Restaurateurs Collaborate with Farmers and Suppliers to Produce Hard-to-Find Ingredients

Get more recipes, food news, and stories at wttw.com/food or by signing up for our Deep Dish newsletter. 

Thanks to farmers markets nourished by relationships built up over decades between farms and chefs like Rick Bayless, Sarah Stegner, and Jean Joho, it’s easy to purchase Michigan ramps, pasture-raised pork chops, and Illinois apples in Chicago. But what happens when a chef wants something that no one grows in the area?

Dario Monni grew up eating seasonal, locally grown produce like tardivo, a sweeter, curlier relative of radicchio, and puntarelle, a delicate but bitter chicory, in Veneto, Italy. To source those vegetables for Tortello, the bustling Wicker Park restaurant and pastificio he owns, he had to import them from Italy, a tiresome and expensive process. Until he met Adam Pollack.

Pollack runs Closed Loop Farms, which grows greens, flowers, herbs, and more in outdoor plots, a hoop house, and indoor growing trays at The Plant, a food incubator located inside an old meatpacking facility in Back of the Yards. Monni asked Pollack to grow him bitter greens, and Closed Loop set about getting the Italian crop to survive in the Midwest.  

“Tardivo is the hardest crop we grow,” says Pollack. “It likes a Mediterranean climate – those long cool seasons – which we don’t really get in Chicago.” But after a few growing cycles, the tardivo and puntarelle were a success. This year Monni was able to add his beloved raw greens to Tortello’s menu during their short seasons, the puntarelle in the classic Roman style – dressed with anchovies and garlic –  and the tardivo with pine nuts and agrodolce.

Now other chefs can benefit from Monni’s request and put locally grown tardivo or puntarelle on their own menus. Chefs like Diana Dávila from Mi Tocaya asked Pollack for ingredients like papalo and hoja santa. Now, the Mexican herbs are big sellers for Closed Loop, and any unsold fresh product gets harvested, dehydrated, and sent to Spirit Tea for blending into their herbal tonics.

Steve Freeman from Nichols Farm & Orchard is a familiar face to anyone who shops the 13 markets where the 300-acre McHenry County farm is a vendor. Always ready with a penknife to slice an apple for a taste, Freeman acts as the Nichols family’s unofficial spokesman. Recently, chef Christian Eckmann of Asador Bastian asked him if they’d grow the fresh piquillo peppers from Spain’s Basque Country that he had been trying to grow himself. “Nick [Nichols] said, ‘Just send me the seed, I’ll plant them,’” says Freeman. And if Asador Bastian doesn’t buy the whole crop? “The nice thing for us? We are both a wholesale and a retail grower,” says Freeman. “We can offer it to farmers market customers, and Nick can put it on his list that goes out to hundreds of different chefs each week.”

Joe Frillman, chef and owner of Daisies and The Radicle in Logan Square, didn’t have to go far when he wanted some hardy Bordeaux spinach for a cold weather salad. This “texturally pleasing” spinach variety can hold up to a hot bacon vinaigrette and not “wilt away to nothing.” A quick text to his brother, Tim Frillman of Frillman Farms, seeded a spring planting. Joe Frillman also requested from his brother Formanova beets, a cylindrical variety that saves on labor cost thanks to its consistent, easy-to-peel shape. 

Chef Frillman keeps a long wish list of items to ask his suppliers for, and farmers know they can go to him with odd items they can’t sell elsewhere. He frequently nudges Marty Travis of Down at the Farms, which consolidates ordering and delivery for over 60 small farms in central Illinois. Last year, Travis’s 17-year-old family dairy cow passed, and Frillman purchased half of it. “We ended up grinding most of it, which made very delicious burgers, and one hell of a Bolognese.”

For Trent Sparrow of Catalpa Grove Farm, it’s tough to sell the off-cuts of his lambs and pigs, because everybody wants racks and chops. But a regular customer like Burl in Evanston might purchase a whole side of pork in order to use the belly and loin for their British back bacon at brunch. Then they have chops and ribs to use for other purposes as well. “They get the belly, the ribs, all of it in one whole piece. We just take the shoulders and legs off,” says Sparrow.

In a business that deals with  seafood, restaurant partnerships can make or break the balance sheet. Aaron Rubens, owner of the Fish Guy, a prominent seafood retailer on Chicago’s North Side, says that these behind-the-scenes transactions with chefs make all the difference. “In a perfect world,” says Rubens, “the wholesale business is the engine of our business, and really drives what goes out into the retail case. If we're bringing in things at volume for a restaurant customer, we can add a little bit on the top to go to the retail customer.” 

Frillman recently asked Rubens for tuna hearts to cure, grate, and serve as an umami-rich condiment common in Sardinia and Sicily. If Frillman doesn't buy all of them, “That's a fun opportunity for us to showcase things for retail customers,” says Rubens. 

Thanks to chefs and their suppliers,  a customer can check the fish store for tuna hearts, order locally grown hoja santa online, or head to the farmers market for fresh piquillo peppers to try out at home.