Culinary Art: An Interview with Jarrett Melendez

Jarrett Melendez loves pigs. He loves pigs so much, in fact, that one of the most important characters in Chef’s Kiss, his celebrated graphic novel, is an adorable piglet named Watson.

Watson is an evolved being, essentially, with a palate beyond the ordinary, and he serves as the ultimate “taste-tester and head of quality control” for the restaurant in which Ben, the novel’s gay protagonist, is discovering his not-so-hidden talent for creating fabulous dishes.

At the same time, Ben is also discovering his feelings for co-worker Liam, and the book spends a lot of time in “will-they, won’t-they?” territory as their romance gently simmers to a boil.

“I wanted it to be a slow burn,” says the 38-year-old from his home in Massachusetts. He’s engulfed in a bright pink light, the glow from a neon sign hanging in his office. A pair of Monokuro Boo plushies, part of an extensive collection, are nestled off to the left just behind him.

Written by Melendez, meticulously illustrated by Danica Brine, and gorgeously colored by Hank Jones, Chef’s Kiss is a joyful, effervescent read. Like any good story, it’s not without drama and turmoil, but it doesn’t force its central gay character through the usual queer grindstone.

Ben is already out and comfortable in his skin. Rather, Ben is going through a crisis of what to do with his life when his dream of becoming a copy editor at a publishing house falls flat.

The book won an Alex Award from the American Library Association and was nominated for a GLAAD Media Award. It was also nominated for a prestigious Eisner Award for Best Publication for Teens.

Melendez will spend the weekend at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center in D.C. at Awesome Con, the city’s annual, massive comic con.

He plans to spend much of his time at his booth, signing copies of Chef’s Kiss and greeting his many adoring LGBTQ fans — as well as gaining new ones, no doubt.

Ahead of the weekend, Melendez popped onto a Zoom call to talk about Chef’s Kiss — and the sequel he’s working on — as well as his life as a cook, writer, and all-around lover of all things porcine.

METRO WEEKLY: Let’s start at the beginning. What was your childhood like?

JARRETT MELENDEZ: So I was born in Miami, and then my family moved around quite a bit until I was nine years old. We lived in Chicago, Indianapolis, back to Miami, and then had to move very suddenly to Mexico, because my dad killed somebody in a drive-by. Woke the whole family up in the middle of the night and said, “Hey, we got to go.” And we packed. I was seven years old. We packed as much as we could into our cars, and drove overnight to Mexico.

MW: Oh my God.

MELENDEZ: Yeah. I’m working on a graphic memoir, actually, about my whole childhood.

MW: That is definitely memoir material. Do you remember how you felt about that at the time?

MELENDEZ: I remember the sense of urgency, obviously. And I was a little kid, so I remember being upset about having to leave stuff behind — my favorite toys, things like that. But I acclimated pretty well to living in Mexico. We were there for a couple of years.

Up to this point, my dad was a career criminal. Since he was a teenager, he was running with gangs in Chicago. He was in the Latin Kings, all of that. So this wasn’t a one-time thing. It wasn’t like he suddenly decided, “You know what I’m going to do today?” He wasn’t like an office worker who went rogue.

So anyway, we moved to Cancun and he started working as a scuba instructor at a hotel, and he met this family from Maine who were in the seafood industry. And they were like, “Hey, you could make good money doing diving in Maine as an urchin diver.” And my dad, figuring things had cooled off enough and that Maine was remote enough, thought it was probably time to move back to the States. And so he, just on a whim, moved the entire family to Maine to become an urchin diver. A year after moving to Maine, he got arrested, and then went away [to prison] for a while.

MW: It seems like coming back to the country was a big risk for him.

MELENDEZ: Yeah. I think he really thought he was the smartest criminal in the world.

MW: The rest of you stayed in Maine?

MELENDEZ: Yeah. At that point, we’d put some roots down. My parents started a seafood company when we were living in Maine. And so when my dad got arrested and then went away, it was like, “Well, we’re here. We’re in it now.” I think my mom was probably a little tired of uprooting the family every couple of years.

MW: Are you still in touch with your dad?

MELENDEZ: I haven’t spoken to him in 12 or 13 years now. So, as you can imagine, he was very abusive — he was a monster, just a terror to live with. I went back and lived with him in Mexico for a year while I was just trying to figure out what to do with my life. We fought endlessly and he just tried to pull all those same intimidation tactics that he did when I was a little kid, except I was in my twenties at this point. So I was just like, “You’re not the boogeyman anymore. You’re pathetic. You’re a loser. You’ve alienated your entire family, all of your kids, your brothers, your sisters, nobody wants anything to do with you.”

MW: Do you have a relationship with your mother?

MELENDEZ: It’s tense. She doesn’t think it’s tense because we really only ever talk online. I haven’t seen her in person in quite a few years, just because I live here and I won’t go see them in Mexico. We don’t talk that often. And when we do, it’s fine — we just don’t talk about my dad. I told her, “I don’t want any updates about him until he’s dead,” basically. That’s the only update I want: when he dies.

