We’re a neighborhood restaurant.

To us, a neighbor is someone whose life situation we actually know something about. To us, a restaurant is a public place that people visit in order to be refreshed. As a neighborhood restaurant, we feel it’s important for us to know and be neighborly to our farms and our guests, whether they live close by or are only a neighbor for a short while, as they visit.

So when we call our farmers, we’re calling people we know, and are friendly with. We ask what’s up, how the season’s treating them, what’s going sideways, what they’re proud of. We ask on every call how we can help. Sometimes that can mean we end up working to find a way to accommodate a hundred pounds of overage nobody planned for. Sometimes it can mean nothing more than a confirmation that we give a fig about them and their lives. The fact that money changes hands between us doesn’t make the relationship less real — it makes it more so; it signifies the interdependent nature of our relationship.

This neighborly approach extends to more than our farmers. Included in our circle are the salesperson, the gig driver (who is always asked if they are thirsty and offered a place to rest if they need to wait a minute or two for their pick up), our cooks and servers, and our guests. The thing is that everything we buy comes from a region that we can draw on a map: the Alleghenies to our east, the state line to our south, and out to Northeast Ohio. And everything we buy from within those boundaries contributes to someone’s living, including ours — we add value to those goods we buy and then we resell them to the public, and we use those proceeds firstly to pay our people properly, because a restaurant that treats its own staff as a cost center has no business lecturing anyone about sustainability.

There’s a word for that map: foodshed. It gets used as a fancy synonym for “local,” but it means something bigger and stranger. A foodshed is land and weather and roads and warehouses and markets and every single person who touches food on its way to a person. Which means it isn’t a thing we buy from. It’s a thing we’re in. It’s a thing we are a part of, not apart from. We are the foodshed. So (obviously) are our farmers. So are our salespersons. So are the gig drivers double-parked on the street outside the restaurant. So are you, sending that driver on an errand to ease your day, or you when you sit down at a table or at the bar and order. The foodshed’s health is our health, all of us. We are not being metaphorical when we write this. And as complex as this idea is, it is certainly not a market position.

Come in because you’re hungry. But come the way you’d stop by a friend’s. Ask what’s good this week, what we’re excited about, what’s keeping us up late at night. Ask how we’re doing. Many of our guests already do this, and those visits certainly brighten our days.

Being kind is instinctual

Everybody knows when they have a chance to be kind. It’s odd that we are trained to betray that instinct at large by our intensely extractive society, and grotesque when kindness is not promoted actively in — of all places — the hospitality industry. But let’s be real about it. Guests are hard on staff. Kitchens (and the front of the house) more often than not continue to run on pecking orders where the people who got treated badly for a decade under someone else’s thumb finally get their turn to make the new hire pay for what their former boss did to them. And then for some reason restaurants go online and are routinely hard on the public: if you’re not buying the right food from the right farms, you’re doing it wrong.

We’re done with all the scolding. Shame can change what someone buys this week. Shame can change a workplace behavior. It almost never changes how anyone sees the world around them, though, and we’d be floored to find the longitudinal study that demonstrates how shaming a person fuels their generosity toward the next person they see, or contributes to any meaningfully sustained positive change. We can’t lecture someone into caring about a local farmer. What we CAN do is take full advantage of you coming in to see us for a dinner or brunch service — feed you very well, tell you all about why your food and drink are so delicious, and then let you arrive at the same conclusions we have, all on your own.

We’d rather welcome people. All of them — the ones who’ve never thought about any of this, and the ones who’ve thought about it hard and landed somewhere different than we have. Because this whole screed isn’t an attempt to win an argument. It’s an attempt to start a conversation worth having more than once, whether with words or actions, and to leave the exchange refreshed. We are a restaurant, after all.

A restaurant shouldn’t have to perform heroics to support a farm. Buying from them, consistently, at a fair price, should be enough. And we shouldn’t have to perform heroics to convince you our work is worth your time and participation. Doing this whole restaurant thing well should be enough. We’re not going to paper this website with accolades. There are PLENTY of places for you to read about others’ opinions of us and our work. Come eat and decide for yourself.

Whatever changes about how we source and cook and serve — it changes at the level of the relationships. We do not contort ourselves for increased market share. We do not chase accolades or certifications. We make phone calls. We talk to delivery drivers and farmers and guests when they arrive at our doors.