O’Neill, Molly

Molly O’Neill (1953–) was born and grew up in Columbus, Ohio. She began cooking as a child, with her mother and her five younger brothers. She graduated from Denison University in 1975 and moved to Massachusetts, where she was hired by Ciro Cozzi of Ciro & Sal’s, an Italian restaurant in Provincetown, on Cape Cod. The restaurant catered to the artists, writers, and tourists who flocked to the cape during the summer; it was closed in the winter. In January 1977 O’Neill attended a six-week program at La Varenne, the Paris cooking school founded by Anne Willan. She returned to Paris the following winter to take classes at the school run by the renowned pastry chef Gaston Lenôtre. When O’Neill returned to Provincetown, Cozzi asked her to take over as chef at Flagship, a second restaurant he’d opened there, but she opted to become the pastry chef instead. In 1979Molly O’Neill became executive chef at Ciro, an upscale Italian restaurant Ciro Cozzi had opened in Boston’s Back Bay.