Renee Kelly plants some new seeds for her Harvest

Renée Kelly’s list of New Year’s resolutions is more ambitious than the usual self-improvement rundown. She wants, for instance, to open a restaurant on the Missouri side of the state line. And if she has her way, 2015 will be the year when she’s featured in a new cable series about operating a restaurant with a different approach.

The 34-year-old chef and restaurateur has reason to feel confident about hitting those goals. Things tend to go her way.

She opened Caenan Castle — the century-old Shawnee structure that she bought and renovated with her parents, construction-company owners Roger and Nancy Williams — in 2003 as a private supper club. Then the recession came, and Kelly learned an important business lesson: People like to book wedding receptions in castles.

As the financial crisis ebbed, Kelly began working on the next thing: a full-service restaurant. So, in 2012, she opened a farm-to-table dining venue, Renée Kelly’s Harvest, in the castle. She says her restaurant was an immediate success, but she hasn’t stopped tweaking her ideas.

“I’ve refined the menu over the last couple of years and certainly downsized it,” Kelly says. “The cooking techniques are the same, but the presentation has a good deal more finesse. Now the menu changes every 10 to 12 days. Not drastically, depending on the ingredients that are coming into the kitchen. I spend a lot more time on detail.”

For a perfection-driven chef, the devil is in those details — easily visible on-screen if a camera crew happens to be following her around the kitchen on a busy Saturday night. But if the proposed cable series gets picked up — Kelly is wary of giving away too many details — that’s exactly how she’ll spend the first half of 2015.

“The producers of the show already shot a mini-pilot in October,” Kelly says. “And that’s what they’re selling to the network. Everyone is being super tight-lipped about the project until the deal is signed, but I can say that it will be a softer approach than some of the more aggressive restaurant shows on cable networks. There won’t be a Gordon Ramsay screaming in the background. It will be more about the choices that I make in my everyday life of running a restaurant.”

Kelly has what a potential TV star needs: She’s young, attractive, articulate and vivacious. And her personal story — she was diagnosed with severe food allergies and Candida albicans eight years ago, requiring her to completely change her diet and her habits — offers audiences a chef with an unusual backstory. “We would be the focal point for the first season,” Kelly says of her restaurant. She expects to hear about the show by March.

In the meantime, she says, she’s fielding offers from Missouri business developers, who hope to lure her into creating a smaller, perhaps bistro-sized version of Renée Kelly’s Harvest east of State Line Road.

“I’m trying to pull together the funding for that project,” Kelly says, “although I haven’t found the right location yet. I like Brookside, but Waldo is a possibility. So is 39th Street. I’m really in no great rush. I love Caenan Castle, but it’s a lot of work. I’ve got a pretty full plate already.”

Kelly says she has cut back on the number of national culinary competitions she used to enter, including the Los Angeles Food & Wine Festival and Pebble Beach Food & Wine. “I have way too much stress in my life as it is,” she says. “If it feels right, I might do one in 2015, but the problem was that it took a week to participate in the competition and two months to recover.”

Her recovery process includes — as you would expect — healthy eating. But Harvest, she is quick to point out, “is not a health-food restaurant,” and Kelly isn’t a prude about her diet. “I love butter and I love bacon,” she says.

Still, she’s upping her healthy-living game in 2015 — and giving herself yet another project — with a series of healthy-cooking classes at Harvest. “We’ll be offering more classes this year,” she says, “which people can find out about on our Facebook page or our e-mail newsletter.”

And there are a few, more everyday things on her mind in the new year. “I’d like to date more,” she says, laughing. “Some people don’t seem to understand that I never have Saturday nights off. But I’m lucky. I have lovely friends, and I get to spend time with them. That is, when I do get time off.”

Renee Kelly’s Harvest hosts the latest Pitch “Bite Club” event January 15 and serves a soup course, a fish entrée, a Scotch filet (“It’s a bigboy’s filet,” Kelly says) and dessert to local food bloggers. For information on participating, e-mail ashley.reed@pitch.com.