Rita Sodi and Jody Williams grew up thousands of miles apart, but fittingly, food is what ultimately brought both of them to New York City, where they first crossed paths. “We’re totally different, but we just have this bond in cooking,” Williams tells Observer from the duo’s Spazio Creativo storefront in the West Village. “When it comes to work and design and just the grit, we want to learn everything.”

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For Williams, that learning experience began in a career as a self-taught chef in California, before relocating to New York City and later, spending several years learning how to perfect Italian food right from the source, in Rome. Meanwhile, Sodi, who grew up surrounded by her mother’s Italian cooking in Florence, took a less traditional path to becoming a chef. Sodi was in fashion until she was 45 years old; more specifically, she worked in product development for Calvin Klein jeans. “I was traveling everywhere for work—Europe, Asia, Australia—and I started to miss the food I grew up with that was so important and meaningful for me.” Having traveled to New York City regularly for work, Sodi decided to follow her passion and move to the West Village to open her own restaurant. “I was not thinking about how difficult it was, but it was very hard to be in a new city, new language, never having had a restaurant before.” Not letting that deter her, Sodi opened her namesake restaurant I Sodi in 2008, and it was the authentic Tuscan cooking that first got Williams’ attention.

“My friends kept saying, ‘you have to eat in this restaurant,’ and I’m working all the time at a restaurant........

© Observer