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There's a small corner of the restaurant world where food is art and the plate is just as exquisite as the mouthful.
In this world, chefs are constantly looking for new creative materials for the next stunning presentation.
The tiny community of farmers who grow vegetables for the elite chefs prize creativity, too, not just in what they grow, but how they grow it. They're seeking perfection, in vegetable form and flavor, like this tiny cucumber that looks like a watermelon called a cucumelon.
The Chef's Garden is a specialty vegetable farm in Huron, Ohio, about an hour west of Cleveland. It's a family farm, where three generations of the Jones family work side by side with about 175 employees. It's a place where vegetables are scrupulously selected and then painstakingly coaxed from the ground.
This farm produces an extraordinary selection of vegetable varieties, ranging from the familiar to the exotic, like the cucumelon. In the summer, they can offer chefs 80 varieties of tomatoes. Through the year, they're growing over a dozen kinds of lettuce of different textures and colors, like Merlot, in their greenhouses.
When Lee Jones (who wears this ensemble of blue overalls, white shirt and red bow tie every single day) was a teenager, his family grew ordinary vegetables for the wholesale market, like a lot of their neighbors. Then in 1983, the Joneses went bankrupt and lost almost all their land. All they could do with the few acres that were left was supply a small stand at local farmers markets.
One of their customers was a food writer in Cleveland desperate to find the squash blossoms she'd tasted in France and couldn't find in America. So they went back to the zucchini patch and picked some for her. She was ecstatic, and they began to realize there were unmet needs in the world of fine dining.
It wasn't too long before the Joneses began to get connected to chefs around the country — people like Alain Ducasse, Daniel Boulud, Charlie Trotter and Thomas Keller. The great French chef Jean Louis Palladin at Watergate in Washington, D.C., told them, 'Your food is s*** in America,'" Lee recalls. In particular, he was talking about the vegetables. And he told them they could seize the opportunity to grow vegetables to the standards of chefs like him.
The farm covers 300 acres and supplies chefs all year round, with the help of greenhouses and hoop houses that can be moved from plot to plot in the winter.
The Joneses say they need to always have something new to offer the chefs. So they have a "secret" experimental garden and greenhouse where they test out new varieties. Visitors are not allowed inside.
Attention to detail flows through every step of the farming, harvesting and shipping process. And it all starts with the soil.
The soil on this farm gets remarkably special treatment.
The Joneses are fortunate that their farm is located just a few miles inland from Lake Erie. That means they started with some of the richest sandy loam soil in the world, formed from thousands of years of deposits from the lake bottom.
But they've dedicated themselves to improving it by resting the soil and adding nutrients to deepen the layer of topsoil year after year.
The way they do that is by only planting one third of their land (100 acres) with vegetables at any one time.
The remaining 200 acres are sown with cover crops like Sudan grass, oats and clover that return nitrogen and other nutrients that the vegetables take out.
Rotating crops and cover cropping this way is one of the secrets to the vegetables' distinctive flavor, Bob Senior says.
The Joneses, like the chefs, are always looking for surprising new varieties. Lee tries out the latest seeds from plant breeders and combs through dusty agricultural books.
Another thing the Joneses try to tightly control is the seeds they put in the ground. If you buy thousands of them in bulk the way they do, many are bound to fail.
They check every batch for their germination rate to try ensure they're only putting the seeds most likely to succeed in the ground.
They also have a machine to sort seeds for size and weight to help them eliminate the weakest ones. The goal is to guarantee chefs a consistent product on exactly the day they need it.
There's a whole lab at Chef's Garden with a small staff dedicated to monitoring and measuring the seeds and the soil.
It's just one branch of Chef's Garden's highly specialized staff, focused on different aspects of quality control. All together, they give this farm an unusual ratio of workers to acres: about one person per half-acre.
About 25 of the 178 employees are temporary workers who come mostly from the Aguascalientes region of Mexico to the farm to work nine months a year.
These workers pick everything to order — from the microgreens to the tiny eggplants and cucumelons.
Picking these crops is labor-intensive, sometimes because chefs always ask for miniature versions of their favorites. When they're small, they pack more flavor and make for stunning garnishes.
If a chef wants 100 nasturtium flowers the size of a dime for garnishing, Lee is happy to oblige — in part because he has the manpower to pick them.
Since there are so many stages in a plant's life, the farm has developed an eight-stage patented set of sizes including micro, petite, young, flowering and seeded. Some vegetables come in every single size.
The precise moment they are picked also matters if you want them to be perfect. Take for example, the squash blossoms, which are only harvested during a narrow hour-and-a-half window in the early morning.
The same goes for the lettuce, which is harvested at dawn when the air, the ground and the plants are coolest. The goal, particularly in the summer, is to harvest them at the lowest possible temperature so that they can stay fresh longer.
By the time the vegetables reach the packing room, they're treated like jewels.
Bob Jones, Lee's brother, oversees this stage, where lettuce rosettes are carefully packed with insulation. If the box is filled with tomatoes, it's fitted with foam padding. In the summer, ice packs go into the boxes to keep the vegetables cold if they're headed to hot locales.
Nearly all the vegetables that leave here by truck or airplane reach kitchens within a day of coming out of the ground.
Shipping vegetables from Ohio to California or New York or Florida means these vegetables most certainly won't be local once they reach diners. They'll have quite a few additional greenhouse gas emissions attached to them, too.
And if you're buying this precious produce, it will, of course, cost you. Joneses say their costs are probably 2.5 times as great a regular production system where you're farming every acre every year. A two-pound box of lettuce from Chef's Garden goes for about $24.
But chefs will pay top dollar for these exquisite vegetables .
Chef's Garden is starting to sell directly to consumers via mail order. And Lee is hopeful about this new frontier for the business.
This has been a special multimedia project of NPR's food blog, The Salt.
