For the fifth installment of my series, “Searching For Italy in the South” I head to charming downtown Charleston, South Carolina to speak with John Amato, co-owner of Melfi's and founder of The Culinary Garden.
The Upper King Street District is lined with beautiful brick buildings, stunning historic churches, art galleries, and noteworthy restaurants including Melfi's, in a picturesque brick building that was once run by a pharmacist named Dr. Melfi.
Melfi's is "a classic clubby joint with fun vibes" as co-owner John Amato describes it. The restaurant is part of the same group behind acclaimed Charleston hot spots Leon’s and Little Jack’s. Melfi’s shares a chic aesthetic with its sister restaurants. "A white tablecloth kind of pizza joint, but one that doesn't want to be a pizza joint, but rather a full-service Italian restaurant with delicious food, where pizza is a course, not a meal." Melfi's has two large wood-fired ovens facing the open dining room, and offers thin-crust Roman-style pinsa with modern toppings, like their popular housemade stracciatella thin-crust pie, known as the Stretch Armstrong. "It's where you can eat pizza in a tuxedo," Amato says of Melfi's.
Amato, who was the opening chef at Melfi’s before handing the reins to current executive chef Ashley Kegu, traveled in Italy for research in the run-up to the 2018 debut. He says that Italy inspired him when planning the original menu, which in turn led him to develop his own urban farm, which is now a business known as The Culinary Garden.
Melfi's features wood-fired steaks, pizzas, and more.
"The food at Melfi's is not about the chef though, it's more about the ingredients," he says. From roasting vegetables in high-quality olive oil or grilling fish with just some fresh herbs and lemon, or tossing pasta with some sharp cheese and some freshly ground black pepper or baking some naturally leavened bread, the idea at Melfi’s has always been to let the ingredients inform the dish. That applies to the big-daddy steaks roasted in the wood-fired oven to the housemade pasta and gelato.
Amato, who was raised in an Italian-American family in the Washington, DC suburbs, moved to Charleston in 2009 and worked in some of the culinary hot spot’s best-known kitchens. When Melfi’s opened, he and Kegu, then the chef de cuisine, developed a menu that still shines today. Pasta, steak, starters, sides, and pizzas offer something for everyone, and there’s a cleverness at play in every dish. The pizzas, besides the aforementioned Stretch Armstrong, also include ”Mr. Wally,” a vodka sauce-based pie with hen of the woods mushrooms, sliced salami, onions, mozzarella, and pickled Fresno peppers.
"The real beauty of Melfi's menu is that you just can't go wrong and I want to prove that right," Amato says.