Trisha Pérez Kennealy, Culinary Arts & Community Building

 

92-154. Trisha Pérez Kennealy

SPEAKERS

Will Bachman, Trisha Pérez Kennealy,

 

Will Bachman  00:02

Hello and welcome to The 92 report conversations with members of the Harvard and Radcliffe class of 1992 I’m your host. Will Bachman, and I’m delighted to be here today with Trisha Pérez. Kennealy, Trisha, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me so Trisha, tell me about your journey since graduating from Harvard.

 

Trisha Pérez Kennealy  00:24

Since graduating from Harvard, I did an initial stint in New York working in commercial banking, then I came back to HBS with a bunch of our classmates, and then spent a little time working in investment banking before actually going and studying to become a chef at Le Cordon Bleu in London. I lived in London for three years, between 2002 1003 and then I returned to the United States and moved to Lexington, which is where I had gone to high school. I had one daughter while we were living in England. Had two sons when I not at the same time, had my first son in 2004 another son in 2006 and while the kids were little, was very active as a town meeting member. I was elected town official. I was very active, volunteering in a variety of different capacities, not only in Lexington, but at the state level, advocating for public education. And then in 2010 I saw a property that was available for sale in Lexington, just a few feet from the battle green, where the American Revolution started, and I embarked on a crazy journey to buy the property and convert it into we call it an inn, but it’s more of a luxury hotel, 22 guest room hotel with a restaurant, and the process between zoning and renovation took three years. We opened in 2014 we’ve now been open since then, and since that time, we’ve become part of relay and chateau, which is a hotel organization, marketing organization that’s based in France, with members over 550 members around the world. We’ve received four stars from Forbes. We just recently, in the last two years, have received Michelin keys, which are the hotel equivalent to the Michelin stars in the restaurant business. And so I spend my time working on running a hotel in a restaurant.

 

Will Bachman  02:37

What an amazing journey, if we draw a straight line from commercial banking to HBS to investment banking. It doesn’t necessarily, if we just draw a straight line, doesn’t necessarily lead to running the end. What’s let’s tell us a little bit more about this. I mean, there’s so many areas here we need to dive into.

 

Trisha Pérez Kennealy  02:57

So I think I always knew, I think some of our classmates might remember, I grew up in Puerto Rico and moved to Lexington when I was 12. Father had his own business, so I always felt that I was going to be an entrepreneur. You know, I ran city step when we were undergrads, the dance and theater program for Cambridge City school kids, and I ran it. I was a teacher as a first year, and then was a director for the remainder of our time at Harvard. And that was a pretty entrepreneurial endeavor, right, running an organization that between the kids and the teachers. There was 150 people that we were responsible for creating, you know, musical theater, a musical not musical theater, but a music and dance production. And so that was actually a really good experience. And I, as an undergrad, admired, I was the senior class gift chair, and I got to know some pretty amazing alms in that capacity. And I recognized that a lot of the people that were really moving the needle in terms of some pretty important issues. Public Service wise, had had successful business careers, and then they sort of, you know, did their work. You know, their volunteer work was a compliment to that, and they use the skills that they developed to do that. So I was very purposeful in, you know, being a commercial banker and then an investment banker, because I felt that if I learned about that side of the business, right, the financing side of the business, that it would be a tremendous asset to any entrepreneurial endeavor that I wanted to take on. The other thing was, is that I always love to cook. And I, you know, living only like 15 miles from campus, I used to take people to my parents house all the time and cook for them. And fast forward, living in New York, I was always cooking dinner and having people over to my apartment, whether it was in Hoboken or in Manhattan. And I felt pretty strongly. About teaching people how to cook. And the primary motivation behind going to Le Cordon Bleu is that I still continue that passion, and I’m still working on some different concepts to really teach people about the power of food, about the importance that it plays in our lives. You know, most importantly nutrition, it’s sustenance, and I am a firm believer that food is medicine, but also because it’s such an amazing tool to bring people together, whether it’s personally with your family, whatever your family construct is, whether it’s professionally, whether it’s diplomacy, breaking bread together is the ultimate in creating community. And so when people are like, Oh, banking, how does that relate? I learned some very significant skills. But the other thing is, is that I was always in a very forward facing role, both in banking and investment banking, commercial and investment banking. And at the end of the day, those service skills, right? Are really, really important to hospitality. People think that the only reason people come to hotels is to celebrate happy occasions. They come for a whole variety of reasons. And I actually do a lot of we have a lot of corporate clients, because where we’re located happens to be the epicenter of biotech. So we do a lot of corporate work. We do a lot of work with some of the local schools, colleges, universities, who are, you know, reaching out to alums or holding events. But then we also have had the benefit and the pleasure of welcoming guests since we opened from all 50 states and over 50 countries, wow.

