says, “It was invaluable. It gave me a fantastic introduction to the job and a chance to pick his brains.”

That’s not to say, however, that Chef Rome won’t be putting his own stamp on things. Taco day may be reimagined as burrito bowl day; Nashville hot chicken could take the place of ordinary chicken fingers. In addition to being a hot-sauce enthusiast, Rome is the kind of “huge barbecue fan” who owns several grills and smokers, so the community might expect to see some ’cue on future menus. But overall, he says, the changes to Rivers’ food service will be subtle and gradual. 

Like his predecessor, Chef Rome plans to serve a mix of the familiar and the novel, citing poke bowls and queso birria tacos as potential future menu items. Korean beef bulgogi and Moroccan spiced chicken have made recent lunchtime appearances. Rome will also continue the tradition of making meals that reflect the diversity of our community, such as the recent Rosh Hashanah lunch celebrating the Jewish new year.

He is mindful, too, that he’s serving a clientele with a wide variety of tastes and a range of experience. “You have to accommodate all palates, and that’s a big challenge,” says Rome, adding that he also needs to take special dietary requirements and food allergies into consideration. “I want to be sure that those students have food that’s just as fun and exciting as everyone else’s.”

At the start-of-school meeting where new faculty and staff were introduced, Rome was pleased, but not really surprised, to receive the biggest round of applause. He understands the importance and visibility of his role, which touches every person on campus: “The chef,” he says, “is always the most popular person at the party.”