The Reach of a Chef (21 page)

“Maybe segment some lemons, parsley,” Rob says, referring to the herb salad that will go with the skate.

“I was thinking tarragon.”

“Lovage.”

“Chervil’s good, fines herbes.” She thinks. “Tarragon, lovage, arugula, maybe chervil, preserved lemon in the salad with the skate.”

“For the steak do you want a vinaigrette with that?” Rob asks.

“Yeah. We can go with the red wine with that.”

Melissa looks back up and sees her note to put tuna on the menu. The citrus and radish will go with that. She writes in the margin of the menu, “Tuna—salad radishes citrus cooked on planc in wood oven.”

The meeting often concludes not when they’re finished, but when they sense they simply need to get into the kitchen and start working.

Rob stands first and as he’s heading in, asks, “Do you have the panisse recipe?”—the chickpea flour that’s cooked like mush, then poured onto a baking sheet and cooled till it’s set, then cut into shapes and reheated at service, a bed for the skate.

“It’s just like the polenta,” she says. “Four cups chickpea flour, nine cups water, salt and pepper, cook it for a long time, till it starts to pull away from the sides.” Rob nods and departs. She makes some finishing touches to the menu to give to Monica to type up.

This daily menu planning also very much defines the style of restaurant and the style of cooking done here. Or perhaps it’s better to say that this planning is an organic element of the whole, interconnected—the garden all but demands this kind of rotation of new dishes onto the menu. It’s hard coming up with new ideas at noon for that night’s menu every single day, seven days a week—and not just dinner for the family, but entrées that live up to the expectations that the press and her reputation have created. Though a complete overhaul doesn’t happen daily, Melissa and her cooks change as much as they can comfortably manage. The menu printed for tonight will have twenty-five items on it—five pizzas, nine appetizers, four pastas, and seven entrées—not including the
amuse
(cold melon soup, perfect for August, served in a shot glass, garnished with sweet anise buds and Prosecco), and a couple of verbals. Two days later, the menu will have twenty-three items, ten of which are new since the Tuesday menu, and the
amuse
will have changed to a fish kebab. That’s about average, five new dishes every day.

It would be far
easier
for a chef to have thirteen aps and thirteen entrées that don’t vary day to day but are, rather, changed once every few months—and I emphasize “easier” because even
that
is taxing.

I remember hanging out in the French Laundry kitchen, which also had rolling menu items, at the end of the night, the brigade sitting around on stools in a very quiet, very clean kitchen trying to plan their dishes for the next day. Grant remembers how hard it was to come up with new ideas at 1:00
A.M
., having arrived fifteen hours earlier, prepped till 5:30, cooked for service for six hours, and spent an hour and a half cleaning the kitchen, intending to be right back there the next morning. At the French Laundry, each station was responsible more or less for developing their respective dishes, with Keller’s approval or suggestions. There, a dozen cooks served 90 people every night; at Primo, 5 cooks served 140, and all the new dishes came straight from the brain of Melissa.

Especially considering the garden. At the French Laundry, they have beds where they grow microgreens and a lot of herbs, but the truth is that to serve the kind of food that has earned worldwide acclaim, Keller (in fact, most chefs in America) has to rely on all parts of the globe—and a company called FedEx, which has probably done more to change what we eat in American fine-dining restaurants than any other single company—whether he’s shipping in fresh hearts of palm from Hawaii, morels from the Pacific Northwest, or truffles from Europe. Keller had told me long ago that the chef’s dictate to cook seasonally and regionally had become a virtual fallacy in the American restaurant kitchen, and he was mainly right.

The Primo garden, however, which produced more than 60 percent of the produce Melissa needed to serve a thousand people a week, contradicted this. Yes, it was true, Melissa conceded, that in Maine you had to fudge the seasonal cooking a little. People are already wanting peas in April and by June are clamoring for tomatoes. You don’t get peas in the garden in Maine in April, and the summer comes so late, the finest tomatoes don’t truly grow ripe until July at the earliest. And so a chef must cater to our expectations of the seasons—shipping peas in the spring, tomatoes in June, and root vegetables in the winter.

Melissa can’t avoid this. But her garden is not simply a symbolic gesture, either.

