The Reach of a Chef (22 page)

“That’s the main thing, and it’s really fun to grow this awesome variety of vegetables and to use my creativity to augment Melissa’s.”

The style at Primo was cooking that suited a small rustic garden in Maine and anytime throughout the year; it was home cooking in the style Melissa had known growing up in an Italian family. Pork with mashed potatoes and a mushroom sauce, the saltimbocca; grilled duck on sautéed kale, potato gnocchi, mushrooms, and favas; that amazing cod that came in, roasted and served with potatoes, salt cod fritters, and a kind of succotash of corn, baby beans, and green coriander; sea scallops with fried green tomatoes and hoppin’ john; wood-oven-fired pies with a thin, crisp crust.

“I took it really seriously,” Melissa says, recalling her first head chef position. Once all the cooks have arrived, Melissa typically works at a small sink station, between the line and the dishwasher’s station, butchering meat, chopping vegetables, the simple mechanical work providing plenty of time for her to talk.

Her arms are disproportionately long for her body. “I’ve morphed with the job,” she says. “My right arm is longer than the left because I always work the left side of the line”—requiring her to extend her reach to her right to grab pans hanging above the line; at her height she really has to stretch and, in the middle of service, do it fast. At the ends of her taut, slender arms are stubby, raw fingers. She speaks as she cuts and cooks a ratatouille; mixes, rests, shapes, and cuts the gnocchi; boils the butter beans; and gets the risotto started. “I—was—
cray
zee,” she went on, describing her first days as chef de cuisine at the Beekman 1766 Tavern, at the Beekman Arms, in Rhinebeck, New York. “People who have worked with me in the past who come and see me say, ‘I cannot believe you are so calm.’

“There was no talking in the kitchen at all. I was crazy because I had to concentrate, I had to make sure everything was right and it was
so,
there was
so
much to think about. I was twenty-four, twenty-five—I was young to have that position.”

Fifteen years ago, Melissa had short punky hair that she did herself and wore clothes to match. Funky punk or not, a five-foot-four-inch young woman only a few years out of the CIA, Melissa was not an immediately imposing leader at the Beekman. “I was a different person. I was more of a girl then, and most of my cooks were my age or older, and most of them were men.

“I often wish I could have done this,” she says, “just known what it was like to do exactly what I did as a male. I think about that all the time.”

After graduating from the CIA, Melissa tried to get a job with Larry Forgione at An American Place, the New York City restaurant striving to elevate and respect American culinary traditions, but he had no position for her. She found work in the hills of West Virginia at the Greenbrier, a formal resort known for its food. There, under Certified Master Chef Hartmut Handke, she learned volume and speed in the sprawling hotel kitchen and refined her line cooking in its small high-end restaurant, the Tavern Room.

By chance, Forgione happened through the Greenbrier. Melissa reintroduced herself, and he remembered her and asked her to call him when he was back in New York. She did and he offered her a job. Not long after she began, late in 1988, she missed her train in from Long Island. Waiting for the next one would make her late, and she couldn’t be late. She didn’t want to leave her car in the city all day, so she persuaded her brother to drive her in. It was snowing hard. By the time they hit the Southern State Parkway, the roads were white. A Mercedes traveling fast in the opposite direction lost control, slid across the median, and slammed into their car head-on. Melissa flew into the windshield. Her brother was unhurt. An ambulance took her away to Mid-Island Hospital, where doctors put fifty-one stitches into her head and made plans for additional plastic surgery.

Today, when she lifts her wide dark eyebrows, you can see where the scar begins, but it’s not something you notice right away. You’re more likely to notice her extraordinary nose above a row of large white teeth, a bright, frequent smile, and dark blue eyes.

And it didn’t affect her work, apparently, either. She moved quickly up to sous-chef, then, in the summer of 1991, Forgione took over the moribund kitchen of the Beekman Arms, the oldest operating inn in the country, in a picturesque Hudson Valley town, and asked Melissa to be its chef de cuisine. Thus, the girl from Long Island had her very first chance to run a kitchen.

