“I’ve never worked in a place where there was such a relationship between front and back,” says Tina, one of tonight’s runners. “But I don’t think Melissa would have it any other way.” The last place Tina worked, she says, “the kitchen wouldn’t talk to you except to swear at you.”
I noted in my pad that Tina hadn’t said, “Melissa and Price.” It’s true, I think—it’s Melissa’s personality that dominates this place. The food, American regional products (much of it from the region of their backyard), used to compose Italianate dishes that would have pleased Melissa’s grandfather Primo. Especially the saltimbocca, which Primo ate on a regular basis—his favorite dish, in fact—and the one dish Melissa never takes off the menu, for that reason. Pork loin pounded thin, sautéed, served on a tall bed of garlic mashed potatoes with a sage-Madeirashiitake sauce and a garnish of shaved Parma ham on top. The way Primo liked to eat it. Primo, whose picture hangs in one of the dining rooms, died in 1987 at the age of sixty-nine, when Melissa was on her externship in St. Thomas. He’d had a triple bypass and was put on a special diet that forbade coffee, wine, and dishes like saltimbocca. Primo, a butcher by trade, was miserable without these fundamental pleasures and abandoned the diet. “So he basically did himself in,” Melissa says now. For Primo, eating and drinking was life. And our eating and drinking has become his granddaughter’s livelihood. Surely he’d be a proud man to know she’d earned awards and national attention for her skills with his saltimbocca.
The familial atmosphere of the place comes from her as well. She’s like a busy young mom, approaching forty, and this is her family. When Lucy Funkhouser, who tends the garden and the hogs, gets pregnant, Melissa exclaims, “The first Primo baby!”
Most important of all, perhaps, her food spirit pervades the place, her convictions about life as they’re reflected by the products she uses and the way she handles them—that’s really what Primo is about. Not foams and alginates, but a garden. The garden is the magnetic north of this kitchen. A two-acre patch of land she and Price cleared of rocks and dug and fed. It was and remains an expensive investment, not the least of which is Lucy’s full-time salary, and part-time gardeners in summer, a time-consuming facet of the business, and not just in the effort to care for the garden daily and pick its bounty, but in terms of daily cooking. It’s harder to cook out of a living garden. Melissa must cook whatever that bounty happens to be when it’s at its peak even if she wasn’t planning for it, not wasting a leaf. It’s one thing to fax in your produce order at the end of the night; it’s another thing altogether to wait and see what Lucy brings her in the morning.
The mixed-greens salad, named “Lucy’s,” included the following greens when I was there: mizuna, amaranth, basil, bronze fennel, bianca riccia, mus tard, tatsoi, sunflower, Red sails, arugula, Tango, and flowering coriander (in the fall there will be more red leaf, young chard, and baby kale). Dressed with a red wine vinaigrette, it’s a unique and interesting salad, so much so that people who order it thinking they’re getting a standard mixed greens don’t always know what to make of it, or how to appreciate the range of flavors in a seemingly simple salad.
That salad, Lucy’s Salad—and Lucy, age twenty-five, for that matter—and Art’s mackerel that he hooks from the breakwater before work, and Michael’s bread, and Lindsey’s hard work and struggle to learn the skills she needs to be a good young cook, and the fishermen who call Melissa up to say they caught an amazing cod they want her to buy, or the sheep lady who brings Melissa two gallons of sheep’s whey that she can turn into an exquisite ricotta, served on a warm, crisp slice of Michael’s baguette with extra-virgin olive oil and coarse salt and some greens—that’s what this restaurant is really about.
Melissa and Price had crafted a restaurant of exceptional romance in what is one of the country’s most romantic areas, coastal Maine. It was a kind of fantasy restaurant life, the life people dream of if they dream of owning their own restaurant—a young talented couple opening a restaurant on the coast of Maine, doing it their way, making the food they love, growing a lot of it themselves, from lettuces to fine heirloom-breed hogs. It was an ideal, and Melissa and Price had realized this dream, and I wanted to see that dream in action—or, perhaps, what the reality is behind such a dream.