“The garden helps create who we are,” she says. “I hate just ordering. I love having it just come to me here. It forces my creativity in a different way. I don’t just dream up dishes and then order everything for it. Today you can get anything anytime of year. If you want heirloom tomatoes in February, you can have them. If you want Meyer lemons in the middle of the summer you can have them—you can have anything anytime.

“And that’s why I try and not buy very much, and just stick to the garden. I think it makes the food taste better, number one, and it makes me think about where we really are. Summer starts for me with garlic, and we move into zucchini and then we start a little with tomatoes and now we’re in beans, and pretty soon we’re going to be in bean, cucumber, and tomato
madness.

“The food is more appropriate to the weather,” she continued. I noted that she said “weather,” rather than “season,” a particularly salient point in Maine. “In spring I’ll have sorrel. And nettles. It’s great stuff that’s natural, what you should be eating then. I can order sorrel but it doesn’t make sense to me to have sorrel in the fall.

“Sometimes we don’t get tomatoes till September, but people want tomatoes in June and July. You want spring things in spring, but spring doesn’t really happen here until June. So it’s a little bizarre here, but this is the Maine season. That’s what we serve.

“It doesn’t always work out the way you dream it to work out,” she continues. “There are so many variables. One year we’ll have tons of zucchini, the next year we’ll have no zucchini. Plus the weather doesn’t always cooperate. It’s not an exact formula. I like that about it. I like that it forces me—radishes, I’ve got four pans of radishes. Instead of ordering stuff in, it makes me think about,
All right I’ve got this and this, what can I make?
and make each dish different and have its own personality and taste good and do the product justice and sell.

“At night when I go home, I’ll take my clipboards with me. I’ll take two things to bed with me. Sometimes I’ll take five if I’m going to stay up. And I’ll page through the books or even just look at the index, just for something to inspire me. Sometimes I’ll look online at other menus, but I try not to do that, because I really don’t want to do that. But I do, I look at Chez Panisse—that menu really inspires me. There are just a few that can help me. Lucques in L.A., her menus inspire me. And Number 9 Park—her menus inspire me.” Suzanne Goin, that is, and, in Boston, Barbara Lynch. “It’s kind of weird that I chose three female chefs—there was no thought behind that, I guess it’s the way that they cook. Just to get some inspiration.

“Our initial investment was tremendous, because the greenhouses and building sheds and all the tools we had to buy—my God, we spent so much money. We spent a hundred thousand dollars a year on the garden the first few years. You think about all the seeds, all the water, a lot of water, the first few years we had no rain. This year’s been great.”

Just to haul all those granite boulders out of the ground to find some dirt to start with was expensive. One day they hope to dig a well that will feed the garden and the restaurant—when they have the time and the money.

Early one morning, before the sun was too high, I found Lucy Funkhouser, the gardener, before she was too far into her day. Lucy was born in New York City, though her easy manner and slow lope through the lush rows make her seem thoroughly rural. She has thick, short dark-blond hair and wide-set brown eyes. She put two slop buckets in the back of an electric cart and pulled away from the hill of composting refuse from the kitchen toward the small pen where the pigs are kept.

The pigs are Tamworths, a breed from England that is naturally lean, she explains. Last year’s Old Spots were incredibly fat. Right now, the brown pigs are skinny, the size of small dogs; they won’t be hogs until the fall. The kitchen saves scraps for the pigs—vegetable trimmings, strained mirepoix, and the like—they also have a separate bucket for compost. Lucy dumps the slop buckets into the pen and the little brown piggies dive in, grunting with delight. “The breed’s best suited to small farms,” Lucy says, “but they aren’t commercially viable.”

With the hogs fed, Lucy gives me a tour of the various sections of the garden—it takes about forty-five minutes to cover just two acres.

Across from the pigpen, she’s grown tall hedgerows of rye and lamb’s-quarters (“really delicious and really nutritious”) to promote beneficial insects, and these are in front of a long line of pole beans five feet high. The asparagus are perennial if you treat them right, and she’s letting them grow out till they’re bushy and fronded, now four or five feet high, so that the roots get fed. This is the fourth year of growing them and they’re getting good, she says. Also in this bed are strawberries she’s grown from seed, white alpine berries (these look like unripe strawberries and are bursting with juice and flavor), and red runner strawberries. She tends five thirty-feet-long rows of garlic, a type called German extra hearty, a hard-core variety (superior to the garlic with no real core, the kind typically available at the grocery store), and will harvest five hundred to six hundred pounds of it this year.

