Stuff Boston

ASK US WHERE we shop and it’s a simple answer: Newbury Street, Copley Place, and, when time allows, the Natick Collection. But when we pose the same question to 10 local chefs, most wax enthusiastic on the merits of various meat distributors, organic farms, local cheese shops, and, in a few cases, the vaguely mysterious “Ben the Mushroom Guy.” Read on for a glimpse into some of the best-stocked fridges, pantries, and spice racks in the city.

Jason Santos, executive chef at Gargoyles on the Square
Meat/poultry: “I use Cambridge Packing. These guys are definitely the most honest, definitely the highest quality. We use a lot of natural meat — that’s all I use — natural, no-hormones, no antibiotics. They have a lot of natural lines. For me, it’s sort of a one-stop shop. I can get something simple like burgers, and I can also get Kobe strip if I want.”

Fish: “Cambridge Packing does some fish. But I also do a lot from Constitution Seafood. They’re [supplying] restaurants for the most part. They’re smaller; the owner often delivers it himself. They’re just good people.”

Produce: “I use Russo’s, predominately Russo’s. I’ve been using Russo’s for, like, 15 years. If they deliver and I forgot to order a lime, they’ll bring over a lime. I guarantee, if you start getting into asking all the chefs, like 90 percent of the people probably use Russo’s.”

Breads: “We bake everything in house. But if I had to buy, Iggy’s, I think, is the best bread in the city.”

Cheese/dairy: “Basic dairy I buy from Paul Marks. And then specialty dairy, like cheeses and stuff, I use Capone’s. They make homemade pastas there, and they have lots of cheeses. It’s really, really small. But their stuff is super-high quality. [I use] a little bit of Formaggio, too.”

Herbs/spices: “I get my spices from a lot of different people. But I’d say Christina’s in Cambridge; they do a lot of spices. Some of the spices I use, I have to buy on the Internet because nobody has them. I get some spices from France, from Spain. If you want something authentic, unfortunately — or fortunately — you have to get it from the source. We’re using a great Filipino sea salt right now.”

Other: “I use D’Artagnan; I buy my mushrooms from [them]. It’s a company out of New York; they do specialty mushrooms and truffles and stuff like that. They do a lot of high-end meat, too, so I buy some meat from them.”

Andy Husbands, chef/owner of Tremont 647 and Sister Sorel
Meat/poultry: “We use John Kinnealey. Good price, and really good, high-quality stuff. They do our grass-fed burger; they do Giannones, which is a free-range chicken, hormone-free.”

Produce: “A. Russo and Sons [Russo’s]. I’ve done business with them for, jeez, maybe 15 years now. They have a lot of local stuff, good quality, and just a good variety. Also, they’re kind of a grocer, so they have great cheeses if you need them. Also, we use Nesenkeag Farms. I talk to the farmers twice a week. We’re using what they have, what’s fresh.”

Bread: “We make most of our own, but Iggy’s rocks. We buy our bagels from there for brunch. Sometimes we buy their focaccia, because it’s just awesome. Like anything, you’ve got to start with good ingredients. And they’re a great company; they’re good people.”

Cheese/dairy: “Formaggio Kitchen, of course. That’s the cheese place, as far as I’m concerned, in Boston. Selection, quality, and just overall good people. I like to do business with people that I enjoy.”

Herbs/spices: “Herbs is Nesenkeag Farm. Also Eva’s Garden. Good, local, fresh. [For spices], Christina’s. We also use Paul Marks, Accardi. They’re awesome. Those are more wholesale, where Christina’s is wholesale and retail. [And] sometimes you’ve got to run down to Chinatown when you’re looking for something really goofy.”

Exotic items: “Accardi and Sons, they’ll get us a lot of stuff. When you’re looking for some good snails, they’re going to be carrying [them].”

Other: “Pat the clam guy. They’re Wellfleet clams, and Pat Woodbury is his name. I’m also a big fan of Louisiana shrimp, so there’s this woman, Kay, I deal with out of Louisiana. Kay Brandhurst sends me an e-mail pretty much every week about what they’re catching. They also have great crab meat. These things are caught this morning and we’ll get them the next day, and they are just fresh and awesome.”

Ana Sortun, chef/owner of Oleana
Meat/poultry: “Savenor’s. [For poultry], I get the chickens from Canada — Giannones, they’re called. Very delicious, free-range bird.”

Fish: “Some comes from Maine, some comes from Gloucester. I’m partial to Captain Marden’s. Again, it’s quality.”

Produce: “It’s our farm, [Siena Farms]. We started it a couple years ago. My husband is a farmer. [In the off-season], for the restaurant, we shop through a wholesale vendor, Specialty Foods.”

Bread: “Clear Flour Bakery, and we make some.”

Cheese/dairy: “That varies. It comes from all over the place; it’s so random. Sometimes we go to Formaggio Kitchen.”

