Meet the Chef: Kenneth Pulomena of Morgans Fish House

When Westchester Magazine's readers and editors chose Rye's Morgans Fish House as the best seafood restaurant in Westchester County over Peter Kelly's famed X20 Xaviars on the Hudson on the Yonkers waterfront this year, it was a culinary upset of major proportions.

But to those who know Morgans' chef Kenneth Pulomena, 58, the selection was recognition that was long overdue because "Chef Kenny" has worked long and hard to earn his cooking chops.

Pulomena was almost born in a restaurant kitchen, literally and figuratively, and he definitely can stand the heat because he has more than paid his dues to be at home on almost any kind of range.

His culinary journey to date has taken him from the Oyster Bar to the Waldorf to the Plaza, and from culinary school to the Yankee Stadium Diamond Club to the Caribbean with stop offs at several of Manhattan's most popular seafood restaurants, places like Docks, Clancy's, Timothy's and the Blue Water Grill, during what he calls "my life with the fishes."

All those stops led him to Morgans several months ago, where he overhauled the menu, popularizing the offerings so they could go upscale or downscale. The new menu includes lots of meat dishes that get along swimmingly with the seafood choices. Each dish shows that special Pulomena touch, from Louisana catfish to BBQ pulled pork, lobster rolls to Philly cheesesteaks and filet mignon.

That touch comes from growing up around restaurants in a family with a genuine love for food.

"My father, Salvator, from Calabria in Italy, owned several Italian restaurants in and around Bayside, Queens, including pizzerias, and when my mom was about to give birth to me, dad looked around the restaurant he was in that night, La Capri, saw there was a full house, and told my mom she had to hold off until we closed the dining room," Pulomena said. "So, I waited, and my mom somehow held out until closing, so you might say I was almost born into the restaurant business from day one."

Pulomena's restaurant career has spanned about 25 years. It has taken him from his father's pizzerias ("a pizza maker named Luigi taught me how to make my first pizza when I was ten, and by then I had already been washing dishes and been around chefs in the kitchen since I was five.") to baseball stadiums hustling for the Harry Stevens Corporation of food vendors as a teenager, a formative stage in his career.

"I was 14, and I remember being a scared kid walking into Shea Stadium looking for a job in the Stevens' kitchen operation, thinking I don't know how fate is going to handle this, but I know this is what I want to do with my life, work in kitchens, become a chef, I don't know how that is going to happen, but that is what I want to happen," he remembered.

"Those were less pampered times, less politically correct times. Nobody looked too closely at my being old enough for working papers or not. If I wanted to wash dishes and learn about the kitchen from the ground up, that was fine," Pulomena said. "Up until then I had been in the best of hands, my dad's and the chefs in his restaurants. Now I was going outside the family."

So he got rough hands from scrubbing dishes, pots, pans and he grilled hot dogs and flipped burgers and saved enough money to go to culinary school, not the fancy Culinary Institute of America (CIA) in Hyde Park or Manhattan's French Culinary Institute, but "a great, underrated culinary school, the State University of Cobleskill in Oneonta near Albany," he recalled.

When he graduated, he was ready to work in the more prestigious Stevens dining rooms at major league ballparks, with the Mets at Shea Stadium in the late 1960s and the Yankees in the Diamond Club as a sous chef in the early 1970s.

"No real money, but lots of experience," he said.

That experience led to several years working at the Oyster Bar in the lower level of Grand Central Station. From there he was on the right track towards more important roles in more prestigious kitchens at the Waldorf-Astoria and Plaza hotels. Next came still more experience handling seafood kitchens uptown (Docks on 84th St. and Broadway), downtown (Clancy's on 10th St. and Seventh Ave.) and cross-town (Timothy's on Lexington Ave. and 29th St.). He did some restaurant consulting, even found time to kick back from New York City with culinary stints in Bologna, Italy with his wife, Barbara. They also did a two-year stint in the islands at the Grand Cas Rainbow in St. Martin, which added Dutch and French accents to his cooking style. He then returned to a different kind of island—Lynbrook, Long Island—to work at the Sanibel Chophouse before moving on to Manhattan's Blue Water.

Around May 2009, Morgans Fish House was looking to make a change from a more austere, upscale seafood restaurant to something more casual and family-friendly. It also wanted to change its menu to include more meat dishes and add variety to its seafood selections, so that the more expensive dishes could be balanced by the relatively inexpensive.

Pulomena was looking for a change in venue, and had heard good things about Rye via the culinary grapevine. The word was out that Morgans was looking for a new chef so Chef Kenny came to Morgans and arranged to cook a meal for the brass.

"From the first dish, we knew Chef Kenny was right for us," said Lisa McKiernan, a managing partner in the Pearl Restaurant Group, which owns Morgans. "A lot of chefs have experience, but Chef Kenny had the wide variety if experience that made him just right for us and what we were trying to do, which is serve great food with zero pretence in a neighborhood atmosphere. We knew he got that from the moment he walked in the door. Besides that, he's a great guy, ultra-talented, well-organized and a hard worker."

"Chef Kenny has such a positive, can do attitude," said Jan Fabry, another managing partner in the Pearl Restaurant Group. "He has a well-earned confidence and exudes an aura of being able to handle anything and everything that can happen in a kitchen, and that only comes from the experience and know how that he brings to Morgans. He strives to make every dining experience a great one."

Pulomena is usually one of the first to arrive at Morgans on 22 Elm Place, starting his work day anywhere from 7:30 to 8 a.m., mapping out meals on a menu that features such dishes as Portuguese fisherman's stew, sautéed Gulf shrimp, filet mignon with lobster and mashed potatoes, sliders, and a wide variety of daily specials depending on the catch of the day. He churns out lunch and dinner Monday to Saturday and brunch and dinner on Sundays. In his rare down time, he enjoys golf and swimming, living in Bayside, playing with his cat, Sweetie, and Labrador, Bosco, and taking long walks with his wife.

"I'm truly blessed because I love being in a kitchen and cooking." Pulomena said. "I bet on fate when I was that scared kid walking into Stevens' at Shea Stadium, and I've pretty much walked the whole road to get here to Rye, where, knock on wood, everything seems to be working out."

For more information, contact Morgans Fish House: 914-921-8190; morgansfishhouse.net.