now serving: fresh from the garden

When you eat at a restaurant, how often do you consider where the food is grown? At finer eating establishments, the chef's schooling is often a topic of inquiry. Less frequently asked about is the source of ingredients. This is slowly changing with the advent of the slow food movement (www.slowfood.com). Over the past few decades, a few restaurants have been actively seeking and promoting the connection between food, farm and table. Most widely known is Alice Waters (www.chezpanisse.com) of Chez Panisse in the Bay area. This woman wanted her vegetables as fresh as possible and sought farmers to supply her with just-picked, lively vegetables for her tables. On this coast, Harborside restaurant in the Maine town by the same name has had a long history of seasonable eats provided by Eliot Coleman. At his Four Seasons farm, Coleman has managed to grow vegetables organically year round in a sustainable solar-heated environment. Closer to home, we have Arrows in Ogunquit, a highly rated seasonal eatery with its own kitchen garden. One can't get much fresher than stepping out the back door for a few extra sprigs of rosemary to flavor the stewpot. In fact, more and more area restaurants are turning to small farms for greens and other specialty crops.

A newcomer is Joshua's in Wells, nearly a year old. (www.joshuas.biz) The chef is a local boy who grew up on one of the area's first organic farms and later fine-tuned his good eating with culinary schooling. He's now opened up his own place, hiring his dad, Mort Mathers, to grow him vegetables.

Miss Mara has yet to eat in this restaurant. Her date ran off with another woman, ruining her appetite. Men and weather are a fickle pair, enough to try the patience of any woman or farmer. She did make it out to the farm to chat dirt with the dad. He was reviving a 30-year-old asparagus bed in his bare feet, encouraged by his son, who claimed it was worth the effort of slowly hand-weeding around the delicate spears. Mathers has quite a history himself in the farming world. He started growing organically back in the 1970s when "organic" was a fledging concept. From the beginning he was working with local restaurants, coaxing them with bundles of the sweetest carrots anyone had tasted. He still recalls leaving a head of lettuce as a calling card with a customer who'd refused to put in an order; he had phone messages pleading for his whole crop by the time he got home. The closest competition was day-old goods shipped up from Massachusetts. Much of his career was teaching chefs the value of local, fresh and organic foods. (Along with farming, he also wrote a gardening column for Mother Earth News, http://supak.com/mort/.)

Mort grows the basics for Joshua: lettuces, onions, leeks, cukes, radishes, tomatoes and even eggplants, purportedly not beloved by the chef; somehow they got into the greenhouse and out in the field. Mort farms an acre himself, which is not an easy task. This year, his wife Barbara is growing all the flowers for the restaurant. (During the winter, Laughing Stock Farm in the Portland area supplies fresh veggies. Mort doesn't have a greenhouse... yet.)

Flowers, food, fresh and local all just up the street on Route 1 are definitely worth pursuing before the summer folk clog the roads. And yes, Miss Mara is determined to find her way to a table at Joshua's, with or without a date!

Don't be a stranger. Miss Mara Vaughn will receive your thoughts about farming, gardening and eating well at This email address is being protected from spam bots, you need Javascript enabled to view it