The Reach of a Chef (20 page)

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 quality 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 food 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.”

“You still want to go with marjoram for the lamb?” Rob asks.

“Yeah, it was in the braising liquid,” she says. Then, remembering, she says, “We used to do a lamb at American Place”—Larry Forgione’s seminal New York restaurant—“the saddle. We put a crust on it with cheese and brioche bread crumbs. It’s a little bit of a pain. It’s a great dish and that’ll really make it sell. But one crepe, make it more blini.”

“Squarish,” Rob says.

“Yeah, that’ll make it a really nice dish.”
(A double chop with a goat cheese crust, grilled, served with braised lamb shoulder in a spinach crepe, called “Crespelle” on the menu, and baby vegetables from the garden.)
“Oh, I got black-eyed peas in today,” she says.

“Are you getting chicken in tomorrow?”

“Yeah.”

“Maybe do black-eyed peas with that.”

“Yeah.”

“Quail?” he asks.

“Yeah, have to order…. We’ve got beans, she’s picking leeks today. Squash, lots of squash, eggplant. It’s hard when you’ve got a lot of the same stuff coming out of the garden. You want each dish to have its own personality.” She fiddles with her pencil, staring at the menu, sighs. “We could do something with citrus and radishes.” Long pause. “Skate, I think of citrus and beets, but also capers.” Pause. “Need to go with the citrusy direction.” After a few quiet moments she reverses herself, says, “Keep it Italian with panelle, with fried chickpeas, preserved lemon in the salad. Piccata—capers.”