 

Will Bachman  06:43

How did you get interested and win in cooking? It sounds like in college it was already a thing for you. High school, junior high, when did you start cooking?

 

Trisha Pérez Kennealy  06:53

Earlier than that? I’ve always loved food. My parents say that they have very vivid memories, and I actually remember this dinner, which is kind of strange, because I was really little. My dad is Puerto Rican, but my parents met and were first married in in New York, in the city, and we got transferred to Puerto Rico, and we were staying in the hotel, in a hotel. The hotel is now the Sonesta on the beach in Isla be and I vividly remember ordering a steak, a baked potato with butter and sour cream. I was three, so I’ve always loved food. My I was very, very lucky to have not only family members that like to cook, but also we grew up in a very close knit neighborhood. I lived in a cul de sac in the neighborhood’s called de remanzo. It’s in a park. It’s in FiO piedras, which is right, you know, it’s in the metropolitan San Juan area. And it basically was kids coming in and out of each other’s houses all the time. And my best friend in my neighborhood, she was a very picky eater, and her parents always felt that maybe she would eat better if I ate with them. I think I would eat like lunch there, and then I would go home and eat lunch at my house. But evie’s parents were very, very good parents very good cooks as well. So I kind of always grew up around food, and I’ve always, I’ve always loved cooking, so

 

Will Bachman  08:20

like in junior high or high school, what might have you been cooking for your family? Like, what would some dishes be that you had been cooking at that

 

Trisha Pérez Kennealy  08:27

time? I mean, I was always baking. So, I mean, I made, and still make a mean chocolate chip cookie, which was invented in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. There you go. Cute, fact, but it was always, I mean, from the beginning, I was very comfortable with the grill. I was very comfortable grilling steaks and, you know, all sorts of things there. I love chicken, so I was always like roasting chicken and vegetables. I made a mean eggplant parmesan. It really just very comfortable cooking whatever sort of struck my fancy.

 

Will Bachman  09:03

Okay, so Cordon Bleu did not just come as sort of some sudden inspiration, but it’s a deep seated interest of yours. Tell us about what was that like leaving the investment banking world and going to three years of professional chef training. What? What did you, you know, know differently about the world at the end of that training that you didn’t know going in?

 

Trisha Pérez Kennealy  09:26

So I think one thing that’s really interesting is, so it was a year and a half, I did Petri and cuisine, but I did, if you do it full time, you could do it in nine months. But i When my daughter was six months old, so I did it. I worked for a year in banking in England, and then I left to go to Le Cordon Bleu. So what’s really interesting about French culinary training is, I think everyone thinks that all I that, then that means that all I do is French food. But the way the curriculum is set up at Le Cordon Bleu is, you, they use, they use. All of the different culinary traditions of the different regions in France, to teach all of the different culinary techniques. So your training is very technical. And what that means, which is actually a good thing, is that you can take that technique and apply it to any cuisine, like I feel very comfortable looking at a recipe, or I could be traveling throughout the world, and I can look at something, and I can pretty much break down. I’m like, Okay, this is how they did it. Like, I’m pretty comfortable with that. And the most important thing that I probably have taken away from my training is find the best ingredients that you can find and do absolutely as little as possible to them, and so I am very passionate about agriculture. I love farms. I love my farmers, and I wish that more people would spend time getting to know their farmers. And surprisingly, you know, I’m in the outskirts of Boston and Lexington. There are five working farms in the town that I live in now. Probably the most important things I took away was the importance of technique. And little bit of technique goes a very long way. And really being picky and really understand the caliber of your products. I’m just trying my phone. I want I don’t want my computer to die at you. We don’t

