A couple of months ago, during the height of the summer harvest, I was shopping at the Union Square Greenmarket, feeling both totally inspired and utterly overwhelmed.  There weren’t enough meals in my week to eat, nor hours in my day to prepare (let alone dollars in my wallet to buy), everything that looked so beautiful and surely tasted delicious.  And yet I watched – as I had many times before, with some reverence and a bit of jealousy – as chefs and buyers for local restaurants quickly scooped up myriads of seasonal vegetables and fruits in massive quantities.  Oh, to be a Greenmarket-inspired chef!  And then it dawned on me – I too could shop like a chef if I simply accompanied one of the franny’s chefs on his regular Greenmarket sprees.

So just a few days later I was back again, this time joining one of our chefs, John Adler, on his tri-weekly morning visit to Union Square. When I arrived just after 8:00, John had already picked up three flats of tomatoes – an array of heirlooms, sungolds and sweet 100s – from Eckerton Hill Farm. He put me right to work at the breathtaking Yuno’s Farm booth, filling two large bags with lima beans as he filled two with green and wax beans.  Added to those were several bags of peppers and summer squash, plus a few minutes of friendly chit-chat with the farmers, and then we continued on to the next stand.  We snagged all of the fennel at Norwich Farms, less a small stalk that the farmer popped in his mouth as he handed them over.  (“I just had some raw onion, do you mind if I take a bit?” he had asked a moment earlier.  And then, upon chewing, he added satisfyingly, “A natural freshener”.)  

Within an hour we had made several more stops and picked up no fewer than: fifteen bunches of basil, two bunches of lovage, five of savory, seven heads of cabbage, a flat of San Marzano tomatoes, about a dozen bunches each of mustard greens & dandelion greens, two bags of fingerling potatoes, a bag full of Kirby cucumbers, some frying peppers and six dozen eggs.  At each stand we visited, John and the farmers greeted each other amicably, chatting about everything from ordering chicken (“We butcher on Thursday, so we can have some for you on Monday, but call me beforehand and I’ll set it aside for you because we sell out”) to the previous night’s Mets game - apparently Bill Maxwell from Maxwell’s farm is a big fan.  Maybe that’s how he developed such a great relationship with John, Andrew and franny’s.  Well, that and his superlative produce.

And while the chefs from nearby, larger Manhattan restaurants have their wheelbarrows and handcarts to load up and walk back to their kitchens, John and I have the New York City yellow cabs as our chauffeurs.  We transferred our bags from where we had been stockpiling them behind one farmer’s truck to the curb along the west side of Union Square, and optimistically raised our arms to hail our ride back to franny’s.  Several started to stop but then, upon seeing all of our baggage, shook their heads and quickly accelerated.  Finally one conceded, we loaded his trunk to capacity in seconds, slipped into the backseat with tomato flats between us and cartons of eggs carefully placed at our feet, and were off to Brooklyn.

Admittedly, I hadn’t really thought about the next step of this whole Greenmarket process.  As far as I was concerned, we would go to the market, have a grand old time picking out pounds and pounds of the most beautiful produce, and then it would somehow get back to franny’s where the cooks would turn in into perfectly simple, fresh, delicious dishes.  On the surface level, yes, this was accurate.  But I quickly learned about the equally important second half of our market trip, which included unloading and storing all of our goods.  Items needed to be divided and put into bus tubs lined with “linen-likes” (special, thick paper towels that are, well, similar to actual linen), different kinds of beans could go in the same tub but needed to stay segregated, herbs went in special little clear bins, every tub got a masking tape label announcing its ingredients, whether they had been cleaned or if they were still fresh from the farm, and their date: “dirty dandy greens, 8/25”.  Some things went into the walk-in refrigerator, some onto dry storage shelves that also hold packaged goods like pasta, salt, and olive oil, and some were handed right off to Robie and Max for immediate prep.  It was nearing 11:00 when we finished, while Franny worked in the office and Andrew and John discussed one of the appetizer dishes from the menu and how they wanted to tweak it.  This conversation naturally led into – what else – last night’s disappointing Mets game, and I took that as a cue that my work was done (I am, after all, a Red Sox fan).

My first professional Greenmarket trip concluded, I headed home feeling much less overwhelmed and much more inspired – I had the night off but contemplated going in for dinner to enjoy much of the items that I helped pick out only hours earlier.  I have continued to join in on the Greenmarket trips as often as possible, and I’ve continued to learn, meet farmers and chefs, and feel lucky to have this relatively unique opportunity.

While the dishes at franny’s highlight fresh ingredients and serve as a very tangible sign of the changing seasons and the dynamism of farms’ harvests, frequenting a farmers’ market – as I am sure many of you are already aware – makes this all the more apparent.  Tomatoes and blackberries yielded to cauliflower and plums, which have paved a path for sunchokes and concord grapes.  One morning a couple of weeks ago we loaded up on all of Cherry Lane Farms’ lima beans, the last of the season, which was close to double the amount John had planned on getting – the temptation as we thought about the months that would pass before they would be available again was too great to leave any behind.  Most recently, we gathered brussels sprouts and pumpkin for appetizers that embrace the crisp, more autumnal October air.

It was on this same trip, while buying more than 20 lbs of fingerling potatoes from Franca at Berried Treasure Farm, that we had an interesting conversation with one of her other workers.  After learning that John is one of the chefs in the franny’s kitchen, she excitedly shared that her nephew is in school to be a chef as well, and how talented he is. She wasn’t shy to declare that she was the one who had introduced him and turned him on to good food at an early age; he would visit her and enjoy her meals full of fresh, local produce, over the perhaps more typical canned and boxed supermarket ingredients he was exposed to at his home.  It was a perfect, true illustration of the significance and quality of farm-to-table cooking.  And so, from there we continued our shopping, one key step in the process of providing meals full of fresh, local produce to franny’s guests, from the most informed to the most impressionable, and everyone in between.

A restaurant in Brooklyn, NY, franny's is fully committed to local, sustainable agriculture and environmentally-friendly business practices.  This post has been adapted from an article written by the author, a server and host, for the franny's Fall 2008 newsletter.