Popular local chef opening new place in Florida

The Miami Valley’s most awarded chef has left her hometown of Dayton for the second time, this time to launch a new restaurant venture in Tampa, Florida.

Anne Kearney, who earned multiple James Beard Foundation chef awards during her time at Rue Dumaine in Washington Twp., will open a new restaurant called OAK&OLA in the Tampa area, Kearney told her followers and former Rue Dumaine diners in an email.

OAK&OLA will be “a 100-plus seat, Euro-American restaurant” in Tampa Heights, Kearney wrote. “Construction begins any day,” and menu testing will commence within weeks, she said in the email.

The former Rue Dumaine, at 1061 Miamisburg-Centerville Road, shut down permanently in July 2017 after a decade-long run. The restaurant changed its name to Bar Dumaine a few months before shutting down.

The first time she left Dayton, she went to New Orleans from 1991 through 2004. She co-founded Peristyle restaurant in New Orleans, and in 2002, Kearney was named a James Beard Foundation best-chef award winner in the Southeastern U.S. for her work at Peristyle.

It would not be her last recognition from the Beard Foundation, whose awards are regarded as the nation’s most prestigious recognition for the food and beverage business — the equivalent of the Oscars of the restaurant industry.

Kearney moved back to the Dayton area in 2004, and in 2007, she co-founded Rue Dumaine. The next year, the Beard Foundation named Rue Dumaine a semifinalist for “Best New Restaurant” in the U.S. Then, for six straight years from 2011 to 2016, the Beard Foundation named Kearney a semifinalist for its “Best Chefs in America” competition for the Great Lakes region. She was the only chef from the Dayton area, and one of only three in Ohio, named to that list in 2016.