Marc Del Pietro doesn’t like to be the guy who buys up the best tomatoes at the farmers market. And much of the time, he sources all the tomatoes and other foods he needs for his restaurants straight from the farmers.

Yet, when the need arises, he’ll hit a local growers’ market and stand in line with the rest of us. He knows that the people queued up behind him might be planning the week’s gazpacho or Caprese salad or panzanella. He feels bad about what he’s about to do. And then he asks for every last tomato.

f a local farmer grows it, Tony Marchetto will work to make something delicious from it. If, that is, the food is organic or all natural, hormone free and antibiotic free. Marchetto is the chef at Prasino, a restaurant that’s eco-conscious from its name (the Greek word for green) to its menu to its décor.

Milagros Figuero has long been the heart of her family. As a young woman in the 1960s, she was at her husband’s side helping to run the family farm on a plateau along Spain’s Duero River in the now-famous Ribera del Duero region, where the main crop is the Tempranillo grape.   

Ande and Tye Pietoso were born into the restaurant business. Jon Berger arrived as a young teenager and never left.

Gardens at Malmaison sit deep in the countryside in St. Albans, Mo., in Franklin County just over the St. Louis County line. The restaurant’s fine food and beautiful setting long ago won the hearts of St. Louis diners, but its distance from the city kept many fans from becoming regulars.

When chef Cassy Vires and her husband Josh Renbarger opened Home Wine Kitchen--a Maplewood eatery dedicated to traditional, scratch-made cooking with local and artisanal ingredients--in 2011, they wanted to create an environment and experience for diners that brings out the best parts of food and drink in our lives.