With Forgione’s reputation and the postcard setting of the colonial-era inn, the restaurant at the Beekman Arms was destined to be busy from the get-go. This would have been difficult enough work for the twenty-four-year-old chef, but she was walking into an operational kitchen with a staff already used to its own standards. The man who had been the chef, a guy roughly ten years her senior, was now demoted to her sous-chef. Moreover, it had been the kind of kitchen, not unfamiliar to just about anyone in the business in the early 1990s or before, in which smoking cigarettes and drinking beer throughout service was not unusual.

Not in Melissa’s kitchen.

“When I got there, I was like, you can have a beer at the end of the night, you can smoke a cigarette on your way out the door, you can take a cigarette break, but you don’t smoke during service, you don’t smoke during the day,” she says. “There was friction there. I just didn’t work like that. I didn’t want my cooks to work like that. They needed to focus on the food. These guys, it was like they were at a party at work.”

She immediately changed not only the food—to the innovative American cuisine she’d learned in Forgione’s Manhattan restaurant—but the standards for serving it.

“They had a steam table with
stuff
sitting in it,” she says, still astonished by the memory. “I said, this is going to be an ice bath now, we’re putting ice in there and fresh stuff in there, and we’re gonna cook it to order, we’re not gonna cook it in the morning and leave it there all day.”

Several of the cooks quit fairly quickly, but a couple wanted to stay, and Melissa said she’d give anyone a chance who wanted it, but they’d have to be willing to change their habits. A cook named Leo showed up looking for work, and he proved to be the sort Melissa was desperate for. “Do you have any friends,” she begged him. She and Leo Castellanos, now chef at the Blue Plate in Chatham, New York, are still close. They cleaned the kitchen and painted it, and got down to the business of cooking. But even so, it was a struggle every day to be a twenty-four-year-old chef trying to give orders to a bunch of older line-cook dudes.

One day, early on, the kitchen was receiving a lot of deliveries. It was a crazy day—pouring down rain. All deliveries have to be inspected, accepted, signed for, and then stored—a time-consuming process in the middle of an already busy day. If you’re ever in a kitchen and see a guy not wearing whites, holding a sheet of paper, and looking for somebody he doesn’t know, it’s a delivery guy wanting to get the order checked in and the invoice signed so he can get out of there.

One such delivery guy called out to the kitchen, “Where’s the chef?”

One of the older crew nodded to Melissa. The delivery man said, “That’s the chef?!”

Melissa turned around, looked up at the guy. He repeated, “You’re the chef?”

“Yeah,” she said.

The guy grinned big and wide and said, “Ya like bein’ a chef, little girl?”

Melissa was speechless. If this had been a cartoon, steam would now start whistling out of her ears. “What?
What?
” And her crew began to laugh. Waves of heat began to rise off her.

“You like being a truck driver?!”
she yelled.
“Go wait outside!”

She made him stand outside in the rain while she personally checked in the order. It was a big order, and she took her time.

Recalling the event today still seems to make her chest heave. “I had to stand my ground,” she said, “because it was in front of these cooks who razzed me every day. I couldn’t let them break me.”

Even to this day she feels it. “People look at you and they see something and they have no idea who you are or the road you’ve traveled.”

Even here, at her own restaurant, as recently as a year ago, older male cooks will become overbearing to the point that she wants to say, “I didn’t just start cooking, I’ve been cooking for twenty years, and you don’t know what I’ve gone through in those twenty years to stand here today.
Don’t tell me
you think it’s good to do it this way, because you know what? This is my restaurant. I like to hear other people’s opinions and I listen, but sometimes I’m just like, No, we’re gonna do it this way. And not just to stand my ground. It’s just because that’s how I want to do it and this is what I built. This is my house and my restaurant and I’m gonna do it the way I want to do it.

“That’s been a really hard thing,” she says. “All the experience you go through and when you look a certain way, people just judge you on what they think you are, what they think you know.

“I’ve worked next to some great chefs. Working with Larry, I had an opportunity to work with some great chefs”—chefs such as Mark Miller, Paul Prudhomme, Alice Waters, Wolfgang Puck. “They were Larry’s friends—they worked in the kitchen. They’re just people; I’m just a person—that’s what it boils down to. We’re all just people but we all have different collective experiences. Just looking at someone and judging them, it’s hard to deal with that. I still get it.”

