Rockland's star

Primo delights

By Joan Lang

Melissa Kelly has been waiting a long time for this. And so have a lot of other food lovers in Maine. Kelly is one of those talented young culinary luminaries you read about in the glossy food magazines, winner of a coveted James Beard award and an alumna of some of the best-known restaurants in the country. She and her fiancé/partner, pastry chef Price Kushner, probably could have gone anywhere to open their own restaurant, but they chose the little mid-coast town of Rockland instead. And even with the drive, it’s lucky for us.

Primo is named for Kelly’s Italian grandfather, who inspired her love for all things Mediterranean — it was his wife who first taught Melissa to cook. They’d surely be proud of what their ambitious grandchild has accomplished.

Kelly’s résumé reads like an instruction manual for How to Become a Star Chef. She majored in business (at SUNY Famingdale and the University of Maine), but threw it all over to study at the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, New York, attending on scholarship and graduating top in her class. Her first job was as a roundsman — sort of a jack-of-all-trades — in the kitchen of the top-rated Greenbrier Hotel in West Virginia, grueling work but great experience. It gave her the foundation necessary to go on and work with some of the top chefs in the country, including Larry Forgione of An American Place in New York City, and Alice Waters of Chez Panisse in Berkeley, who is often credited with revolutionizing the craft of cooking in the United States. Along the way, she met Kushner, who started his own career as a baker at Berkeley’s renowned Acme Bread.

By the time she was in her early 30s, Kelly had enough under her belt to become executive chef of the highly esteemed Old Chatham Sheepherding Company Inn, a gourmet’s dream destination in upstate New York; Kushner signed on as pastry chef. Esquire magazine named Old Chatham one of the country’s best new restaurants in 1996, and the waiting list for reservations could be four months long. Then the James Beard Foundation named her the Best Chef in the Northeast in 1999, the culinary equivalent of a Nobel prize or the Pulitzer. Melissa Kelly had arrived.

But she and Kushner, who had also spent summers in Maine as a child, wanted their own place. When they decamped for Rockland last summer, the inn’s heartbroken owners closed up shop, and the tight-knit little foodie universe was agog.

That kind of buzz is always helpful when you’re opening your own restaurant, surely one of the riskiest ambitions a person can dream. In Kelly and Kushner’s case, it’s warranted.

The couple bought a 110-year-old Victorian on a hill overlooking South Main Street that used to be Jessica’s restaurant, then poured heart and soul into renovating it, doing most of the work themselves to stay within their modest budget. Over a six-month period, they refinished floors and moldings, resurfaced walls, put in an atmospheric bar and bistro on the second floor, and took the back part of the old former house down to the original studs, replacing it with an airy new kitchen that includes a custom-designed cooking line for Kelly and a wood-fired brick oven and bakeshop for Kushner.

It’s a charmingly romantic setting for Kelly’s rustic, seasonally inspired Mediterranean-on-Maine cooking, a series of cozy little rooms with wide-planked wooden floors and cheering fireplaces. The menu changes a little bit every day, showcasing fresh local seafood, meats, and produce, including vegetables and herbs from the four acres of gardens the couple had planted on the site.

Kelly has a sure hand with these carefully chosen ingredients, bringing an earthy, full-flavored swagger to food that takes its cues from Southern France and Italy, Greece and Spain, and North Africa. The menu is so creative, so enticing, that it’s almost painful to have to make a choice — the crisp-crusted pizzas or the suavely creamy pumpkin soup, the lusty short ribs or the delicate sautéed scallops with homemade tagliatelle pasta — life should always be so cruel.

Fortunately, you really can’t go wrong no matter what you decide. Oysters “Rockefeller” are crackling-crisp in a perfectly fried cornmeal crust, set on a bed of just-wilted, Pernod-scented spinach; Frico is a soft crepe of flavorful Montassio cheese, enfolding piquant eggplant caponata and a tangle of lightly dressed baby arugula — where does she find such beautiful stuff?

The Farmer Salad of frisee and escarole with a superbly garlicky dressing and a soft-boiled egg is one of the best things I’ve eaten all year — you break the soft yolk into the salad and mix it all together and just inhale. Potato gnocchi simply dressed with browned butter and seared rabbit is comfort food elevated to the nth degree.

Speaking of comfort, those short ribs could ease me through anything short of last rites, so tender and magnificently winey, served on a bed of luxurious, horseradish-spiked mashed potatoes. And arctic char, “blistered in the wood oven,” is both rich and light, served over a bed of pearl-like beluga lentils that offer a brilliant textural counterpoint to the fish, with sweetly roasted baby beets and a mustardy beurre blanc.

The bread is stunning, of course, a densely crusted peasant loaf with the pleasing tang of natural starter. And save room for dessert: maybe homemade cannoli filled with locally made Little Barn Farm fresh cheese and dried cranberries, or a meltingly savory pear tarte tatin.

Now’s the time to visit, before the summer throngs arrive again and even more people take notice. Already, Primo’s shown up on Esquire’s latest list of the best new restaurants of the year, and reservations are bound to get a tad harder to come by. Plus, those fireplaces are just so darn cozy right now. n

Joan Lang can be reached at joanmlang@aol.com.