 

Speaker 1  11:20

want the computer. I know this is like podcast, very Tay, here we’re we’re plugging in the computer. So after we get plugged in, tell me about the in and the name of the inn and what the experience would be of staying there. And I’d love to specifically hear about the menu. All

 

Trisha Pérez Kennealy  11:45

right, so the inn is comprised of three buildings, and as I said, it’s called an inn because I felt that that was really important to pay tribute to that style like inns were very important in the history of the United States, inns and taverns, these were meant to be places where community members can not only community members, but they were crossroads. Right? People were traveling from one place to another. So there’s 22 guest rooms at the end. Each of the rooms is individually decorated, and all of our design esthetic celebrates American design. So we have, you know, the products, a lot of the products are sourced here in the New England area. We have wallpapers that were printed in Western Massachusetts, light like sconces and other lighting fixtures that were made in Connecticut, blankets that remain in Maine. All of our linens are beautiful, like the sheets, the beautiful linens on the bed, our bath towels are made by a company called matouk. That’s, you know, based here in Massachusetts, right? So really trying to celebrate that tradition, you know that American people have been manufacturing all sorts of design products here for centuries, right? Basically, since they arrived here on the shores of the United States, the experience is very high touch. I used to joke around that it was kind of like cheers that we know your name, but we do, we do, do a little bit more than just sit at the bar with cliffy and Normie at the bar. So it’s a very high touch experience. It’s very it is luxurious, right? So, and then we what’s a little bit different. Everyone’s like, Oh, how’s the BNB? I’m like, I don’t run a BNB. I run a hotel. So it, you know, there’s someone on property. 24/7, you know, we’re competing. In the luxury market. So I have a full, you know, I have an executive chef. I have a full, you know, general manager and these and my staff is incredibly well trained. My general manager went to hotel school at La Roche. She studied, she was at their campus in Marbella. My sales manager train, you know, my general manager was like at the Intercontinental. She was on the opening team the Newberry, which is a beautiful hotel here in Boston. My rooms manager worked, you know, Weston Marriott for years. My sales manager came through the Ritz. So we really have a team that understands luxury hospitality in terms of the restaurant. We serve breakfast, lunch and dinner, which is a little bit different, right? That’s a lot. Most restaurants serve one meal service so and we also do a lot of weddings and different types of private events. So on the menu again, really trying to celebrate the bounty of New England. So there’s, you know, beautiful breakfast breads we have Cabot clothed on cheddar at breakfast, like homemade granola. And then there’s different, you know, all sorts of omelets depending on the time of year. We have different hashes. You could have a duck hash, a lamb hash. Hash, corned beef hash. Our lunch menu has beautiful clam chowder. It’s made with cohogs, which are a clam that’s local to here, here in Massachusetts, the Wampanoag. The Wampanoag, the tribe, you know, they own the rights to some of those beds. They’re beautiful, beautiful clams. So it’s thick, it’s smoky, really, really nice. Beautiful quiches, salads, different fish dishes, and then the dinner menu again, like always, we have a whole variety of things on the menu. There’s always, there’s usually, like a duck pork, duck, pork, lamb. It really just depends on the time of year. We also have a really well curated dessert menu right now. There’s, like, a beautiful pavlova, there’s a pumpkin spice, a pumpkin spice latte inspired dessert. We also always have a selection of artisanal New England cheeses on there as well. And of course, oh, how can I forget lunch and dinner? We have beautiful Parker house rolls that we bake in house. Very, very yummy butter, Vermont Creamery butter. Can you tell that I like food?

