The Pre-Dawn, Gear-Grinding Realities Behind ‘Farm to Table’

The primary methods by which restaurants receive product from independent farms is directly via door-to-door delivery by the farmer themselves or a delivery driver the farm employs, or by visiting the farms’ stands at local farmers’ markets.

During the seasons that permit it, Tayler and/or Thomas visit the Green City Market—a sprawling Brigadoon of all things edible—in Mary Bartelme Park in the city’s West Loop on Wednesdays and Saturdays. There they replenish their inventory, especially from farms that don’t deliver to them, including Smits Farms, from which they purchase the thyme and rosemary for our dish. But most of the restaurant’s proteins (fish, poultry, and meats) and produce are delivered directly to them by farms located within a roughly one-hundred-twenty-mile radius of Chicago. (Dry goods mostly arrive in mammoth trucks emblazoned with the logos of national gourmet suppliers like Chefs’ Warehouse and Rare Tea Cellar.)

For a sense of what deliveries entail, I meet Marc Hoffmeister at Nichols Farm’s cleaning and packing facility at 3:30 a.m., electric light beaming in Spielbergian shafts from the structure’s handful of loading docks. The sky above may be dark as squid ink, but here the business day is well underway: Clusters of workers in T-shirts and work pants swarm each dock, and if you’re still shaking the sand out of your cranium as you navigate from one end of the hangar-like structure to the other, you run the risk of getting pancaked by a forklift. Everyone seems entirely too energized and enthused for this hour of the morning. Take, for instance, the man who speeds past me in a forklift.

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