MW: That sounds like a pretty rough childhood.

MELENDEZ: It wasn’t great. It was definitely, he ruled over our household in fear.

MW: Did you come out to them?

MELENDEZ: I did, yeah, when I was 21. I was living in Japan as a study abroad student. And my mom had contacted me with an update that her dad — my grandfather — had passed away suddenly. And it was the catalyst for a bunch of emotions and realizations about how much I had been hiding different parts of myself.

That night when I got back from school, I AOL Instant Messengered with my mom and I was like, “Hey, we have to talk.” And it took about probably thirty minutes of just back and forth before I was finally just like, “I’m gay.” Started crying, the whole thing. She told my dad, and he said he was fine with it. But after a childhood of being called a “sissy” and a “mama’s boy,” it’s like we all know how he really feels about it.

MW: How did your mom take the news?

MELENDEZ: She was fine. Honestly, the family knew for the most part. They were all just waiting for me to come out.

MW: You were a freelance writer, but you also had an interest in food. Were you a cook anywhere?

MELENDEZ: I worked as a line cook for a while at some diners back home in Bucksport, Maine. I did that for a while. I worked in some bakeries for a while. I helped a friend start a Japanese restaurant in Mexico while I was living there with my terrible dad. I worked in a bunch of kitchens throughout, but I had been interested in food since I was a little kid.

My mom taught me how to cook scrambled eggs when I was eight. From there, I would always hang around her while she was cooking dinner and stuff like that. I feel very at home and safe in the kitchen.

MW: Were you a natural in the kitchen?

MELENDEZ: Yeah. And I don’t know what I attribute that to. My parents are both good cooks. But this was also at the height of the Food Network doing its thing. So Ina Garten, Giada, Emeril, all those big celebrity chefs. That was in the late ’90s and early 2000s when that was all very popular. This was back when it was actually cooking shows and everybody had their own brand. So I learned a lot of different recipes from that.

And then I would just either work with whatever we had, or make alterations and then just started figuring out how to make my own things. I had this catalog of recipes in my head already. And then I like learning new kitchen skills and working with equipment and stuff like that.

MW: You also continued writing?

MELENDEZ: Yes. Freelance writing for a bunch of different sites. I did a little bit of travel writing for usatoday.com. I did some stuff for Tyra Banks’ old website — it doesn’t exist anymore. Kept doing that until assignments dried up. And then took a break and was working in a comic shop for a while and I helped run a small convention.

Through that, I met tons and tons of different artists and other creators. I started traveling to conventions to meet creators to invite them to our little con. And then I met my business partner, Bob, and we now run an agency that represents comic talent for their convention appearances.

I started working with him in 2013, and that’s how I became friends with Danica. Bob and I were working for yet another small convention, and Danica and her husband, Nick, were guests of that convention. She and I really hit it off. We had a lot of the same interests. We’re both huge anime and manga fans. We loved a lot of the same series. We were friends for four years until we were like, “What if we made a comic?”

And that’s how I got back into writing. It was 2017. I wrote the script for Chef’s Kiss, and Danica did some sample art, and then we sold it to Oni Press in 2018. It took a while for the contract and the deal and all that stuff like that. I think in late 2018 she started working on it. And then it came out in 2022.

MW: It’s a long process.

MELENDEZ: A very long process. And Danica, she gets on herself for being slow, but the thing is, she puts so much detail into those backgrounds. That’s the reason. She creates these beautiful, rich backgrounds full of detail. And I was like, “It’s not that you’re slow, you’re just doing a lot of work on every page, and that takes time.” She’s super detail-oriented and the book is so, so much richer for it. I loved, loved, loved creating this book and this whole world with her.

MW: Do you remember the feeling when you actually held the final product in your hand?

MELENDEZ: Yeah, yeah. I remember they sent us an advance copy. And just holding it and being able to flip through it and be like, “Oh, we did it. It’s real. We really did it,” it was really surreal. It was really nice. Working with Danica was a dream. Hank Jones [the colorist] was incredible. He did, as you can see, a beautiful job.

MW: So it was everything you hoped for when you finally got it?

MELENDEZ: Yeah. There’s not really much I would change about this book, certainly nothing that either of them did. The art is stunning. The colors are beautiful. That scene where Ben and Liam are up on the rooftop overlooking the sunset, those colors are just gorgeous. I’m very, very proud of this book.

 

MW: There’s a bit I loved — you have a montage of the roommates putting the apartment together and it’s all done with rapid, one-word panels: “Illuminate, stack, install, display, approve,” and so on. In those nine or so panels, you tell an entire day’s worth of story in an economical and vibrant way that could only be done using this format. It’s extraordinary.

MELENDEZ: I’m writing the sequel right now, and I feel like maybe those montages are going to be part of my signature style. I have another montage in the sequel, and it’s just two pages of different things all happening over the course of an evening at the restaurant. Hopefully, even though you’re only looking at eight panels, you can get the sense that several hours have gone by and now everyone is tired.