Also, this was a woman’s kitchen. Women had a different experience in the professional kitchen. A group of eight women chefs had formed an organization in 1993, Women Chefs & Restaurateurs, dedicated to the education and advancement of women in the industry. One of its board members, Ann Cooper, has written a history on the subject, A Woman’s Place Is in the Kitchen: The Evolution of Women Chefs. Melissa had reached the top ranks of cooking in America, and I was curious about her experience as a woman in the testosterone-dominated world of restaurant cooking.
However, there was something harder to get a handle on, a quality in Melissa Kelly herself, something difficult to put into words that made her, before I’d ever met or spoken with her, especially alluring to me in ways that most other chefs were not.
When you travel in culinary circles, hang out with chefs, read as much as you can, you pick up distinctions and begin to notice the details that gather to form a larger, truer impression of a place or a person. The most interesting of these details came from Sam Hayward, chef-owner of Fore Street, a restaurant in Portland, Maine. Hayward was in my hometown, Cleveland, invited by a local chef to participate with several other chefs from around the country in a dinner to benefit the James Beard Foundation. Hanging out the day of the event in the host kitchen, a place called Fire, run by chef-owner Doug Katz and his wife, Karen, I was talking with Hayward (who would soon win Best Chef Northeast from the Beard Foundation), and Melissa Kelly’s name came up. I don’t remember how—I likely asked him if he knew her, because by then I was already curious. Of course he knew her. With a chuckle, he commented on all the journalists who told him they’d “discovered” Melissa Kelly, and he mimicked Johnny Apple, the New York Times reporter, saying it: “You know, I discovered Melissa Kelly.” Hayward seemed to think it odd and funny that reporters should have such a proprietary feel about her.
I remembered Apple’s story. It was the first I’d heard of Melissa, though her restaurant had been named one of the Best New Restaurants in 1996 by Esquire. I’d just published my first chef book, intended to continue writing about chefs and kitchens, and happened to be finishing my brief tour as a line cook at the time the article appeared in the Times’ “Dining” section, a whopping 3,800 words, as long as a Sunday magazine piece. “Hudson Valley” in the headline would have been enough to catch my eye, having recently lived there a year, but the phrase in the subheadline is what I noticed: “a young chef’s sorcery.” Once a hard newsman, Apple has become the paper’s roving gourmand, filing travel, food, and drink pieces from across the country and the globe. He does call her “a sorceress” (and “a smiling slip of a woman,” one of two references in the story to how thin she is). Recognition from The New York Times like that about a chef you hadn’t heard of sticks in your mind. So when subsequent stories about her appeared, notably about her leaving Old Chatham and renovating a house and restaurant in Maine, I always read with interest. Book work unrelated to food and cooking took me to Camden, Maine, a couple of towns north of Rockland.
On my last night there, a Saturday night, I drove down without a reservation. I had to wait a while for a seat at the bar, and so had time to spot Price (the walls are hung abundantly with framed magazine and newspaper articles of the couple) and introduce myself, then ask if I could meet Melissa, if and when she had a moment during service. Price said he didn’t know, that they were really busy, and he’d love to seat me if he could, but as I could see, they were packed. So I hung out and watched and waited. It was a very comfortable place to be, even when this crowded, like being at a really big fancy dinner party at a friend of a friend’s house. Eventually, Melissa came upstairs to say hello. She looked like a cook, in her pinstriped overalls, with an elusive, feline q
uality that made her seem shy and self-effacing, but also clever and sly. She said she had time to show me the kitchen and—this was the middle of service on a Saturday night in the middle of July—gave me a tour of the garden and introduced me to the piggies, Gloucestershire Old Spots. She then said she had to get back to work.
A lone table in the bar had opened up, and I was seated and ordered. The food was superb—an amuse of oysters prepared three different ways, halibut on a succotash—all of it memorable more for the pleasure of eating it rather than for any sort of unique preparation, unusual pairings, or unfamiliar ingredients. Memorable also because of the old house, its good karma, and Price and Melissa’s welcoming nature.