Just a few months ago she participated in a women chefs’ benefit at the Biltmore Hotel in Miami. She was paired with a male French chef, and when she said she wanted all her peas shucked, he said they should just use frozen. She said,
No, fresh.
He said of his frozen peas, “They’re good, I use them every night.”

“It’s not your dish,” she said.

“I’m not shucking all these peas,” he said.

“Yes, you are, we’re using fresh peas.”

The French guy thought this was absurd and helped for a while, then disappeared, which she was glad for. “I don’t like anybody to do my own prep,” she says. “I want to make my own dish, I want to make my own sauce. I’m doing one dish for three hundred people. I didn’t need his help, then he was mad because everyone was saying it was a great dish [halibut with a pea puree, lobster, and spring vegetables].

“It’s a challenge being a woman in the kitchen—it’s a huge challenge.”

Chief among those challenges is, she says, “Being taken seriously on your way up. Women have to work a little harder to be taken seriously.”

The different treatment, she notes, though, is double-edged. Sometimes women get the benefit of the doubt, something else Melissa doesn’t like. “I don’t want any free rides or for anybody to say that’s how I got this,” she says. “I got this through work.”

To young women entering the business she says, “If this is what you want to do, maintain your level of professionalism. Stick to your guns—it’s easy not to. There are so many shenanigans in this business, and drugs and alcohol, there are a lot of opportunities to make mistakes. I’ve seen girls do that. You’ve got to be professional. And keep your part of the bargain…. Maintain your professionalism and you can demand that back.”

Melissa ran the Beekman Arms kitchen for three years, transforming it into a first-class restaurant serving American regional cuisine. Owner Forgione, himself a 1981 CIA graduate, was by then in the first ranks of celebrity chefs in the United States. It was perhaps inevitable, then, that, following the success of the Beekman Arms, he’d try to do the same thing in Miami. This has been a common pattern: When a chef becomes well known, opportunities to open offshoots of the flagship restaurant multiply. Again, he sent Melissa to open the kitchen. The results were not so lucky. While no restaurant’s demise is simple, a combination of Forgione’s spreading himself too thin and insufficient support from his business partners, together with a scathing review in the
Miami Herald
(“An American Place Waterside Restaurant,” the paper wrote in March 1994, “is an unfinished, uneven creation suffering from conflict and confusion, producing disappointment”), hit the restaurant so hard that Melissa was on the phone trying to line up jobs for her cooks before the paychecks began to bounce.

About the only good thing to come out of South Florida for Melissa was Price Kushner, a Florida native whose parents ran a linen business that brought Price to Melissa’s restaurant and provided an excuse to show up even when he had no business there. They became friends; they dated a couple of times. “Then suddenly we were moving to San Francisco together,” Melissa says, apparently still surprised by it.

On the West Coast, Price worked the graveyard shift at Berkeley’s Acme Bakery, the country’s leader in popularizing artisanal breads, and learned there a feel for dough, both literally and spiritually—“knowing how dough felt and how it should feel,” he says—skills that would come into their own when he created the bakery in an aged carriage house at Old Chatham.

Melissa here began what was her most itinerant phase as a cook, working for periods no longer than months at several restaurants. She and Price originally moved to San Francisco so that she could take over as head chef of Restaurant Lulu, Reed Hearon’s hip, high-volume restaurant. It wasn’t a good fit, and she and Price would eventually move out to Denver, where he’d gone to school. An outdoorsman, a builder by nature, Price would renovate an old house while Melissa worked at Mel’s with Melvin Masters. It was while they were in Denver that Melissa got a call from a husband-and-wife team who were planning to open an inn in Chatham, New York. While at the Beekman Arms in Rhinebeck, south of Chatham, Melissa had worked with a cheese maker, Ken Kleinpeter. It was he who gave Melissa’s name to Tom and Nancy Clark. They invited Melissa out to cook for them. They liked her food. She told them, “I’m not moving out here just to cook breakfast.” They ultimately decided to open a forty-five-seat room that could serve dinner as well. Her plan for Price, as Price notes, was that he would initiate a bread-and-pastry program there while she created a restaurant. Both would come to perfect fruition within a year.