How does your favorite farm connect with your favorite restaurant?
Below is a discussion I had with Ron and Christina Binaghi of Stokes Farm about a side of their business an average consumer doesn’t see and might not even consider: restaurant sourcing.
Q: Do you have all of the restaurants you source to listed on your website? Can you tell me about your relationships with these restaurants?
Christina: Probably about 75%. Sometimes restaurants buy from us and we don’t even know. They don’t ask for wholesale prices; they just go to the market and buy stuff. We don’t even realize they’re buying from us until we go to the restaurant and see Stokes Farm on their menu.
We have our regular restaurants that have been customers of ours for years and years. It helps them and it helps us. When their menu says Stokes Farm, people want to know more about us.
[Customers] are always asking us, ‘oh do you know any good restaurants in the city that have fresh, local produce?’
One of our projects that we’re working on is that we’re trying to get more restaurants in New Jersey to buy from us. We have a list of 7 different restaurants; we’re going to go in with a basket with a sampling of all our stuff, with a brochure and a wholesale price list.
Q: Why are these relationships with your local restaurants only beginning to develop?
Christina: In the city, I feel like [customers] embrace [cooking] more; they’re food savvy. They want to learn how to do it themselves.
Ron: Restaurants around here, or restaurants in general, they want THAT tomato, every single week. They want it to be the same price and the same size, every week, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. That’s what they want; they say ‘that’s what I’m getting from my purveyor; they’re delivering it to my door and I know how much, what size, and what it’s going to taste like.’ Where with us, it’s like one week we might have it, one week there’s no more: maybe next week!
Q: When you’re thinking about restaurant versus farm stand versus markets, how do you divide up the product?
Ron: Right now, since we’re so engulfed in the markets, markets come first. We do three markets on Saturday. If we have ten flats of cherry tomatoes, Union Square gets five because they’re the biggest; Lincoln Center will get three; Tribeca will get two. If anyone calls and orders any, we don’t have any, because our ten flats will sell out. That’s where we have to balance things out. For the most part, that doesn’t really happen because we have so much, an abundance, that it’s easy to fill. Union Square is still the biggest.
For a fairly complete list of which restaurants carry Stokes Farm products, click HERE.
