On Thursdays, School Could Wait

Chef: Zachary Melker, Toscano Ristorante, Bordentown; Mamma: Mariellen Melker, Hamilton; Nonna: Emma Melker, Chambersburg, Trenton

Posted January 18, 2012 by Jill P. Capuzzo

Mariellen Melker with her son, chef Zach Melker. She taught him to make soups—and keep a clean kitchen.

An observant school administrator might have noticed a pattern in young Zachary Melker’s absences: They usually fell on Thursdays. This was because Thursday was family pasta night at Grandma Emma Melker’s, and Melker was more interested in helping his grandmother chop vegetables, brown meats and babysit the gravy for hours than in studying multiplication tables. While his school in Ewing didn’t seem to notice, his father, John, did, but he was willing to look the other way. In fact, he practically facilitated it.

“My uncle would pick my dad up for work, and they’d drop me off at my grandma’s,” Melker says. “They didn’t care, because they knew I was helping her.”

Considering that family night typically meant about 25 to 30 relatives dropping by for pasta, meatballs and salad each week, his grandmother could use all the help she could get. In Melker’s memory of Emma, who died in 1999 at age 70, “She’d get up around 7, start the gravy, first getting all the meats cooked and the vegetables. It would simmer all day. She’d turn it off at 5 and let it sit until everyone arrived.”

Emma’s house was not large, so the family ate in shifts. Depending on which pasta was slated for which shift, there could be lots of jockeying for position.

“It was chaos. We’d be in the kitchen, the dining room, the basement, the backyard. It was always, who’s screaming at who, which cousins are getting in a fight?”

 Melker, 28, would grow up to earn a degree from the French Culinary Institute in New York City. But French technique could not improve on Emma’s meatballs, which today appear on the menu of Melker’s restaurant, Toscano, as Emma’s Meatballs & Salad. The unusual combination reflects how family pasta night unfolded.
“We’d get everything all at once, piled on one plate—salad, then meatballs and pasta, then a slice of bread on top, and off you go,” Melker recalls. “There was no coming back.” Melker says he always liked the temperature and flavor contrasts, so he decided to present it that way at the restaurant.

His grandmother wasn’t the only one who set Melker on his career track. His godparents, Debbie and Russell Vizzini, owned Sal DeForte’s restaurant in Chambersburg, and at least once a week Melker would go there after school to wait for his mother to pick him up after work. As soon as he finished his homework, the kitchen staff would have him standing on a milk crate peeling garlic, breading chicken or frying eggplant.

His mother, Mariellen Melker, who is also of Italian descent, taught him to make soups, although she was less enthusiastic about his helping out. “She’s a neat freak, and she didn’t like me messing up her kitchen,” he says.  Several of her soups appear regularly on the Toscano menu, including split pea and Tuscan bean with escarole, white beans and sausage.

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