But it was not the strength of that visit that compelled me two years later to contact Melissa and ask if I could spend a week or so in her kitchen. It was the whole scene—the house and the garden, the husband-and-wife team, each working practically every night, a chef who raised her own pigs, a chef who had no interest in being on TV, no intention of writing her cookbook, who preferred working the line to schmoozing the dining room, who wore commis overalls rather than a crisp jacket with her name embroidered on it.
Ultimately—and only after I’d returned from Maine would I realize this—that ineffable quality of Melissa Kelly that I found so hard to define, what made journalists proprietary, what made her so alluring was this: seduction. Somehow she seduced you. Not in any conventional sense, but rather with her whole being, with her movement either at the stove or in the garden—both deliberate and graceful, combining strength and lightness—with her confidence in what she was doing. She didn’t need to speak. She was grounded. She knew exactly who she was and what she was doing, moment by moment, month by month, year by year.
“I like to cook,” she says. She’s usually cooking when she says it. “I’m a cook. That’s what I am.”
Tuesday, August 3, 2004, is a typical summer day at Primo. Melissa arrives at 9:00 and begins her lists. Even before she knows what she has she writes on a legal pad:
Soup:
Stock:
Butcher:
Prep:
And it’s the “Prep” that typically fills up quickly (pea soup, herbs, mash, gnocchetti, peperonata, chix jus), and the priorities marked with an asterisk. She’s moved through every inch of the walk-in cooler, to check to see what they have and what they’ll need, and has brought out the striped bass to begin butchering them. Lucy will wander through the kitchen in jeans and a tank top, sweat already beading at her temples, and drop off her “harvest list,” all the items she’ll be taking from the garden. Today’s list includes zukesla (a type of zucchini), zucchini blossoms, calendula, nasturtiums, tomatoes, eggplants, gooseberries, micros, one artichoke, cucumbers, fresh garlic, and tetragonia. Also available to pick, but not required today, are red leaf, pea shoots, young chard, young leeks, Genovese basil, an herb called cutting celery, and parsley. Of all the produce they use, about 60 percent of it they grow and harvest themselves during the summer months.
Melissa can usually bang out several items on her list before it’s time for the daily menu meeting with her sous-chef, Rob.
Rob is an affable thirty-five-year-old who carries a few extra pounds, is balding appropriate to his age, keeps his remaining light brown hair clipped short, and sports a trim beard and mustache. Originally from the South, Rob started out playing in a band years ago, then moved into cooking. It’s always nagged him that he doesn’t have a proper culinary education. He learned as he went along, as many cooks still do, but he doesn’t know what he’s missed or what he’s lacking. And now he feels he’s too old for school, thoughts that fellow cooks who have been to school (everyone else on this hot line has a culinary degree) thoughtfully concede. He’s been a year and four months, having come from the West Coast by way of Boston, where he was variously line cook, sous chef and chef de cuisine at other high-end restaurants for the past three years. He liked that focus and after two years there decided to make a change. He moved with his girlfriend, Monica, across the country to work at Primo. Monica is a front-of-the-house here.
Kitchens are like families—but adoptive families, with distinct personalities. Sometimes you feel comfortable in them and sometimes you don’t. Rob has never quite felt comfortable here, it seems, much as he likes his colleagues and the restaurant itself. And Maine in the winter he found to be deadly dull. He’s given his notice and intends to head back to San Francisco to start work the first week of September.
This is fine with Melissa. She likes Rob—he’s been good and dependable—but also recognizes it’s not the right fit. Furthermore, she’s really missed the line. She’s eager to get back in there cooking. She loves to cook. It drives her crazy that Rob toward the end of service begins to flag, and when big orders come in late, she feels like an expectant father: “Push!” she says through the service shelf at her puffing sous. This is physical work and you have to be in good shape—it gets hard. I’ve heard many chefs after they hit forty say, I just can’t do this anymore. But she’s lean and mean and loves it—loves it.
Service is a long way off. A lot has to happen over the next six hours in order to be ready, and writing the menu is first on the list.
