An iconic Durham restaurant will reopen. Meet the new owner.

Durham chefs Matt Kelly and Scott Howell were sitting at the back table at Foster’s Market in late September, eating soup while the early edges of Hurricane Ian flitted against the windows.

Side by side, Kelly wears the full and graying beard of a sailor who’s seen both kind and harsh seas, while Howell has his own gray hairs overtaking his long sideburns.

Though only a generation apart, Howell and Kelly embody two great eras of Durham’s dining scene and with the sale of one of the city’s historic restaurants, have connected that past and present.

Nana’s, an ambitious old school restaurant that helped plant the seeds of Durham’s current dining Golden Age, has changed hands and will reopen early next year.

Chef and owner Scott Howell has sold his longtime restaurant to Durham chef Matt Kelly, owner of city hotspots like Mateo and Mothers & Sons.

Kelly credited Nana’s as an inspiration early in his cooking career and felt the comfortable fine dining restaurant still has a lot to say in 2022.

“Nana’s and Magnolia Grill, it was everything I as a young cook worshiped and aspired to be part of,” Kelly said, also mentioning the acclaimed and influential Magnolia Grill of Ben and Karen Barker. “I probably wouldn’t be cooking in this town if it wasn’t for Scott, if it wasn’t for Ben. I wouldn’t be here.”

Creating Nana’s

Howell was 29 when he opened Nana’s in 1992, putting the bar’s liquor on the maître d’s credit card and sleeping on a friend’s couch for a few weeks to save on rent. Still, it was a dream, Howell said, lived for half of his life.

Before Nana’s, Howell attended the Culinary Institute of America, a top cooking school, worked in famous kitchens in New York and Los Angeles and finally in Durham as a sous chef at Magnolia Grill. After a year and a half it was time to find out what it meant to create a restaurant of his own.

“I wanted to have my own restaurant, I wanted to live that dream and quite honestly I got to do that for 28 years,” Howell said. “I mean, it was fun.”

With Nana’s, Howell said he set out to create a European style restaurant in an era of Durham where fine dining often meant steak and potatoes at a country club. Two famous dishes, Howell’s risotto and a chicken liver pate, seemed avant-garde at the time, he said. But while the tables were draped in white tablecloths and the menu influenced by the trends of New York and San Francisco, Howell built Nana’s to be lived in.

“Yes it’s my restaurant that I opened, but the concept of how you succeed is to make everyone feel like it’s their restaurant,” Howell said. “We had guests a lot of days, you could shake a martini and set it down at five o’clock and they’d be there.”

Handing over an icon

Succession is rare in the restaurant industry, with menus and restaurants often reflecting a moment in taste and trend, then giving way to something else. But Nana’s is built on the classics, on dishes that predate it by decades, but which Howell helped bring to Durham and enliven with seasonal North Carolina ingredients.

Kelly’s done this sort of thing before. In the early 2000s he brought new energy to an old style restaurant, running the kitchen at Giorgios Bakatsias’ French bistro Vin Rouge, reestablishing an electricity that continues to this day.

“We lost Magnolia Grill, we lost Crook’s Corner, we’re losing these things and no one’s really saying anything about them, these foundations,” Kelly said. “I know there’s a market for people who care and enjoy this kind of restaurant and know the difference.”

Howell first closed Nana’s in 2018 after 26 years, then reopened it a year later, only to run into a global pandemic and shutter the restaurant indefinitely.

Over the years, Howell said he’s had numerous conversations about selling Nana’s and its building, which he put on the market in 2020. In Kelly he said he saw something of a kindred spirit, a chef willing to honor the restaurant’s legacy, while still building his own.

“The only person who was serious about (buying Nana’s) was Matt and he was serious about it because you could tell he cared about it,” Howell said. “I didn’t want to sell it to someone who wasn’t going to take care of it.”

Howell first approached Kelly about Nana’s in the month after the 2019 gas explosion in Durham, which killed two people and closed Kelly’s restaurant Saint James for nearly a year. At that point, Kelly said he couldn’t imagine buying Nana’s while still processing the grief and trauma of the explosion.

“I was completely overwhelmed, I’m still trying to get out of what that explosion did to me,” Kelly said. “I told Scott, I’m so knee deep in something I can’t even express to you.”

But the idea never left him and he said one day in the pandemic it hit him again like a bolt of lightning.

“I think the idea came from a lot longer than I really realized,” Kelly said. “There are things that happen to you and you don’t know the impact yet. That seed was planted, I think there was always the idea of being able to take over a restaurant, as long as I understand the cuisine. I understand Scott’s cuisine. I practice French and Italian food. That’s a huge driver, that old world cuisine.”

The new Nana’s

The Matt Kelly version of Nana’s is still being written and renovated. But for a menu, Kelly said to expect eight to 10 appetizers, including raw oysters, and seven or eight entrees. The chicken liver pate and risotto will remain etched on the menu, as well as regular appearances of Nana’s roast chicken. Kelly plans to have two nightly pastas, one with a hand cut noodle and one stuffed, a perfected salad and a renewed emphasis on seafood.

The bar will serve classic cocktails, including plans to stir up the coldest martini in Durham.

Longtime chef de cuisine of Mateo, Nate Garyantes, will lead the Nana’s kitchen and be a partner in the restaurant, Kelly said.

‘It’s a jewel’

Kelly recently closed his beloved seafood restaurant Saint James, which ended its five year run ahead of plans from Brightleaf owner Asana Partners to redevelop the block. Saint James had replaced the fried fish and oyster bar Fishmonger’s and Kelly’s menu balanced the deep fried history of the space with exquisite shellfish towers and fresh local fish.

At Nana’s he aims to strike a similar tone, honoring the past while embracing a new era.

“For me it’s giving it a facelift, balancing change and progress and (Nana’s) evolving,” Kelly said. “I want to do it in a way where I’m not alienating people, but I also don’t want to alienate myself.”

For Howell, who plans to spend retirement largely from the deck of his boat, he’s touched by Kelly giving Nana’s a second chapter.

“It’s a jewel,” Howell said of Nana’s. “I really appreciate the fact that he’s making Nana’s a brand and moving forward with it. It makes me feel like I did something, like the brand meant something to people in Durham.”