The Reach of a Chef (23 page)

Melissa had left Miami in the spring of 1994. In the fall of 1995, having held five different jobs during that year and a half, she returned to the Hudson Valley, opening the restaurant at the Old Chatham Sheepherding Company Inn that October.

It was during her year in the desert, though, that she’d had her most important cooking experience to date. Significantly—indeed, perhaps in order to have it—she would have to turn in her chef’s hat, so to speak, and become a cook. She’d been the head chef now—the leader—of four restaurants. With this move, she would return to being a low-wage line slave. For the first three months, she worked without pay, moonlighting to pay the rent.

The restaurant was Chez Panisse, “the only restaurant in California I wanted to work,” she says. And thus the only restaurant that could entice her to take a step backward, as it were, and to work for free. Chez Panisse is, of course, the famed Berkeley restaurant that has arguably given birth to more world-class and prominent chefs than any restaurant in America and probably the world—Jeremiah Tower, Mark Miller, Mark Peel, Deborah Madison, Joyce Goldstein, Jonathan Waxman, Steve Sullivan (founder of Acme Bakery), Paul Bertolli, Judy Rodgers, and now Melissa Kelly.

Melissa didn’t feel completely comfortable there, either. Born in a place and time of intense political ferment (early 1970s Berkeley), Chez Panisse remained political in the back of the house as well—any restaurant as justifiably famous as this is bound to have a severe social pecking order, which this place did. If you didn’t fit into your place here, you wouldn’t be happy. (I met a cook at the CIA named Leather who’d externed there and grumbled that he’d done nothing but carefully wash and hand-dry the lettuce, about which the restaurant was fanatical, every day for six months—that was his one, his solitary, job. He spoke to almost no one.) Furthermore, Chez Panisse remained funky in a way that was stereotypical of its region. Cooks there were not expected to work full weeks and were encouraged to have other jobs or serious hobbies outside the restaurant. “They have these rules there,” Melissa says. It was not in the business, that is, of training line cooks. One cooked and served food for reasons more lofty than a paycheck. One’s work as a cook did not comprise who one was but rather facilitated and augmented other work. This is likely a unique situation in American restaurants, surely a reflection of the mind who created it, Alice Waters, along with Lindsey Shere, pastry chef and co-owner, or at least is typical of a handmade restaurant, one that’s unique as a thumbprint.

But what are you to do if a line cook is who you are at your core? Melissa wasn’t about to go work at a candle shop or get involved in local politics. She snuck a job at a bakery called Morning Glory, the solitary cook from midnight to 5:00
A.M
., while working her way up at Chez Panisse, from 2:00
P.M
. till close.

“Chez Panisse is an incredible restaurant and incredible place,” she says now. “Amazing people that work there. Very political. The politics of the place is that you have to work there a long time.”

She began at the Café, upstairs, like all new cooks after the 1980 extension opened. The big move downstairs to the restaurant was supposed to take a long time. Melissa, however, was a killer line cook and had the chef-leader experience to make the move with unusual speed. In order to cook downstairs at Chez Panisse, a chef ultimately must cook a meal for Waters and a few others, answer questions about the meal, and be approved—a successful, though harrowing, experience for Melissa. Cooking for Alice Waters in this way, in which you do everything, from buy and prepare your food for a three-course meal—rabbit ravioli, in Melissa’s case, swordfish, a fruit galette with cheese (“I hate to bake, hate it,” she says, another mark of the true-blue line cook)—as well as choose the wine and set the table, would be incredibly daunting even in the best of circumstances.

Waters liked the meal, and so Melissa moved downstairs, suffering the jealous who-the-hell-does-she-think-she-is rebuke from her colleagues, inevitable upon such a speedy advancement within the intensely familial atmosphere of a kitchen.

She spent a total of six months at Chez Panisse, and it gave her the critical component of knowledge she needed to move forward, primed the path toward acclaim at the elegant but rustic Old Chatham. Homey food worked fine in restaurants; people liked to order and eat do-at-home food; you didn’t have to make fussed-over, high-concept haute cuisine. You could make your favorite meals, the food you loved the most, with the best possible ingredients, treating them well and serving them with grace in a comfortable room. You could make
money
with this kind of food. Here was one of the most famous, most influential American restaurants ever, doing exactly this.

