Neighborhood harvest: embracing local growers, restaurants cut distance from farm to plate.

• Author: Mitchell, Karen

You're starting your dinner at a neighborhood bistro by enjoying a fresh salad. Do you know where those greens came from?

Perhaps you're savoring them at The Kitchen, a restaurant in Boulder, where chef/owner Hugo Matheson procures them from Cure Organic Farm, an 8-acre farm in Boulder County.

The Kitchen's philosophy has always been to buy local, based on common sense and a sustainable method of running and operating the business, Matheson says. A large chalkboard provides diners with the "provenance" of the foods they order, from cheeses to eggs to greens--part of a growing trend by restaurants nationwide to buy as many of their supplies as possible from local sources.

"I just saw that nobody had a clue in the first restaurant kitchen I stepped foot in here in Boulder," Matheson says. "Everything came from one large distributor, and I was surprised at that."

The first person Matheson approached for The Kitchen was Anne Cure, now of Cure Organic Farm, which has become the bistro's No. 1 supplier of fresh produce and honey in the area. In the peak summer season, the bistro is able to buy at least 50 percent of its ingredients from suppliers in Colorado, including several hundred pounds of dried beans, Durango grass-fed lamb and naturally bred chickens.

"We have about 32 suppliers," Matheson says. "Six of our suppliers are just for fish, including one in Hawaii for tuna and a supplier in Alaska who smokes only 400 pounds of salmon a year."

If you sampled strawberries with your dessert at The Kitchen, you were likely eating fruit grown by another of Matheson's suppliers, Monroe Organic Farms in Kersey, southeast of Greeley.

With some 60 acres of fruits and vegetables on their land, Jacquie and Jerry Monroe provide produce to a select group of restaurant chef/owners including Matheson, Teri Rippeto at Denver's Potager Restaurant and Wine Bar, and others with whom they have a symbiotic relationship fueled by trust and loyalty.

Like other Colorado restaurateurs, Matheson and Rippeto are committed to obtaining as much of their meat, poultry and produce locally as is feasible, a trend often credited to Alice Waters of Chez Panisse in Berkeley, Calif., who made buying local an essential ingredient in her famed cuisine in the early 1970s.

Along the Denver/Boulder corridor, the names of small farms such as Cure, Monroe, Pachamama and Abbondanza, and purveyors such as Destiny, Wisdom, Haystack Mountain and John Long are revered by local-minded chefs as they head to the Boulder...