Top Chefs | 2022: Amanda Cifaldi | Pomodori Restaurant

Article by Barry Kaufman | Photography by Rob Kaufman | Hilton Head Monthly Magazine | Mar 2022

For the last 10 years, Chef Amanda Cifaldi has led her restaurant Pomodori with a commitment to authentic ingredients and an irrepressible enthusiasm for food that comes through in every bite.

“The fun part of food is that it’s different every time you do it. Even if you’re cooking the same thing, it’s always new,” she said. “I truly believe that I show my love through my food. It’s how I care for people.”

It’s how she would care for her community as a kid, bringing her mom’s casseroles to the neighbors in celebration and in sympathy. “It really instilled in my that food is the conduit to caring for somebody.”

That love of cooking brought here to Calabria’s famed Italian Culinary Institute, where she and a dozen classmates lived, breathed, slept and ate the region’s culinary heritage.

“It was full immersion. You lived at the school, then went right to the market and cooked what you brought back,” she said. “Being Italian myself, it was important to get that authentic experience.”

She returned to her native U.S. having been trained in some of the most celebrated techniques in Mediterranean cooking, a foundation that informs her natural love of food and insatiable yen for life. And that lifetime of passion and experience comes through in every dish at Pomodori.