A morning at Greenway Farm.

The drive to Greenway is forty-three minutes from the restaurant, give or take, depending on whether you hit the bridge before the school traffic. Chef Rosa makes it once a week in the summer and once every two weeks the rest of the year. I tagged along last Tuesday, partly because it was a beautiful morning and partly because I wanted to see the place that grows the tomatoes I serve people every night.

Greenway is run by Anna and Joe Castellanos. They bought the land in 2009, after fifteen years between them in restaurants in the city. The farm is forty-eight acres — small by industrial standards, big by anyone trying to do it carefully. They grow about ninety different vegetables, lean hard into heirloom varieties, and never use a single thing that ends in -cide.

The Cherokee Purples.

What we go for in summer are the Cherokee Purples. Anna started growing them after a guest at a wedding she catered in 2011 told her they were the best tomato she'd ever eaten. She'd never grown them. The next spring she put in two hundred plants. Now she puts in eight hundred. Three weeks of every August, those tomatoes are on every menu we write — sliced raw on focaccia, charred whole with burrata, halved and roasted under sea bass. They make the menu by being themselves.

Why we drive forty-three minutes for tomatoes.

"You can buy a Cherokee Purple from the supplier downtown," Anna told me, leaning against the bed of her truck. "They'll get you one that looks the same. It won't taste the same. They picked it green so it'd survive a refrigerated truck. Mine got picked yesterday afternoon, sat on a counter overnight, and is in your kitchen by ten."

That's the difference. There's no romanticism in it — just the math of how a tomato ripens. We pay about 30% more for hers than for the wholesale alternative. That money goes into Anna and Joe being able to keep doing this.

The eleven other farms.

Greenway is one of twelve. We have a cheesemonger, two seafood co-ops, a heritage-pork farm, a goat dairy, an apiary, a stone-fruit orchard, a microgreens grower, a mushroom forager, an egg co-op, and two grain mills. None of them are huge. Most have fewer than a dozen employees. Together they fill our walk-in every week, and together they're why our menu prices what it does.

The honest version of "sourced locally" is that it's expensive, fragile, and worth it. When the freezer broke last August, we lost forty pounds of frozen pork stock from the heritage farm. We didn't replace it with commodity stock — we just took the dish off the menu for two weeks. That's how this works.

If you ever want to know exactly where something on your plate came from, ask. Your server will know, or they'll find someone who does.