The Reach of a Chef (19 page)

The sound of the kitchen’s screen door slamming shut says
Home.
The air is a balmy seventy degrees at seven
A.M
. in Rockland, Maine, the first week of August. You can see the big garden in full summer bounty from the windows here. Michael Florence mixes bread doughs at the back of the Primo kitchen, built into an old Victorian house on the craggy Maine coast. He works on a heavy wood bench with flour and water in this rustic kitchen with a massive central brick oven, still hot from last night’s service. Michael will mix the starter, natural yeast, with water and flour, a little commercial yeast, let it rest awhile, then finish mixing with a little more water, extra-virgin olive oil, and salt. He’ll pour it into a five-gallon plastic container to ferment, let the natural yeasts feed on the sugars and release their tangy lactic acid that gives sourdough its name. Because of the warm weather, which makes the bacteria a little more feisty than usual, the starter’s been too sharp, and this concerns him.

“You don’t want an overpowering acidic taste,” he says, “just a depth of flavor.” Michael is a craftsman. Quiet, fair, medium height and build, a cap over his short, light brown hair, he studied classical piano at a conservatory in Wisconsin. He’d like to do a recital here in Maine, but it’s hard to find three hours a day for practice. Every day in the kitchen, though, he’ll make the country loaf, four big ones. He uses a levain (a different kind of starter) for the whole-wheat boule. They’ve got another dough for the baguette, and he’ll also make the pizza dough and feed the starter. Occasionally he’ll do a rye, maybe a rye with hard cider in the fall, but not often. “A lot of people enjoy bread, but not everybody can make it,” he says. Sometimes he’ll leave a loaf of bread warm out of the stone oven. He cringes when the cooks rip a piece off, tearing apart the crumb. Making bread is a craft; he wants people to appreciate it.

He needs to get all his doughs mixed and fermented before Kristin Nicodemus arrives to begin pastry back here. Kristin, twenty-nine, has a degree in applied history and public policy from Carnegie-Mellon. She worked in education for a while but it wasn’t right. “My true passion was in restaurants,” she says. She met her fiancé, Aaron Leikman, thirty-three, in a Seattle restaurant. He’ll be in at about eleven, will be working the line tonight. Aaron has a degree in ecology and zoology from Oklahoma University, as well as an associate’s degree from the CIA. Joe Nastro—tall and thin with dark hair cut very short, who used to work with animals out West, has a B.S. in animal science from the University of Vermont, and may return to that one day—is on the wood oven tonight. The wood-burning oven, he says, “is like working with another human being. It’s temperamental. You never know what it’s gonna do next.” After the bread has baked, Joe will load the oven with wood and really crank it for service. A pizza will cook in sixty seconds in there. A roasted whole dorade, stuffed with lemon slices and fennel, takes about five minutes on a sizzle platter and comes out with the skin nicely charred.

While this kitchen staff has more nonculinary degrees than most others I’ve met, there are some purely culinary folks, such as Lindsey Kutsai, twenty-three, who arrives in the morning to begin prepping her station, garde manger. A graduate of the Institute of Culinary Education, formerly Peter Kump’s in Manhattan, she’s been here a year, her first real cook’s job. Art Rogers will be the last one in, the other line cook tonight—from Rochester, New York, a graduate of a hotel and restaurant school in New Hampshire and an unflappable line cook. Right now he’s out on a breakwater casting into the Penobscot Bay, and he’ll land eight or ten small mackerel, which will be grilled and used on a salad tonight, or with cucumbers or purple Romano beans, depending on what’s plentiful in the garden. Rob, the sous-chef, is off tonight, and Alissa Alden, twenty-one, who began washing dishes here six years ago, finishes up pastry in the evening.