That may seem like old news today, but you’ve got to remember that when Melissa was learning to cook in the late 1980s, and when she graduated from the Culinary Institute, the most revered places among aspiring cooks remained the severely French white-tablecloth temples such as La Côte Basque and Lutèce—the four-stars, they were the trophy jobs. Innovation at the time happened in nouvelle cuisine, food even fancier than classical haute cuisine, at places like the Quilted Giraffe, or the refined and innovative cooking at Le Cirque by the young phenom Daniel Boulud. If you aspired to be the best chef you could be, you had to be doing this kind of serious food. The idea that you could make and sell the food you ate as a kid in your Italian Long Island household in the late 1970s was a revelation to Melissa.

“It took me home,” she says of her experience at Chez Panisse. “It took me to the place where I felt comfortable cooking, the food I grew up with, that I feel most comfortable with.” Up until Chez Panisse, she continued, “I’d always felt there was a division between restaurant food and home food. Chez Panisse liberated me to do [home food] myself. Before that it would be a little more fancy or showy. The rustic thing wasn’t happenin’ for me at all. I didn’t feel like it was acceptable at a restaurant, but after that experience I realized it’s OK, people liked it.”

The result, by the time Johnny Apple stopped by Old Chatham, would be things like sheep’s-milk cheese wrapped in grape leaves and grilled, rack of lamb on a bed of pecorino-spiked polenta, and crown rack of pork stuffed with Italian sausage. And more attention followed the
Times’,
from
Food & Wine,
the
Boston Globe, Gourmet, Bon Appétit, Condé Nast Traveler, Travel + Leisure, Town & Country,
and others.

Melissa works with the sheep’s milk and whey early in the day when the kitchen stove is not in use except for simmering a large pot of pork stock, and it’s just her and Doug, the young prep cook, in this part of the kitchen. The whey she has is the watery rich-rich liquid separated out of the sheep’s milk during the cheese-making process at nearby Apple Hill Farm. When the proteins that compose whey are heated they clump together, they curdle, into what is called ricotta. She begins this process now in a large heavy aluminum pot. The recipe she uses is from the cheese maker at Old Chatham Sheepherding Company. To cook there was a luxury. Funds (originally deriving from owner Tom Clark’s leveraged-buyout firm) were virtually unlimited. In a way, cooking this sheep’s-milk ricotta returns her to those productive but difficult years. Tom and his wife, Nancy, oversaw—and continue to run—one of the largest sheep dairies in the United States, with more than a thousand sheep. In addition to the lambs they raised for the kitchen, they also raised hogs. Melissa had all the sheep’s-milk cheese and sheep’s whey she could ever dream of. The farm-raised lamb and hogs yielded meat of extraordinary flavor. You couldn’t buy better quality anywhere on earth, and it grew right there outside her kitchen window. It was here that she determined how she wanted to cook—in a small kitchen with a big garden, working the line every night with a couple of other cooks, making the food she cared most about.

“We had pigs,” she says. “We had the lambs there. We had sheep’s milk every day—it was an incredible place to cook…. We worked really hard there for four years. Same as we do here.”

Ultimately, however, a cook’s dream though it might seem, she grew disenchanted by the owners and the boggling sums of money that were spent. “They didn’t get what was really happening there,” she says. “After a while I couldn’t work for them. ‘Do you see what you have here? Do you understand what’s going on here—that we’re working and you’re just in the way right now?’ They had no concept.

“A lot of people don’t know,” she continues. “
Most
people don’t know, even as a cook you don’t know half the stuff that needs to happen in a day or a week or a year [for a restaurant to run smoothly], and to understand that, it gives you a different perspective.”

Melissa removes her instant-read thermometer, slips it through the metal clip perpendicular to the sheath so she can hold it comfortably above the heating liquid. When she sees it hit 120 degrees Fahrenheit, she adds salt for flavor. She continues to stir, and when the whey reaches 140 degrees, she adds the milk, about two gallons. As the temperature begins to rise again, small clots of curdled whey float to the surface. Melissa measures the temperature again, and at 194 degrees she adds about a cup of white vinegar, which curdles the milk proteins. She continues stirring as gently as she would an incipient consommé raft. Some of the curds stick to the bottom and caramelize just slightly, but she determines they don’t taste scorched. When it is as curdled as it will get, she dumps the contents of the pot into a cloth-lined strainer. I taste some of the curd, true ricotta. It has a delicate, neutral flavor. A cup of vinegar into four gallons of whey and milk seems like a lot, but the taste is not acidic.

