Her time at Chez Panisse created her food philosophy—or took it back to where it began—but only a return to Maine solidified it. Working in New York and traveling around the country, she contemplated the sea of sameness. “You’d be in Las Vegas, and you’re eating Maine scallops,” she remembers. “You didn’t taste the land.”
Now, she runs into the scallop divers at the gas station. “When I opened Primo, I put a wood oven in the kitchen, because I wanted the food to be rustic and approachable,” Kelly says, as she’d worried what the locals would think about a New Yorker moving in. She cooked the planned pizzas in it, but also fish and whole birds. At night, she cranked it up really high, and in the morning, she roasted all the vegetables in there. “That really helped me change my style,” she says. “Less fussy.”
Newcomers often assume a restaurant named Primo serves Italian food, but Kelly found, in her corner of Maine, that the Mediterranean cuisine she learned from her grandparents provided mostly quiet guidance in coaxing maximum flavor from the state’s cornucopia of ingredients. So while the restaurant’s name comes from her grandfather, her Italian American roots on Long Island are only visible through the dressing of Maine ingredients in her food. Unless you open Kelly’s home refrigerator, that is, where her mother still leaves her the occasional eggplant parm. “It’s not something I would ever order in a restaurant,” she says. “No eggplant tastes like hers.”
Five Dishes That Shaped Melissa Kelly’s Culinary Heritage
Fresh Pasta with Grandma
No need to buy a fancy drying rack when you roll your fresh pasta by hand. Hang it to dry just like Kelly’s grandmother did, using something you probably already have around the house: coat hangers.
Mom’s Eggplant Parm
Dining and Cooking