 

Will Bachman  16:21

I I’m almost thinking like for the 35th reunion, we need to have some kind of, you know, Wednesday evening event, special event for people to go and have

 

Trisha Pérez Kennealy  16:31

some pleasure. Well, for for HBs, actually, I have hosted. We haven’t done it at the end, but I’ve usually hosted at our house, because the way the HBS reunions work, the sections have dinner together. Oh, nice Friday night. So my husband also went to HBS, so I’ve hosted many a dinner, and I’m always happy to you know it’s the Inn at Hastings Park. Is the name of the inn. Always, always happy to welcome members of the class of my view too. People can reach out to me. They can, you know, they can find my you can find me on the alumni side too. But also you can just reach out to the end. And you can legitimately Tell, tell my team that you’re a friend of Trisha, and I’ll let me know that you’re coming, and I will make sure to be there if I’m not traveling to welcome you?

 

Speaker 1  17:22

No, I’m just guessing that if there’s 22 rooms that the guests themselves might not be, you know, sufficient to provide patrons for those breakfast, lunch and dinner. Do you have a lot of sort of just local traffic or restaurant is

 

Trisha Pérez Kennealy  17:40

open, the restaurant is open to the public. And not only do we have breakfast, lunch and dinner, we have a beautiful bar area. We also have we also have champagne brunch on Sundays, and we do a beautiful high tea, so very traditional tea every Saturday. And depending on the time of year. The different holidays we do different Hold on one second. Do you want me to I’m going to put in my ear buds. Can you hear

 

Will Bachman  18:09

that? That’s fine. Are you okay?

 

Trisha Pérez Kennealy  18:13

So, like, this coming weekend, you know, we’re approaching Halloween. We’re doing our Halloween tea is always Dia de los Muertos themed. So, you know, we do Christmas ones, so we really do enjoy celebrating all of the different holidays throughout the year.

 

Will Bachman  18:32

So you were already trained professionally in food. Tell us a little bit about the experience of starting and running it in what were some of the lessons learned for you along the way of a boutique luxury hotel, let’s say, but we’re calling it an inn,

 

Trisha Pérez Kennealy  18:49

so it’s, you know, I hadn’t worked in a hotel before, but I had, I had been, I had been a guest at many, okay, very definitive. I spent a year when I was working in finance, commuting from San Francisco, between Boston and San Francisco. Okay, I basically lived in a hotel, and I also traveled extensively when I lived in Europe. And I’ve always really loved hotels, so had spent a lot of time really focusing and observing observation operations, but it’s very different to run your own. And I think that what most people would be surprised about is that in this day and age, it’s pretty tech intensive in terms of some of the software programs that we use to run the business right. So you need to be able to keep track of your reservations. You need to be able to take reservations via phone, but you also have to have a platform that can take reservations via, you know, someone doing it off of their phone, some of them, someone doing it off their computer. And then you also, there’s an incredible amount of data that needs to be, you know, that you need to keep on top of, right, where are your guests coming from? Why are they coming. From Are they coming? You know? Is it their second visit? Is it their 100th visit? Do they like room 22 do they hate room 11? Right? There’s all of this data that you need to be on top of. And I think probably the most important thing that I from the beginning, I am never afraid to say I don’t know how to do something. If I don’t know how to do something, that I’m going to find the best person to teach me. And so I really went out of my way to hire people at all levels in the organization that knew, not only knew how to do their jobs, but they knew how to do their jobs well. So there were, you know, I had a bunch of people that worked for me that came from the Boston Harbor hotel, you know, an independent owned hotel in Boston, impeccably trained staff, right? So you I went out and found people that had been trained by the best people, and I learned from them, and wasn’t afraid, and I’m also not afraid, if I hire you to do the job, I’m going to let you do your job, right? Like, that’s what, but, but always learning. And the other thing is, is that I was, and I still am willing to get my hands dirty, you know, I’ll put on my chef’s coat. I’ll work in the kitchen. I can do sheets. I can iron sheets. I can make beds, any job that needs to be done at the end, I can do that job. And that’s also the same thing for my management team. My management team is not afraid to roll up their sleeves and do whatever needs to be done, because when there’s only 22 rooms, that’s you have to do.

