Chef Melissa D’Elia
Melissa D'Elia is a personal chef and alumna of the Natural Gourmet Institute for Food and Health in New York. She owned Down To Earth, one of the first organic vegan restaurants in New Jersey. In 2007, she sold her business to pursue travel and to focus on her personal chef enterprise. She loves creating bespoke menus for clientele at all types of clients, whether it’s meal prep clients or highly curated dinner events. D’Elia has been featured on NPR's All Things Considered, Viceland’s Bong Appetit, and is a featured chef in Vice's Munchies Cookbook. Her work was featured in Kitchen Toke Magazine, the first nationally-distributed publication about cooking with cannabis. Melissa hosts The Making of Things podcast, which explores the processes by which artists make tangible creations from the seeds of ideas. She discusses this concept with makers and artists, digging into the inspiration they find to mold and shape their initial concepts, the process in which they create what they do, and the essentials in the construction of their work. She believes in the therapeutic value of cooking with emotion, living with a spirit of generosity, and doing acts of service. In these ways, she develops connections and long-lasting beneficial relationships in her life and strengthens the communities where she works. She serves survivors of trauma through her work in teaching meditation and Breathwork classes. Chef Melissa is a lifelong lover of tattooing, a body art collector, a passionate host, a late-night reader. Lately, she works obsessively on The Making of Things episodes, which feature the music of Daniel Higgs and Fountainsun as their main theme. In the little spare time she carves out of her days, she will happily read quietly on a porch in the sun.
