Homegrown Love

Melissa Miller, executive chef for Bon Appétit at SAP in Palo Alto, Calif., learned to love fresh food from the garden at an early age. Through jobs at restaurants in places as far away as Alaska, her love of simple, homegrown food has remained.

“I grew up on Long Island in New York. My mother and my grandmother were both great cooks. My father worked in the city and when he came home at the end of the day he always played in the garden in the backyard. I think the combination of eating good local ethnic foods and learning about the importance of the garden from my father made me love food. There’s just nothing like fresh tomatoes right off the vine. It wasn’t really specific dishes that I remember my mother making; it was more about using the fresh product that my father grew in his garden.

That is where I started connecting food and the land and learned that flavor starts in the ground, which incorporates perfectly now with Bon Appétit’s farm-to-fork philosophy. We grew tomatoes, corn, onions—the summertime on Long Island just gave us a bounty of local product.

In school I worked as a waiter but quickly became fascinated with the way things worked in the back of the house rather than the front. I worked at a yacht club that served classic American cuisine. Over the years I worked at gourmet food stores such as Williams-Sonoma across the country.

Eventually I fell in love and moved to Alaska. I became a partner in a restaurant up there. I got in touch with locals who were hunters and fisherman, as well as farmers, though there are not many of those. I could offer locally grown greens but mostly just locally harvested animals. We would serve moose and deer. Occasionally I would try bear, but we didn’t really sell that in the restaurant. I was not a hunter but the bear was in the vicinity so I could taste it on occasion and that was very interesting. I had growers bringing stuff to the restaurant for me to offer to my customers and it was very exciting. I remember being there and looking out the window while I was making bread and there was a moose standing there. It was pretty sublime.”