 

Will Bachman  21:29

Yeah, so you had stayed at a lot of hotels. Probably many of our listeners who have you know from their careers have stayed in a lot of hotels. As a consultant, I stayed in what are some thing that you know now about running a hotel that it was surprising to you, you’d been a guest for a long time. But what are some things from the inside you mentioned sort of data. But what are some other things that are a bit surprising to you that you learned along the way? Yeah,

 

Trisha Pérez Kennealy  22:03

I think what’s interesting is that in some ways, it is much easier to run a 200 room property than it is to run a 22 room property. There’s fixed costs of running right that you can’t it’s much harder to amortize over over 22 rooms, right? So I think that that’s something that I think people might find surprising, that it actually might be easier to run a bigger property than it is to run a smaller property, because less of you to do all of the same jobs, right? When I’m competing for mindshare, when I’m competing for people to know that there’s a luxury in in Lexington, Massachusetts, my minuscule marketing dollars are going up against the Mandarin Orientals, the four seasons, the Ritz carltons of the world, right? And so you learn a lot by watching too, like I spend a lot of time observing what other people in the market are doing, what we offer, what are they offering? What? What’s you know, how are they pricing their rooms? But the other thing, and this didn’t surprise me, right? I knew from the beginning that it was all about the personalization, about really making sure that our guests knew that we saw them. We see you, we hear you. You know we want to be part of whatever experience. Did I freeze?

 

Will Bachman  23:35

No, no, you’re good,

 

Trisha Pérez Kennealy  23:40

whatever reason you’re coming to stay with us or do an event with us, we want to make sure that we’re on the same page. And so this is going to sound a little bit strange, but I think I said this before that people, people sometimes assume that the only reason people come to stay at a hotel is for a joyous occasion, right? We happen to be located in, you know, one of the best places for medical treatment in the world. So we have had quite a few families who have come because somebody needed medical treatment. You know, people came for six weeks at a time, right? We had one family. They were coming from the Middle East. We helped the mother. One child was receiving treatment. She had two younger children. We helped her lined up tennis lessons, swimming activities for the kids, right? You know, we have other people that have come because, you know, their houses, their house was destroyed in a fire, right? They stayed with us for six weeks. We were packing lunches for their kids to go to school, right? So it’s really having I consider it a luxury for me to be able to know and to be able to provide that level of service for my guests, which makes it a little bit different than staying at a larger hotel. But I think that that’s what I wanted. Right. Like I knew that, you know, it was, it took much longer than expected to get from get to the opening right? The rezoning was way longer than it should have been. But that this is what I envisioned. I envisioned having a place that people would want to come back to, right? They couldn’t just come, and it would be one and done, you know? They would come and they would experience something, and they’d be like, You know what? That was really special. I want to come back. And the beautiful thing about the Boston area is that, especially where I’m located, right, we’re right off, yeah. The beautiful thing about Lexington is that there’s 15 different ways that you can get into the city of Boston, so it makes it really accessible. And so you can come multiple times and have a totally different do a totally different thing every time you come and stay with me,

 

Will Bachman  25:53

curious to hear about the Michelin key. What impact has that had on visibility? And you know, yeah, people finding discovery, yeah.