The garden also grows enough herbs, cut flowers, microgreens and salad greens (which Lucy plants weekly), and shallots to obviate the need to purchase them from a purveyor.

Toward the far end of the garden, beyond one of two greenhouses, she grows cauliflower, romescu, and a purple cauliflower called Graffiti. Some of the cauliflower are covered by a white-cloth row cover to protect them from flea beetles, which all the cabbage family are vulnerable to right now.

She grows radicchio, escarole, and lots of kale and arugula (“Melissa can never have enough arugula”), winter squash, buckwheat. Pea blossoms, various lettuces—Galactic (very dark red for drama); bianca; a frisée that grows as leaf lettuce; Tango, a frilly leaf; Sunfire; Black-Seeded Simpson, an old-fashioned reliable lettuce that’s been grown since the 1800s—Charantais melons, moon and star watermelon, which has a pattern of stars with one, sometimes two, moons on it. “It seems like so many of these heirloom vegetables were on the brink of extinction,” Lucy notes, “and now they’re the rage.”

Beets, cukes, Swiss chard do well, but the celeriac, planted in March, were largely killed by cutworms. Cardoons—an Italian vegetable, a thistle like the artichoke, with a celery texture and an artichoke flavor—she grows because they’re unusual and fun.

She’s planned rows of clover between the rows of lettuces and vegetables, in the pathways, explaining that it harvests free nitrogen in the air and transfers it to the soil via bacteria that live on its roots.

She grows red Russian kale, Bright Lights, and white chard, Lacinato kale—a sage-green coolly rippled leaf—a variety of specialty basils, parsnips, leeks, winter leeks called Blue de Solaise, as well as Upton.

She grows forty-five kinds of heirloom tomatoes, a few plants of each chosen carefully to get the maximum variety of color and flavor (many are started early in the greenhouse, a tactic Lucy had been skeptical about but says works great). Tomatillos (“a crazy plant, so humongous and disorderly”) and the related sweet-sour husk cherries that will garnish the foie dish tonight, their tomatillo-like wrappers peeled back to make it a finger food. Eggplant and peppers are not doing well; she erred in cupping the roots to protect them from bugs, expecting the roots would break through the cup but they were instead choked. Carrots, summer turnips, pink and white Japanese turnips, which she tries to start every ten days. Zucchetta, “the serpent of Sicily,” a squash that will grow four feet long if you let it, one of forty varieties in this garden. Lucy says squash are fun. Tons of blossoms. She once got so excited, she said to Melissa, “I’m gonna grow you a hundred kinds of cool squashes.”

She’s planted six kinds of pole beans, big white butter beans, English peas, favas, which are peaking now (Melissa also serves the fava flowers, which taste just like the beans). The fennel is excellent this year, as is the New Zealand spinach, called tetragonia, a hot-weather substitute for regular.

In a small decorative garden, just across the drive from the kitchen’s screen door, abundant herbs and edible flowers grow—the cook’s garden, nicknamed “the mall” because of the variety it contains. The flowers are so vivid in the morning sun that Lucy says, “Those nasturtiums are looking very excited to be alive.” She grows poppies for poppy seed; as well as salvia, an ornamental branch of the sage family; sunflowers whose yellow petals can go in salads. The two perennial beds directly behind the house were here when Melissa and Price bought the property. Lucy uses them for teas—lemon and wild bergamot, chamomile, anise hyssop. She’s even growing a hearty kiwi plant that gives fruit as small and edible as grapes. Beyond this garden are some apple trees whose fruit is so gnarly that they can only put them in the foyer for aroma and press them for cider.

Lucy says she loves the process of “being able to grow food and see Melissa make it into art. And I get to see it every night. It’s different on a remote farm. Most farmers don’t see that, most farmers don’t even know how to cook what they grow.”

“Melissa translates [what’s grown] into the customer’s language,” Lucy continues. “And they have a trust in her. They’ll eat her kale even if they wouldn’t eat kale at home. It’s a subversive way of getting people to eat healthy things, to get them to eat these simple things that people have been eating for centuries…. Eating from the land. Eating can be a little empty without that [connection].