Herbs/spices: “Watertown, Sevan Bakery.”

Other: “Wine: Violette. It’s on the corner of Mount Auburn Street and Belmont Street. It’s an organic-wine store. And the other great place to shop is called Vintages in West Concord. It’s an unbelievable store; it’s worth driving out to.”

Rachel Klein, chef at OM
Meat/poultry: “We use D’Artagnan. D’Artagnan and William & Company. They work with a lot of restaurants; they just kind of know how to talk to their chefs. And they really work with me to get me the product I need.”

Fish: “Honolulu Fish Company, or Foley. Foley is a national company. They’re very particular on how they handle their seafood; everything’s very fresh. And Honolulu Fish Company, they’re out of Hawaii. We get all our West Coast fish from them, like our tunas and our opah, or anything a little bit more exotic. We get our blue prawns from them. And that comes in FedExed every day.”

Produce: “For the restaurant, our produce comes from Russo’s. Russo’s and the Chef’s Garden. Russo’s has really nice quality. They’ve been around a long time, it’s a family-operated establishment, and, to be quite honest with you, if I lived closer I would personally go there myself and shop. Chef’s Garden, that’s out of Ohio, and we get all our microgreens from there — we get baby vegetables, little precious vegetables and fruit or lettuces, the really delicate stuff.”

Bread: “We bring bread in for brunch, and it’s Iggy’s. We also use Mariposa Bakery in Central Square. Iggy’s does all of our little pastries for brunch. They do baguettes for us, and they do our hot dog buns — we do a hot dog on our lunch menu. And Mariposa used to do scones for us, and they do a really good brioche.”

Exotic items: “When I’m bringing in anything exotic, I really just talk to the companies I’m presently using, and they source them for me. So if I say, ‘Hey, I’m looking for a Japanese purple yam,’ Russo’s is going to find it for me, and then they’ll call me the next day and be like, ‘We found it.’ ”

Other: “I go shopping a lot at Super 88, personally and for the restaurant. We use a lot of Asian products here, and my pastry chef happens to be part Chinese. You can find really bizarre things there sometimes, like mini octopus and frogs’ legs. They have some really funky things in the fish department and the frozen foods department at Super 88. Of course, no one speaks English there, so it’s hard to get any information. You have to learn by trial and error.”

Tim Wiechmann, chef/owner of T.W. Food
Meat/poultry: “Most of the meat comes from the Big Ox Farm, which is my friend Peter. It’s in Concord. He raises the meat pretty much for the restaurant. We talk a lot about the diet, and we are in control of the whole production. He usually only has, like, two pigs at a time, and I buy them. He had a steer about four weeks ago, and I bought the whole steer.”

Fish: “For the restaurant, I have some fishermen friends in Marblehead, ’cause that’s where I grew up, and oftentimes I’ll get fish directly off the boat from them. After that, I consign myself to buying fish that’s only in season and only fished off of our waters. So I don’t buy Alaskan fish, or I don’t buy Oregon salmon, because it takes forever to get here. I buy whatever bluefish is running or bass is running. They’re both Massachusetts fish. Or lobster. And there’s a great store in Marblehead called Marblehead Lobster Company, and they have lobster right from off of Marblehead.”

Produce: “I get it from Grateful Farm, which is in Franklin. They come to me three times a week with whatever they’ve grown. I also have given them stuff to grow for me. Like, kohlrabi was something I had them plant in the spring.”

Bread: “Bread I only get from B&R Bread. He’s my friend, and he’s a very good baker.”

Cheese/dairy: “Dairy, I use Vermont Butter & Cheese. I use their high-fat butter. Best butter out there, by far. Cheese I get from Russo’s. They have a great cheese department. I go to Formaggio as well.”

Herbs/spices: “Herbs we grow ourselves out in Marblehead.”

Exotic items: “We had mallard duck from Long Island, which is the duck that’s indigenous to our East Coast. D’Artagnan, they’re the big guys that do that. And right now we have Oregon porcini mushrooms — fresh, so they’re really, really good.”

Jamie Bissonnette, chef de cuisine at KO Prime
Meat/poultry: “I use Cambridge Packing Company, D’Artagnan, and Kinnealey a lot. Kinnealey will do all of our aged meats, because they have an aging room. D’Artagnan helps me with farmers out of New York state and Pennsylvania, getting things like veal, Berkshire pigs, small farm chickens, and ducks. And Campco helps me get our all-natural grass-fed meat from Brandt Farm, Brandt Meat Company out of the West Coast, Nebraska, and California. We use Bella Bella Gourmet to get our foie gras.”

Fish: “We get a lot of it from Sunny’s Seafood. It’s a Boston company, just known as Sunny’s. When striped bass comes in season in the summer, the first day it’s in season, the guys at Sunny’s Seafood know that I’m gonna want it. [For more exotic fish], we use a Japanese company called True Worlds.”