 

Trisha Pérez Kennealy  26:08

What’s really interesting is that the Michelin key is a relatively new program with Michelin, and I have to say, what I love about it is that we have no idea who the inspectors are, right? And so when we first found out a little bit of a year ago that we got the first key, I got a call from my sale at my market. She runs marketing and sales, and she said, I think we got a Michigan key, really. She said, the press release just came out. Well, those are the most beautiful accolades, right, when you had no idea that you were even in the running. And so what it does is, it really does open you up to a new you know, the press was unbelievable. It was, it was, you know, there was press releases in the United States. They were Global Press releases. And, you know, having spent time living in Europe, and, you know, very familiar with the Michelin star. I have to admit that I was trapped like the the red you know that the logo came and you, you put it up on your by your front door. And when it arrived, I was traveling, and I got back from the trip, and it was late at night. I’m going to admit that it was late at night, and I got in my car and I drove by the front door just to be able to see that, right? So I’m really proud of that accolade, especially given the fact that, you know, even though I was at Le Cordon blo in London, you know, given given my training, I’m really proud of that, yeah.

 

Will Bachman  27:40

What is something, you know, you’re running a business. I’m also running a business, and it’s sometimes you do different approaches to marketing, and you don’t know what in advance, what’s going to work. What is something that you’ve done to help, you know, raise awareness, market the business that that maybe worked better than you had hoped or expected it would so,

 

Trisha Pérez Kennealy  28:04

as I said, I’m really passionate about teaching people how to cook. So on my social media, like I’m on Instagram, I am I’m on Tiktok, I do a lot of videos teaching people, a lot of reels, teaching people how to cook. And I think what’s funny, maybe more surprising for my kids, although it was pretty surprising to me, is to be walking places and have people come up to me and say, Are you? Are you that person? So, you know, I had it happen in Puerto Rico. I was walking through Logan Airport. We were I was walking through Logan Airport, and we were going to get on a plane, and one of the flight attendants was like, you’re the owner of being like, Hi, how are you? So that has been what’s even more meaningful to me is when someone says, Hey, I watched your video, like the real I saw you do this, and I did it, and it worked. Yeah, because my whole thing is that I really, I really am trying to make it approachable. I want the things that I teach people. I want you to go try it. I want you to go and play and tinker and figure out how to make those recipes your own. So that’s that’s been really interesting to see the reach. And also it’s kind of funny some of the things that get traction, like, you know, we’ve had a few things that have had over a million, like, million people watch, but it makes me laugh some of the things, one of them was about pasta.

 

Will Bachman  29:36

All right, tell us about being the senior class gift chair that you know, as you mentioned it earlier, I’m thinking, oh, boy, that would have been actually good network, relationship building kind of thing to do at the time. It sounds like it just would have been a lot of work. But tell us, how did you decide to do that, and what was that role?

 

Trisha Pérez Kennealy  30:00

Like so I, I am, I was really incredibly my parents gave me one of the most incredible gifts that they could have given me, and that was that they were able to pay for my college education to worry at all. But I recognized very early on, during my experience at Harvard that that wasn’t the case for everybody. And I recognized even then, and you know, the financial aid wasn’t even as generous as it is now, that we were standing on the shoulders of the people who had come before us, and I felt really strongly about making sure that if students were qualified to come to Harvard, that they should be able to come and they should not have to think twice. And so when the opportunity came up to apply to be the Senior Gift chair, I’m like, I want to do that, and it actually has been one of the greatest gifts to me, right my life, because the friendships that I’ve made with with people of all ages, right? So I just came, I was at Harvard yesterday, and today, I’m on the Dean’s Advisory Council for the Radcliffe Institute, and my being on that is a direct it’s it’s directly linked to the beginning in that experience as the gift chair, because I was super active as a young alum. I was a vice chair of the Harvard College Fund when I was in my 20s. I’ve been involved in some way, shape or form with every reunion that we’ve had. I’ve worked, you know, I’ve been on the Schlesinger Library Council for a while. I’ve been on the Dean’s Advisory Council for the Radcliffe Institute, which I’ve absolutely loved. I’m so incredibly proud of all of the deans. Tomiko Brown, Tomiko has done such to me, go to get around his done such an amazing job in what has to be one of the most challenging environments right now in higher ed, at really being steadfast that the Institute is a place for interdisciplinary learning and it’s not just about people. It’s about engaging the undergrads. It’s about engaging faculty members from across the spectrum at Harvard, different disciplines, different perspectives. It’s really, absolutely incredible. So I feel that I’m the one who got the gift right, because it really gave me an opportunity to give back. You know, so many of the skills that I use in my job are skills that I learned at Harvard, both in and outside of the classroom, right? I think that one of the most beautiful things about Harvard is that, as undergrads, you know, we we run the different organizations, there aren’t, there’s there isn’t really a strong there aren’t a bunch of advisors running around telling us, well, this is the way that you should do it. Right? We sort of figured out how to run these organizations. And I had often said I would have loved to have run a business with, you know, the men and women that I ran city step with. And actually, what’s funny is that Kelly Doyle actually did do the PR initially for the in so that that did come to pass, that Kelly did work on the PR. So it was one of those things that I felt like I was giving back. But I think at the end of the day, I ended up getting so much more in return.