This is Melissa’s staff, her kitchen. Melissa Kelly arrives at 9:00
A.M
. in her white T-shirt and navy blue overalls with the white pinstripes—the commis pattern in French kitchens—rolled high above her clogs to reveal thin, saggy white socks. Melissa is five-foot-four, dark hair pulled tightly back in a ponytail, and if you walk into her kitchen at most times of the day before service, you’re likely to see her in this position: straight over a cutting board, neck cocked to hold a phone, talking to a purveyor, the press, family, or someone begging a reservation at the height of the season. Melissa is thirty-nine years old, was first in her class at the CIA in 1988, won the Best Chef Northeast award from the Beard Foundation in 1999, and became a media darling after she put the Old Chatham Sheepherding Company Inn, the Relais & Châteaux B&B and restaurant in upstate New York, on the map. She and Price Kushner—they’re married in all but the technical sense (never had the time or a strong inclination to make it legal)—have owned this restaurant in the Victorian house since 1999. And while Price is nominally the pastry chef—his culinary background is breads and pastry—and he does oversee and often cook that side of the menu, he spends the majority of his time running the nonkitchen parts of the business and in the evening leads the front of the house. Melissa is the force of the kitchen, 9:00
A.M
. to 1:00
A.M
., seven days a week in the summer. Most of the remaining hours of the day, she’s dead asleep amid piles of cookbooks and notepads, which cover the bed and surrounding floor in their home nearby.

When I asked when her next day off would be, she said without thinking, “Labor Day.” Her last day off had been Independence Day and before that Memorial Day. “We close for all the barbecue holidays,” she says. Summers are busy in Maine. If you’re not busy here in the summer, you’ve got a problem. Capacity summers are the only way to get through winter.

“You could shoot a gun down Main Street and you wouldn’t hit anyone for three towns,” says Price of the winter population.

But even those months, January through March, Melissa likes to stay open five days a week, despite the fact that they consistently lose money—she does it to keep her staff employed. Otherwise, she’s afraid, they’d have no choice but to leave her. Also, I suspect, she’s happiest in a kitchen.

“I’m not a groundbreaking chef,” Melissa says. “I like to cook…. I
cook.
That’s what I do. That’s what I’ve done my whole life. Food is it. I’m not a photographer, I’m not an artist, I’m not a boatbuilder, I’m not anything else. I’m a cook, that’s who I am.”

And so she’s most likely to be in her kitchen just about any nonsleeping hour—not dressed for a photo shoot, in the office on the phone with her brand consultant, or scouting new restaurant locations—dicing the onion and peppers for the peperonata, a base for a grilled swordfish–mussels–saffron gnocchetti, or mixing yolks and flour in the KitchenAid for the hand-rolled spaghetti, served with Nicoise olives, capers, and ricotta salata, as well as eggplant, basil, and tomatoes from the garden out back.

“I don’t know why I do it,” she says in her slightly nasal, slightly Long Island voice and without looking up from her board. “I enjoy it, I enjoy the routine, the sense of accomplishment. Even last night going through the cooler and getting everything organized makes me feel really good.

“I love the circle,” she adds, “the cycle of cooking. It is a life cycle, it has its own life.” The finest moments of the day are when she’s got four or five pots and pans going, she’s stirring a risotto, butchering the lamb, dicing the onion for the sauce, throwing the onion ends into the stock, every act and every scrap propelling her and the food toward the finished dishes, moments when one movement works toward several different ends, and all those different ends fulfilling a singular goal. “I love when there’s that full circle, to me that’s the best feeling.”

The food at Primo couldn’t be more unlike the food Grant pursues. Melissa’s is home-cooking food that emphasizes the best possible vegetables, meats, dairy, and fish, simply prepared. It’s served in a house on a hill. To enter it, guests walk across a front porch, through a foyer, and into a vestibule whose main feature is a staircase leading up. There are three small dining rooms on the ground floor. Upstairs is a small bar (your best chance to eat at Primo in the summer if you don’t have a reservation), a small dining room that has a more bistrolike feel to it, and an open room that serves as a private dining room for up to fourteen people. Servers descend via a back stairway that leads to the kitchen. The hallways and doorways, the molding, the tongue-and-groove floors, the staircases all kind of whisper
Home.
The servers and cooks, they all work in a house, not a building, and this has its own impact. Service is casual, and the relationship between the servers and the cooks is not just cordial, it’s family-like, as much as front and back of the house can be, anyway. (Front and back is always a difficult bond.)

“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.