Melissa and Rob sit in the dining room where it’s cool, each with a pen and a copy of yesterday’s menu. The room is quiet. The old wooden chairs creak. The framed photograph of Primo looks down on his granddaughter, as does a gallery of other black-and-white family portraits.
“Are we getting chanterelles in today?” Rob asks.
“Yeah,” says Melissa. She looks over her list and the menu. “Skate—gotta finish butchering that. That’s going on.” She slumps over the menu, just staring. Minutes of silence pass. These are her least active, least intense moments of the day, as if when she’s sitting, her whole body takes advantage of the break. “We’re going to use the rest of the confit on a pie,” she says. “We sold twenty-five pies last night. That was hard. Our record is twenty-nine, so he was right up there.” Joe was on pizza last night, which also serves some appetizers and the amuse—he’ll tell you how hard it can get. An order for five pies is called followed by three pies—it becomes a space issue as much as a time issue. He’s got to spin and stretch each dough ball, then garnish the twelve-inch disk (with duck confit and fig for the “chef’s whim”; or artichokes, olives, ricotta, and basil; or mushrooms and roasted garlic and thyme and radicchio), and then fire it. But it’s hard to find the space and hit the cooking time just right on all of them because they take only a minute. Plus he’s got the wood-roasted oysters topped with Jonah crab, and Rob or Aaron beside him firing numerous roasted whole dorade. That station is either a killer or a breeze, rarely in between.
“We got tuna tonight for the ap,” Melissa says, then scans the menu, and Rob does the same, for a quiet minute. How should I do the bluefin? she thinks. Melissa says, “I just talked to Jess. He’s got some nice sword-fish, and littlenecks from Prince Edward Island, and they’re the size of mahogany clams. We’ll use those for the dorade, and he’s bringing some lobsters for Lindsey.” (Chilled Garden Pea Soup with a salad of lobster, mint, and preserved lemon.)
Melissa will buy only large swordfish, telling all her purveyors this, sending the message that she’ll not bring in any that haven’t had a chance to breed. “Swordfish from here is amazing,” Rob says, hungrily. “It’s like butter, the best I’ve ever had.”
“Whey and milk are coming,” Melissa continues. “We’ll make sheep’s-milk ricotta tomorrow. She’s bringing two animals.”
“We’re gonna do lamb two ways?” Rob asks.
Another long pause scanning the menu, the dining room is quiet.
“I’m gonna verbal out the quail,” Melissa says, meaning it will be a special described by the server, “and I’ll put the tuna on. I’m not sure about the blossoms.”
More pondering. Melissa’s still in the aps section of the menu and suggests doing arancini. Rob grins, he loves arancini—“Street foo
d in Sicily,” he says—risotto croquettes: flour, egg, bread crumbs, and fried, often with different additions to the fillings. Melissa will wrap sticky cold risotto around mozzarella and anchovies, deep-fry them, and serve them on tomatoes from the garden.
“That’s gonna replace the blossoms, we need to accumulate some. We usually do those every other day, and we’ve done them the past two days.”
The squash blossoms—flowers filled with ricotta, fried, and served on a bed of grilled squash, red onion, cherry tomatoes, and a pesto vinaigrette—are an irony: they don’t sell well when they’re written on the menu, but when they’re verbal they sell like crazy.
Rob, whose attention on the menu is now on the pasta section, says, “No more pappardelle, need more eggplant and sauce, and I can pick some nice basil for that.”
“Agnolotti for the scallops tonight,” she says.
“We have enough gnocchi,” says Rob. “We need to wrap salmon.” (Salmon fillets wrapped in grape leaves, grilled, and served on green beans, roasted peppers, and couscous with cumin-spiced eggplant sauce.)
“Fingerlings?” she asks.
Rob says, “Yeah, I’ll do a little bit more.” Those for the strip steak, and then for the striper entrée, he needs more coulis, saying, “Red pepper for the bass.”
“I don’t know about the fennel,” Melissa says. “She’s picking more today, we have to check it out. Also ratatouille…. We’ll wait to put sword on tomorrow to get rid of the dorade and halibut.” She runs down the menu. “Ten plus two verbals, that’s good.”
The Reach of a Chef Page 17