THE FARMER AND CHEF SERIES: CHEF TO FARMER, NOT FARM TO TABLE.

In the name of full disclosure, Rolf and Daughters might be my favorite restaurant. I have worked and eaten at many great establishments over the years, but R.A.D.––as it so appropriately abbreviates––has served two of my most memorable meals. That being said, I suspected this may be the case long before I ever came in for dinner. The chef/owner, Philip Krajeck, has been coming to our farmers' market for several years now to buy produce. And for Philip, quality is paramount. He has bought loads of produce from us over those years but he has also turned down perfect-looking July carrots when the flavor wasn't there. He has passed on chanterelles when they seemed a little beyond their prime. I've always felt you can tell a good wine by simply talking to the winemaker, and I like to think you can tell a good restaurant by simply watching the chef at market. So I had no doubts, by this measure, that Rolf and Daughters would be good.But Rolf and Daughters isn't just a good restaurant, it's also an uniquely subtle one. The atmosphere is lively, italicized by fresh, creative food (and drink), that seems to prefer its focus be more on the experience than the chef––the experience than the farmer. No one at R.A.D. would likely describe the place as a farm-to-table, despite the fact that the chefs buy a vast majority of their food from local farmers. In fact, in the day I spent with them, they filled an entire pick-up truck full of food from no less than six different small farms. But this, as impressive as it is, is just not something they feel compelled to advertise. There are no blackboards with the farmers' names, no farmer portraits on the walls, nothing in their literature about farm-to-anything (in fact, nowhere in their online profiles does it even say who the chef is, let alone the farmers). They simply let the food advertise this for them.Curious about this, I asked Philip and his sous chef Owen Clark why Rolf and Daughters doesn't play up the farm-to-table thing, since they do it so legitimately. They both said they'd prefer to simply serve the best tasting food, and let the quality of that food reveal to people that it came from good farmers. "Doing it quietly," Philip added, "makes a bigger reverberation." And it has. Rolf and Daughters has already in their young existence been heaped with accolades including the number three Best New Restaurant from Bon Appétit in 2013. Moreover, you know it's reverberating because they are a mid- to high-end restaurant––in a city filled with mid- to high-end restaurants––that stays packed. In other words, when people want a nice meal, they may try other restaurants, but they go back to Rolf and Daughters. Again and again.Anyway, I felt it was important to profile Rolf and Daughters in this fashion to give you an idea of the type of chefs I was utilizing for this project. The ultimate goal is to understand how farmers can better serve chefs, and chefs can better serve farmers, so I needed a restaurant who greatly relied on these relationships to get to the bottom of it all. Next week, we'll dive a little further into those details––what farmers do right, what farmers do wrong, and we could all be doing better––so stay tuned.- Jesse.