Primo Restaurant in Rockland

Heading into its 26th season, Primo in Rockland continues to set the standard for what a restaurant can be when it’s built around place, purpose, and persistence. Chef Melissa Kelly opened Primo in 2000 with a vision that went far beyond the plate. Today, the property is a fully integrated farm and restaurant where pigs, chickens, bees, greenhouses, and gardens feed a menu that changes daily and a team of more than 80 in peak season.

“I hate the term farm-to-table,” Kelly says, “but we are a restaurant on a farm.” The distinction is key. Primo’s ingredients are often harvested just hours before service—lettuces, root vegetables, eggs, herbs, edible flowers. Meats are butchered in-house, often raised on-site. Even the sourdough starter used in the restaurant’s bread has been alive and fed daily for 30 years. It’s a system designed to serve food that’s not just seasonal, but deeply responsive to the land—and a staff trained to treat ingredients with the same care used to grow them.

That ethic of care shows up in the dining experience as well. Though the restaurant seats 180 at full capacity, it doesn’t feel like it. Kelly and her team intentionally preserved the old bones of the 160-year-old house, leaning into its cozy, intimate layout rather than opening it up. Salvaged floorboards from Maine schoolhouses now top the bar. Horsehair plaster walls were painstakingly restored. “I wanted it to feel warm and welcoming,” Kelly says. “Like someone really cares about it.”

Outside, the restaurant has grown in new directions. A pavilion built during the pandemic—now known as 0KM, a nod to the Italian phrase for food sourced just steps away—has become an extension of the kitchen and a summer hangout for guests. On Sundays, it hosts live music, oysters, small plates, and a picnic-style setup with space for families to relax while kids explore the gardens or visit the pigs and chickens. “It’s really changed the dynamic of what we do,” Kelly says.

Still, the heart of Primo is the regulars. “We have people with standing reservations every Wednesday, folks who sit at the same barstools every Friday night,” she said. The kitchen’s dedication to “doing things the hard way” has built not just a loyal following, but a lasting identity. “The food is better because it’s fresh and made with care,” she says, “but it’s also about the relationships—between the team, the guests, and the place itself. That’s what keeps people coming back.”

FAMOUS FOR:
Its hyperlocal approach, harvesting ingredients daily from the on-site farm, and for a kitchen that does everything the hard way, from baking bread with a decades-old sourdough starter to curing meats in-house. It’s the kind of place where guests return year after year, not just for the food but because it feels like coming home.

ADDRESS:
2 Main St in Rockland, ME

WEBSITE:
primorestaurant.com

photos by Peter Logue