“What are you going to do with it?” I ask.

She pauses thoughtfully, then says, “I’m not sure yet, I was thinking of an appetizer to feature it. We’ll see how it turns out.” She scoops the drained moist curd into a deep one-third pan. “I wish the bread were made,” she says, smiling seductively at the thought of it, “so we could put some of this on warm baguette and drizzle it with olive oil.”

Later in the day, after the bread has baked, she sets beside my cutting board a small piece of toasted baguette with the warm ricotta on it. The fresh cheese is snowy white and streaked with the yellow of extra-virgin olive oil. It’s got a light, milky, sheepy flavor, faintly sweet, and a firm, curdy texture—a delight. I can see why she misses having abundant whey—what a luxury that must have been.

There are few luxuries here. Only lots of work—satisfying work. And a good thing, too, because for all of Melissa’s successes—for her struggle to rise to sous-chef at An American Place in Manhattan, then taking over the Beekman 1766 Tavern and the trials in Miami and California and Denver, for the Chez Panisse struggles and for the splash of arrival at Old Chatham, and for the ensuing and endless press she continues to receive, and now, Primo, five years old and booked solid all summer long every day except barbecue holidays—for working, as Price puts it without too much exaggeration, “probably a hundred twenty-five hours a week for fifteen years”—for all this, she and Price will scarcely make a dime.

Melissa’s mom, JoAnn, knows—she’s Primo’s accountant. She does the books.

“They’ll be lucky if they break even this year,” she tells me, without a smile. Price acknowledges this. “Everything we have is in this restaurant,” he says, “and everything we make goes back into it.” They’d make money if they were this busy year-round but they’re in
Maine
—February and March, needless to say, are not thronged with tourists, or even residents for that matter. Nevertheless, they’re making ends meet, and this year they’ll have worked through most of the debt they took on in 1999 when they bought and rehabbed the place. “And I know that’s when things are going to start breaking down,” Price says with an ironic grin. “I just
know
it. Like we’ve got to put a new roof on, and that’s expensive, especially in an old house like this.”

The day’s routine almost never varies. Morning prep is followed by the menu meeting with Rob, followed by about four more hours of prep—all afternoon and up until service the kitchen is a hive of activity, and work space becomes territorial, especially when service arrives and begins the sidework, wiping down silver and glasses and stacking plates, folding napkins. At 4:15, Melissa writes the day’s specials, the verbals, on the dry-erase board.

At 4:30, the servers, usually about ten of them during the summer, gather in a wallpapered Victorian dining room hung with old black-and-white photographs of Melissa’s family. They busily scribble the contents of the board into their pads. Melissa waits quietly, apparently relaxing, taking advantage of this time off her feet. No hurry. If you work in the kitchen, the pre-service meeting, a ritual in virtually all good restaurants, is a time of strange calm.

When Melissa senses the servers are nearly finished, she begins: “The first turn looks hellish on paper, the second turn looks spread out. We have a hundred and nine.” The night before, they did 131 covers—served 131 customers—which is almost exactly two turns in this 65-seat restaurant. They’re likely to do the same tonight, with walk-ins and people eating at the bar.

She then begins at the top of the two-by-three-foot board. “Duck-sausage pie”—each day there’s a “chef’s whim” pizza, this one using duck confit and figs, same as yesterday.

“How much is that?” a server asks.

“Fifteen,” Melissa says. “The antipasti is a fried-squid salad. Quail is wrapped in serrano and wood-roasted, served on a salad with red onion, a quail egg, and mustard vinaigrette…. The beet salad has our roasted beets with an orange-pistachio vinaigrette…. The duck confit is served on the bone with an arugula salad, a champagne vinaigrette. The duck is cooked with allspice, cloves, bay, thyme, garlic, and white pepper…. The salmon is wrapped in fresh grape leaves, not the brined ones we’ve been buying. They’ve been blanched and it’s grilled, so they get a little charred and crisp. That’s served with fresh beans…. The bass tonight is served with a ratatouille of summer squash and eggplant—that’s from our garden…. The duck is served with potato gnocchi…. We have seven orders of the leg of lamb with couscous, mint, peas, and Thai basil.”