A rendering of the interior of The Jimmy, which will be in the former Nolen Kitchen space on Selwyn Avenue. Photo courtesy of Johnson Studio

Chef Jason Neve (left), executive chef of Noble Food & Pursuits, will develop the menu at The Jimmy with the restaurant’s executive chef Vince Giancarlo (right). Photo courtesy of Plaid Penguin

Former Zeppelin chef Vince Giancarlo will run the kitchen at The Jimmy, an upcoming restaurant from Noble Food & Pursuits (Rooster’s, Bossy Beulah’s, Noble Smoke, and The King’s Kitchen) as the restaurant’s chef de cuisine. Jason Neve will be executive chef of The Jimmy, as well as Rooster’s and other upcoming concepts.

The restaurant — which will take the former Nolen Kitchen space in Myers Park — will feature seasonal pasta and pizzas. Most of the pastas will be made in-house, and dishes will be given a Southern tinge by way of the local produce used in making them.

“Italian, Southern — whatever you want to say — is always seasonal and just using the best ingredients you can source at that time,” Neve says.

The menu will have a small selection of staple dishes that will be available year-round, along with seasonal selections that change based on what’s available from local farmers. 

“It’s not going to be just a mix and match ‘pick your pasta,’ because it’s going to be more about the true Italian experience of ‘these things go together,'” Neve says. 

“An intentional pairing — the idea that one noodle pairs with a specific sauce,” Giancarlo adds. 

Though the lease was signed pre-pandemic, as Covid-19 spread across the globe, delays spread across the opening timeline. From building supplies to kitchen equipment, the slowdown of the global economy has pushed the restaurant’s opening timeline to late spring or early summer. The restaurant began construction in the summer of 2020. 

“It almost feels like we’ve been playing like Groundhog’s Day for at least a year,” Neve says. “[We’re] a year from when we locked down and everything went really downhill, and I feel like we’re almost at the same point that we were a year ago.” 

The chefs have shifted the menu and plans for operations slightly to meet the increased demand for takeout and adapt to our current style of dining. A covered patio with movable louvres will provide comfortable outdoor dining to guests throughout the year. 

Giancarlo, who will oversee the kitchen on a day-to-day basis, earned a reputation as a stalwart of local sourcing during his time at Zeppelin. One of the chef’s first kitchen jobs was at an Italian restaurant in the beach town where he grew up, giving him a foundation of pasta early in his career. His Italian grandmother helped lay that foundation as well when the family cooked together. Locally, Giancarlo spent a year working as chef de cuisine at Mama Ricotta’s. He hopes to combine those experiences with his love of using local produce in his new kitchen, bringing in farmers he has relationships with from Zeppelin. 

“There’s a massive respect for local, sustainable ingredients within Noble Food & Pursuits already,” he says. “It was really just an easy fit and pretty easy for me to start bringing in people who care as much as they did already.”

Until The Jimmy’s opening, Giancarlo can be found at Rooster’s in SouthPark.