For Melisse Shaban, cooking up buzzy hair products and making dinner require a similar skillset.
“You set the right expectation for yourself and the person you’re serving,” said Shaban, the founder and chief executive officer of Virtue Labs. “As product developers and marketers, we are service providers. If we do our jobs well, we meet your expectations. When something meets or exceeds your expectations, it’s hard to choose something else.”
She takes that same ethos into the kitchen. Shaban grew up in a food-centric household with a focus on homemade cuisines. “My mother was Italian, my father was second-generation from Russia. Food was such an important part of the gatherings,” Shaban said. “We cooked together, we laughed, we drank wine.”
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“I was very, very close to both my parents, but extremely close to my mother. She really taught me cooking,” she continued. “As I developed out in my life, food and wine became really very much part of my DNA.”
Today, Shaban still cooks every meal, never ordering out. She’s slowly expanding her expertise outside of Italian culinary staples, which are her specialty. “I do a lot of branzino, I do a lot of roasted chicken — Ina Garten’s roasted chicken is my favorite thing in the world,” she said. “I’m doing a lot of shopping now in Asian markets, trying to fuse these two cuisines together, and please everybody in my house at the same time.”
And though she’s sharpened her skills over the years, the pandemic allowed her to blend her home hobbies and work life.
“You had the ability to start dinner at 4 p.m. or 5 p.m. and still be working because you’d be on the phone. It was a very unique change,” Shaban said of the pandemic. “I could be working until 8 p.m. at night and still be cooking.”
TikTok has also expanded her horizons. “It’s taught me a lot of new trips and tricks, and I’m doing things a little differently now,” Shaban said. “You used to go out and buy a cookbook, or watch the Food Network. Now, it’s all in my feed, and I’m trying things I normally wouldn’t necessarily do. I saw this great recipe for eggplant meatballs. I wouldn’t even know where to go look for something like that.”
Given her decades living in New York, Shaban remains loyal to her Manhattan eateries, like the Jean-Georges- and Cedric Vongerichten-helmed Perry St, and Rita Sodi’s I Sodi.
“I love Rita Sodi so much, I love her food, because she can take the simplest dish and get the most powerful flavor because of the freshness of her ingredients,” Shaban said. “She came out of Calvin Klein, and she has this huge sense of brand and expectation, and it’s always extraordinary. Everyone that works there speaks perfect Italian. That’s what a great brand is — it really holds on to its heritage and it doesn’t chase trends.”