So this is like the, we call it the mothership.

This is all year long.

We just are moving plants through this greenhouse.

And really, it's like, why we call it the beating heart because that pulse comes through here.

We start the seeds and then take these plants out, and then they're they're grown out of the field and we're harvesting them.

My name's Mark DeRespinis And we are at the home of Esoterra culinary garden.

We consider ourselves small but mighty.

We have a huge impact in the regional food culture from this small garden.

Three acres serving 50 restaurants year round.

You know, there's a huge amount of people that eat the food that we're harvesting each week.

We've created 14 jobs and you know that we're continuing to grow and expand.

So that right there, this gorgeous cluster, these beautiful sparkly, salty orbs on there, it's got an amazing kind of like tart, salty flavor to it.

I'm a foodie at heart when it comes down to it.

And so I just I love having access to a wide range of amazing plants that have incredible flavor and rich diversity of phytonutrients.

And so you get, you know, these beauties, Amazing, sweet Mokum carrots with so much flavor to them.

I just found like working directly with chefs allowed me to cultivate a wide variety of culinary ingredients that maybe you might not find at your local farmer's market.

But my chefs really appreciate that.

So we're able to develop production models around these unique ingredients and really feature them so that they can then be featured on local menus.

The previous owner of Potager was very much about building relationships and building community.

You know, she did that through the farmer's market and becoming friends with a lot of farmers because of her relationships with them.

The continuing relationship.

Buying from a farmer is not the same as ordering from a purveyor is not the same as like, you know, buying something online or whatever.

There is an actual you know, it's not desensitize.

It becomes very personal.

What do you have right now?

It's what are you going to have in three months?

What are you planting?

So it's the commitment that we have to them and that they have to us and that they're going to trust that that everything that they put in the ground, we're going to buy and we trust that they're going to grow.

It's a beautiful product.

We've got this rest of Tara.

Weve gotten these from Esoterra We are going to lightly oil them and then we're going to grill them on an open flame from raw and we're going to serve this as a with some Caesar dressing and lemon gel as a Caesar salad.

Almost every element of the restaurant, the mentality is the same.

It's focusing on like responsible, small, family, farming, and raising and producing.

So for the beverage program, the mentality just follows what we're doing with food.

The goal is to look for people who care about what they're doing with the soil, putting into the land.

And so rather than having like big name producers, we just look for families, small families.

And then also, since the focus is on like Paul is saying, like the dish is kind of celebrating the vegetable, I don't want the wine to overpower or take away from any of that.

Farmers have done all the work, nature's done its job, don't manipulate a vegetable.

You know, as a chef, it's so important to know when to manipulate the product and when not to.

When to just leave it alone, when to serve carpaccio raw radishes with the right amount of salt and olive oil are just beautiful.

They don't need anything else.

Right?

You know, if everything has been grown properly and it's so good, then why do you do anything to it at all?

You know.

The whole staff went to celebrate the year at Potager.

This year we had 14 people around the table and we ordered multiples of every single dish on the menu and got to eat through and see the beautiful transformations that the chefs worked on.

Our produce really was so remarkable about it is how much it made sense.

Like it makes sense when you sit down and you could feel connected back to the land through a dish that you're eating.

That's something that I really felt in that moment of sitting down all together around that table.

And I feel like my crew really felt that, too.

And that's been it's just been really healing for everyone to like, have that experience of working with the plants and knowing that they are being so received with such reverence and gratitude and then presented to people who are then just as grateful to be able to be eating something that's come so fresh from the land and grown with such care.

That's something that just feels like it's the way it's supposed to be.