 

Will Bachman  33:41

Tell us about being a town officer.

 

Trisha Pérez Kennealy  33:44

So being a town meeting member, I was a government concentrator at Harvard, and I’ve always been, you know, is particularly interested in American history and American government. So town meeting for people who don’t live in New England, is it? You know existed since there were settlers here, and basically it’s the legislative body. So in the town of Lexington, we have a Select Board, which is kind of, is the executive branch. Town Meeting is your is the legislative branch. And the way it works in Lexington, it’s a town of about 31,000 people, we have what’s called elected town meeting. So each precinct elects members to represent them, and so for 18 years, I was one of the representatives from my precinct.

 

Will Bachman  34:32

And what was 18 years, what would tell us about that role? Like,

 

Trisha Pérez Kennealy  34:36

well, the way it works, the way it works in Lexington is town meeting starts in March. Well, we sometimes have it in the fall too, but it lasts, it’s every Monday and Wednesday night for six weeks until we get through the warrant. So the warrant is like a list of bills that are being proposed. So we do all of the appropriations for the municipal side, for the schools we work on, you know, approving capital expense. Expenditures. We work on zoning policy, so all of these, there’s all of these different things. I mean, it’s really like being a member of the town’s Congress, and it was an incredible learning experience. And what I always tell people, democracy is not a spectator sport, and it’s very, very important if we want to, especially, you know, if you want to see change, then you need to get involved. And I’m not saying that you need to do it for 18 years, but I feel very, very strongly that people, you know, take a term. Everyone should take their, take a take their, take their turn at serving a term. How’s that? Whether it be school committee, whether it be an alderman, you name it, if we all just did a few years stint, it would be a really good thing. And I do think that that’s what the founders of this country intended. No one ever intended for any of these political positions to be lifetime appointments. Right? We intended for there to be diversity of ideas. And the way you do that is there has to be new people coming in. George Washington had it right when he walked

 

Will Bachman  36:09

home. Yeah. What is something that you helped accomplish in those 18 years that you’re particularly proud of so

 

Trisha Pérez Kennealy  36:19

in 2010 after I bought the inn, I joined the town’s Tourism Committee. And tourism is a really important industry, not only in Massachusetts. I haven’t checked the data recently, but we were the eighth most visited destination in the United States, the state of Africa, okay, yeah. And foreign travelers. International travelers, their length of stay is longer. They usually tend they stay longer and they spend more money. So there’s tourism multiplier. The town. Our visitor center was built initially in anticipation of the bicentennial. And so 10 years ago, actually, more than that, 15 years ago, we started planning for for the 250th and so what we the big thing that we worked on was we secured the appropriation to build a brand new visitor center, okay? And so that visitor center, it open. It was, it was supposed to open in April of 2020 but it was so quiet.

