Remembering All Kovalencik

Chef, photographer, gentle and kind, and an exceptional human being

I saw a posting on Facebook yesterday that made my heart stop for a minute as I felt another tear in the fabric of our island community. I started reading all the comments on the post – over a hundred – when it struck me that it must be true. All was gone.

All Kovalencik was an extraordinary human being. Kind, gentle, thoughtful, and an exceptional chef. If you ran into him on the street, or sitting on the bench in front of The Company of the Cauldron which he owned for many years, you left feeling better as you walked away after a few minutes in conversation with him.

All came to the island in 1971, and like so many others of his generation found a community of like-minded people on the quiet little spit of sand that used to be Nantucket.

He was a chef of the old school; no formal training. He had a gift for it and an urge to explore culinary possibilities. At some point he just ended up behind the grill, flipping eggs at the island’s greasy spoon, The Sandpiper, on Main Street. Long gone, today that building is a real estate office.

He made his way through kitchens around the island, from the old Roadhouse (now the Faregrounds) when Frank Conroy had it, to the Club Car kitchen when Michael Shannon was the chef, and ultimately to the Cauldron, which was at its finest when he and his wife Andrea owned it.

Dinner at the Cauldron was always a treat. It didn’t matter what the prix fixe menu was, with All running the kitchen, you knew the food would be delicious.

In 2016, he was filmed at The Cauldron for a short film on scalloping made by my husband, filmmaker John Stanton, and called “The Last Bay Scallop?” Here is a short clip from that 30-minute film that features All talking about and cooking up a mess of scallops. It’s how I’ll remember him. Click here to view this three-minute clip.

Today was All’s birthday. He would have been 74.