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WHO ARE WE?

We’re passionate about better food! Nantucket Wild Gourmet & Smokehouse was founded by two wild foodies: one a Master Private Chef to the most discriminating palates, and the other a world renowned professor, both part of the Slow Food movement, which seeks to preserve our natural resources and inform the concerned consumer.

PETER O’DONOVAN

Chef Peter O’Donovan is passionate about better food. Early in his career, he developed the philosophy that all great food starts with the finest from nature. So when he couldn’t find smoked seafood that really blew him away, he decided to make it himself. That is how Nantucket Wild Gourmet & Smokehouse was born.

A native of West Cork Ireland, Peter has worked as Private Chef to some of the most discriminating palates in New England and Palm Beach. He trained at the prestigious Ballymaloe Cookery School in Ireland, Peter Kumps Cooking School in New York City (now the Institute of Culinary Education), and Tante Marie’s Cooking School in San Francisco, among others. He has mastered the traditional Irish/Scottish art of slowly, cold-smoking seafood working with Sally Barnes of Woodcock Smokery in Ireland, winner of many awards including two highly coveted Gold Medals in the 2006 Great Taste Awards given by the Guild of Fine Food Retailers in the United Kingdom.

Peter is also an ardent believer in the Slow Food movement, which links pleasure and food with awareness and responsibility, protects cultural identities tied to food and gastronomic traditions, safeguards cultivation and processing techniques inherited from those traditions, and seeks to preserve our natural resources and educate the concerned consumer.

MARCO PROTANO

Marco too shares Peter’s passion for better eating as well as building a business to share that passion with others. He’s spent his entire twenty year career in strategic marketing anticipating and satisfying customers needs and desires. He’s worked on three continents and built businesses in a variety of sectors including financial services, consumer packaged goods (yes, he was a Cookie Man at Nabisco on SnackWell’s) consumer electronics and E-commerce. He’s worked for both large multi-nationals to entrepreneurial ventures, including now Nantucket Wild Gourmet & Smokehouse.

What Marco is most proud of professionally is his fifteen-years of teaching and coaching at a host of universities from New York, Boston, Europe and Asia. As judged by the students’ top ranked evaluations, he successfully stimulated new generations of managers to the passion and power of both strategy and marketing at the undergraduate, graduate and executive levels. This business is devoted to future students who will benefit from his continued practical education in the marketplace.

Marco completed his own academic training at the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business where he graduated with top honors studying for his MBA. He earned his Bachelor’s degree in business Summa cum Laude from Northeastern University.

Convinced that better smoked seafood didn’t exist in the market, in 2005 he collaborated with Chef Peter O’Donovan to learn the art and science of smoking and became a member of the Slow Food movement. Marco and Chef Peter co-founded Nantucket Wild Gourmet & Smokehouse in 2006 putting into practice their strong commitment to providing better-for-you luxurious edibles—the way food was meant to be.