Cheryl Henry, The Business Woman of Food
One of my fondest memories is of when grandmother decided that I had earned the right to roll the cavatelli. My hands were so small, it took every finger I had to get them to roll.
Cheryl Henry ’96 says her love of food and cooking came from her grandmother, Vita Antoinette Puopolo Ricardo.
“All my memories of her take place in a kitchen,” she says. “She came to the United States from Italy as a child speaking no English. She became a from-scratch cook, and the way she communicated with people was through her food.”
When Henry was a child growing up in Medford, her grandparents bought a small home in New Hampshire and her grandmother, she says, “transformed its unfinished basement—with cold, cement floors and walls, and a tiny wood-burning stove in the corner—into a pasta-making factory. That is where she taught me how to make pasta. She had two sawhorses that she stole from my grandfather, a piece of plywood she would lay across the top, and she would spread out her flour and, together, we would roll out our pasta dough with a sawed-off broom handle. And when we were finished, we would hang it on a wooden clothes rack to dry.”
Today, Henry is president and COO of Ruth’s Hospitality Group, a fine-dining company with more than 150 Ruth’s Chris Steak House restaurants worldwide. “I oversee everything to do with food,” she says, adding that she also runs the real estate division, HR, brand marketing and IT.
But she hasn’t forgotten where she came from. Her grandmother, she says, cooked not for herself, “but to bring joy to every person who sat around her table. And when I walk into our restaurants to this day, whether I’m in the front of the house, or in the heart of the house in the kitchen, I look for that glimpse of Vita Antoinette Puopolo Ricardo.”—SC