IS Chef Boyardee a real person?
yes….He was indeed a real person, born Hector Boiardi in northern Italy in 1898. Young Hector was a culinary savant who reportedly worked in restaurant kitchens at the tender age of eleven before immigrating to America and joining his brother in New York at age seventeen. His brother’s employment as a waiter at the prestigious Plaza Hotel helped gain young Hector entrée to the Plaza’s kitchen, and over the next several years Boiardi whipped up his creations for renowned hotel kitchens New York, West Virginia, and finally Cleveland, where he opened his own restaurant, Il Giardino d’Italia. Boiardi’s spaghetti sauce soon became famous throughout Cleveland, and his restaurant patrons began asking him for extra portions of sauce to take home with them, which he doled out in milk bottles. Demand for his spaghetti sauce grew so large that he started producing it in an adjacent loft and selling it with dry pasta and packets of his special cheese. Hector Boiardi later plunged into full-time
