The Grave of Chef Boyardee

In the middle of All Souls Cemetery rests one of the most iconic creators of food that we see every day on our grocery store shelves: Ettore “Hector” Boiardi, also known as Chef Boyardee.

Boiardi started training in restaurants at the age of 11 in Italy, then migrated to France, then England, then finally the United States when he was 16, all the while learning more about cooking as he went. He followed his brother into the kitchen at the Plaza Hotel in New York City where he worked his way up to become the head chef. After some time there, he moved to Cleveland, Ohio, where he became the head chef of Hotel Winton where he introduced a new menu featuring Italian cuisine.

After some years there, he decided to open his own restaurant in Cleveland named Il Giardino d’Italia (The Garden of Italy). People would ask to be able to take home his sauce or for his recipe, and he would sell his sauce in washed-out milk bottles until his fateful encounter with some of his guests who would help him to can and sell it at their market. He changed his label to read Boyardee so that people would know how to pronounce his name. It became the start of what would become a huge name in the food industry that we know and love today.

During WWII, he was asked to make rations and they became an essential part of the soldier’s rations throughout the war. Due to this, he kept his plant in Milton, PA running 24 hours a day. When they weren’t busy with production, Chef Boyardee employees would march through the streets of Milton during patriotic parades waving banners that read “Keep ‘em flying! Keep ‘em rolling! Keep ‘em well-fed!” Due to his efforts, Boiardi was awarded the highest honor a civilian can receive: the Gold Star. After the war, in order to take care of all of the extra employees that had been hired during the war effort, he decided to sell the company so that they could still keep working.

For the rest of his life, he continued to appear in television ads until 1979 and created new recipes until his death in 1985.