MW: There are people who criticize the graphic novel form, but they’re missing the forest for the trees. There’s a lot more to this art form than meets the eye.

MELENDEZ: There are people out there who don’t consider them real books. There are people out there who still consider comics just for kids. And there are plenty of comics that are absolutely not for kids. I am sure there are educators out there who don’t want their students reading comics and graphic novels.

I’m like, “Listen, as long as these kids are reading, don’t stop them. Don’t stop them from reading.” If they don’t want to read Huck Finn or whatever, find a graphic novel that’s comparable. This format breaks down the story in a way that makes it a little more digestible for kids who have trouble reading. There are a lot of people who are comic book fans and comic book creators that learned how to read from comic books — and I’m one of them.

MW: Can you comment a bit about your overall approach to Chef’s Kiss?

MELENDEZ: When we were coming up with the concept for this book, one of the things I said right off the bat was that I wanted to make something for teenage or 20-something-year-old me. Because when I was that age, you didn’t see stuff like this on the shelves. And there were BL and Yaoi Manga, Japanese stories about gay love, but a lot of them contained pretty nasty non-consensual storylines.

We were never going to do anything like that. We also didn’t want there to be queer trauma in it. There are tons of books and graphic novels and stuff that have that horrifying coming out story, and the terror that we all have and the anxiety we all have about coming out and just being our authentic selves. And I was like, “I don’t want any of that in this. I want everybody that is queer to basically be out already and nobody has to have their coming out. Nobody has to have the confrontation with the parents.” Nothing about sexuality anyway. Obviously, there is a confrontation with parents….

MW: There is, but what it’s about is unexpected.

MELENDEZ: We just wanted a gay love story that was sweet and cute and wholesome. That was just very important to us. And then as far as the career stuff Ben goes through, I just wanted something that was relatable.

MW: One of the main characters is a pig. He’s very important to the story.

MELENDEZ: Very important.

MW: Why a pig?

MELENDEZ: I love pigs. I think they’re so cute. Obviously, you can see in the background part of my Monokuro Boo plush collection. And in a lot of anime and manga, and also in Disney movies, you have that pet that becomes like the mascot that’s smarter than the average animal. It doesn’t speak or anything, but it has some agency, it has some sentience that a normal wild animal wouldn’t. And we just wanted a cute little mascot for this. And having that thing where the pig is a taste tester is very silly and fun, and it’s just a little bit of magical realism. It’s otherwise a completely normal world — except for the pig.

MW: You said you’re working on a sequel. What can you tell us about it?

MELENDEZ: So the way that Chef’s Kiss deals with these typical young adult problems of trying to figure out what you want to do with your life, and maybe defying the expectations that everyone else has for you, and doing what is right for yourself, and being able to choose what that is, this next one picks up more or less right after Volume One.

It goes from about Halloween to Christmas. And it’s going to deal with early relationship problems of getting used to a new person who is in your life. Being scared that any little thing that you do is going to just flip a switch in this person’s mind and make them not interested in you anymore. All of those anxieties.

MW: Are you envisioning this as a full series?

MELENDEZ: I’ve always wanted to do a total of four books, so that it would be more or less a year in the life of these people. So Volume One takes place in the fall. Two will take place in the winter. And then if we get a third and a fourth, it would be spring and summer.

MW: Finally, what would be your advice to somebody who wants to break into working in the illustrated novel or comic book field?

MELENDEZ: I get asked this on panels quite a bit, and I think my answer is the same as that of a lot of creators: Just do it. You have to just do it.

You will have imposter syndrome no matter how many awards you win, how many you’re nominated for, how many times you continue to get work. Just continue putting work out, and continue to grow your fan base. No matter how many people tell you to your face how great you are and how much your books mean to them, you will always have imposter syndrome. And you just need to tell that little voice that tells you that you’re bad at this to “Shut up,” and just do the work and put the work out. Find your audience, and then keep doing the work.

MW: Are you over your imposter syndrome?

MELENDEZ: [Laughs.] No, no. I’ve written a book that’s been translated into multiple languages. We won awards for it. We were nominated for an Eisner, which is the top award in our industry. And now I’m writing this sequel and I’m like, “I don’t know if I know what I’m doing.” I’ll probably feel that for every book I write.

MW: I’d say you know what you’re doing.

MELENDEZ: [Laughs.] Well, one of these days someone is going to read one of my books and be like, “I knew it! He was faking it this whole time.”

Learn more about Jarrett Melendez and purchase Chef’s Kiss (Oni Press) at www.jarrettwrites.com. The book is also available at www.amazon.com.

Follow Jarrett Melendez on X at @JarrettMelendez.

Awesome Con is at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center, 801 Allen Y. Lew Pl. NW, in Washington, D.C. Show dates Friday, March 8, from 1 to 8 p.m., Saturday, March 9, from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m., and Sunday, March 10, from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.

Single-day badges run from $48 to $60, with 3-day badges costing $95. Premium badges are also available. For more information on badge options and a full lineup of events and panels throughout the weekend, visit www.awesome-con.com.