 

Will Bachman  37:34

Why? What was happening in April 2020

 

Trisha Pérez Kennealy  37:37

Yeah, absolutely nothing is what was so it did open. It’s beautiful. And so this April 19, this past April 19 was the 250th anniversary of the beginning of the revolution. And it was awesome. I mean, the weekend was fantastic. It was magical. And it was so incredible to see all of these things that we had worked on come together for this incredible celebration. We did this amazing dinner on Friday night. They reenact the arrival of Paul Revere at Clark house. And so we host a dinner, and then we take our guests with Kendall lit lanterns, because it’s walking distance, so we walk over to watch the reenactment. In the room, in the room for the dinner, were multiple people that were direct descendants of people that were on the battle green. And there was also a direct descendant of Paul Revere. Oh, pretty cool. Yeah, that’s it was. That was, you know, that’s what it was all about, right? Because I felt, when I wanted to do the in there had been inns in Lexington, the Buckman tavern where the farm, the men waited overnight for the advancing regulars. It was, it was a tavern. It was an inn. But that style of hospitality, you know, we’d sort of lost that in the last few decades, and I really felt that Lexington really needed that. And so our property is located 400 yards from the Nile green from the third floor of the main house, which, depending on the time of year, if the leaves, I can see straight down to the battle green.

 

Will Bachman  39:25

Now you’ve already touched on it a couple times with with city step and with the the class, class gift. Let’s go back to Harvard. Tell us about any courses or professors or other activities that you were involved in that continue to resonate with you.

 

Trisha Pérez Kennealy  39:43

So I was very lucky. I took a constitutional law with HW Perry my junior year. I did both section like the first the first semester. After is the broader constitution, and then the second more focused on the Bill of Rights. And I absolutely, I don’t think I it was I worked harder in that class than I worked in any other class. And what I really appreciated we were actually just talking about this today at my meeting at Radcliffe, because it was, we’re talking about academic freedom, and he really pushed us to to explore both sides of any argument, right, and to make sure that we were that we had context for the decisions that we were making, that we weren’t just bringing our own our own perspective or our own biases, right? It’s also pretty amazing to say that you took constitutional law with a current Supreme Court Justice of the United States. So that was pretty cool. But the other thing was, I had the pleasure of seeing MICHAEL SANDEL. He spoke to us last night, you know. And it was so interesting, because obviously 1988 is a long time ago, but I could so vividly remember sitting in Sanders and listening to him talk, and again, really trying, not in an inflammatory way, but in what should be happening when you’re at a liberal arts institution like pushing us, I want you to tell me what’s the basis of that argument? Why? What’s the basis of that argument? And I think that that just really resonates with me, because I felt that the most important thing that I learned at Harvard was I learned how to think, right? You know, we were given, especially in the GOV department, you were responsible for reading and distilling a lot of information very quickly, and you needed to have an opinion. And you know what I worry about these days is that people aren’t very comfortable sharing their opinions, right? And I think that we really need to train people to think rigorously and be able to express themselves and to defend their ideas with facts. And I think that, you know, those two classes in particular, really did teach me how to do that.

 

Will Bachman  42:22

So Trisha, tell us some links where we can find you on Instagram and where we can find the n where, where can people learn more about what we talk Importantly, the

 

Trisha Pérez Kennealy  42:33

most important thing is, please, please, please, come and visit. We’re in Lexington, Massachusetts. If your travels coming through, bringing you through Boston, it’s super easy to get to us. So it’s the Inn at Hastings Park, and we’re located in Lexington, Massachusetts, and the name of the restaurant is town meeting. Is a very intentional play on words, because I feel that restaurants ins or places where people should come together. Follow me on Instagram. It’s Trisha Pérez kennealy. You can follow the inn. The inn, is it in Hastings park or in Hastings park, but they’re sort of linked together. I’m on Tiktok, I guess that’s where all the little kids are. But you can find me at any of those places. And I truly do mean it. I’m on LinkedIn, obviously on Instagram too. People can reach out that way as well, but always happy to welcome people to the end, give them a tour, show them what it’s all about.

 

Will Bachman  43:35

That’s where I am, wonderful. Trisha, thank you so much for joining today. Thank you. Bye.