Jeff Pond

Boston Talks

**Jeff Pond** didn’t initially set out for a life in culinary arts; it’s more like the culinary arts chose him. Before moving to Boston in 2000, he was working at a local steakhouse in Westport, CT to make some money, while studying Marriage and Family Therapy at Fairfield University. But after this initial stint in the restaurant industry, Jeff decided to see what a life in the kitchen had to offer. Following a year-long certification program at the Cambridge School of Culinary Arts, Jeff joined the kitchen at Barbara Lynch’s No. 9 Park. For the next several years, Jeff traveled the world as a private chef and then worked his way from bread baker (where the sourdough starter for his Area Four/A4 Pizza dough was born) to Chef de Cuisine at Tomasso Trattoria in Southborough, MA. In the fall of 2008, Jeff joined co-owner Michael Krupp as Chef de Cuisine to open The Achilles Project/Persephone. After the concept came to a close, Jeff joined chef Michael Leviton as Chef de Cuisine at Lumiere before opening Area Four and becoming partner as the team opened A4 Pizza in Somerville, which sadly closed due to a fire connected to the building in 2015. Jeff is currently overseeing the expansion of Area Four through its mobile pizza oven and new locations in the South End in Boston and Central Square in Cambridge, opening in fall 2016.