Produce: “We use a lot from Eva’s Garden in South Dartmouth, Massachusetts. [She’s an] organic farmer. She custom plants things, so you can say, ‘Hey, I really want ground ivy next year,’ or ‘I love lovage. Can you make sure you have extra lovage for me?’ And her herbs are impeccable; her edible flowers are unbelievable.”

Bread: “B&R Artisan Bread, Michael Rhodes. I love his baguettes and his bread. I also do use Iggy’s for a lot of things as well. I prefer Iggy’s for their breakfast pastries.”

Cheese/dairy: “I’d say 90 percent of our artisanal cheeses, we go through Ishan at Formaggio.”

Herbs/spices: “Fresh herbs pretty much all come from Eva, or we have a garden on the roof here at the restaurant. So we’ll grow stuff over the summer. Lovage, tarragon — I didn’t plant tarragon, but I couldn’t get rid of it. And chives, garlic chives, allium flowers, chili peppers, and tomatoes. We’ve got about 250 cubic feet of sod; it’s pretty cool.”

Exotic items: “I sourced out my Wagyu beef from a woman who bills herself as the ‘Kobe connection’ out of New York. Her father and uncles farm Wagyu beef in Kyoto, and they sell it, but it gets distributed through a company called Austin Meat that’s based, ironically, out of New York. Mushrooms, I love using Ben, a local mushroom forager. I forget his last name, but ‘Ben the Mushroom Man’ is pretty much what he’s known as. He lives in Jamaica Plain with his wife, and they forage all over New England.”

Other: “I’m really happy with our coffee. It’s a local roaster called Karma Coffee. He delivers three or four times a week, with beans that are roasted the day of or the day before. Coffee is so much better when it’s roasted so much more fresh.”

Tom Fosnot, chef at Rocca
Fish: “We buy from Captain Marden’s, and from Seafood Specialties. It’s good to have multiple purveyors in case someone’s out of something.”

Produce: “For the restaurant, we use Verrill Farm and Nesenkeag Farm when in season. Otherwise, we use Russo’s. They’re the kind of purveyor that will deliver one bunch of thyme. If you forget and you call them up, they’ll order one bunch of thyme for you.”

Bread: “We buy from Iggy’s, and we make it ourselves. We make our crackers and our focaccia in-house, and we’ll buy our bread that we use for crostini from Iggy’s.”

Herbs/spices: “Eva’s Garden would be one good place we get a lot of herbs from. She just has really nice, fresh herbs she grows down in [South Dartmouth]. I think that being near the ocean, they’re heartier and they have a lot more of an intense flavor.

Other: “We buy our gelato from a company called Spasso Foods. We buy some Ligurian olive oil through Accardi. I think sweet yeast is probably the most non-standard [ingredient we use]; we get it from Italian delis. We use it in the crust for our fig walnut tart. We talked to someone in Italy who used it in a bakery there, and we bought a ton while we were over there and brought it over.”

Paul O’Connell, chef/owner of Chez Henri
Meat/poultry: “We buy from Savenor’s. I’ve known Ronnie for a long time, and I like his quality. And he’s local. He’s in Cambridge, right on the corner, so if we’ve forgotten something on the order, he can get it over to me pretty quick, or I can swing by there and grab it.”

Fish: “Captain Marden’s Seafoods. Again, it’s a relationship, and quality.”

Produce: “In the summer, I’m most seasonal, so I buy from Nesenkeag Farm, and then there’s some people at the farmers’ market I deal with on different apple orchards and stuff. I buy mushrooms from Ben the Mushroom Guy. When he started out, he used to just forage, but now he also has connections where he imports stuff from the West Coast, like chanterelles from Washington State.”

Bread: “We make half our own bread, and the other half I buy from this artisan bread guy out in Framingham, B&R Artisan Breads.”

Cheese/dairy: “I buy all my cheese from Formaggio Kitchen. Ishan’s probably the top cheese shop in the country. Ishan travels to Europe frequently and is always finding new cheeses and new products.”

Exotic items: “From Ishan [at Formaggio Kitchen], I just got this Maras pepper; it’s a Turkish pepper. It’s somewhere between cayenne and Italian red pepper flakes, but it’s softer and fluffy, and it costs like $15 for a little teeny thimbleful — it’s like saffron, but it’s delicious. I’m using that on lamb right now.”

Other: “I go to Latin markets to get Latin ingredients. My secret place is Market Basket over here, and if I happen to be over in JP, there’s the tropical supermarkets. I can buy frozen banana leaves that I use to wrap tamales in, and dried corn husks, and yucca.”

Mary Dumont, executive chef at Harvest
Meat/poultry: “The lamb actually comes from Pennsylvania. But I think they do a lot of mail-order things for the general public. [It’s called] Jamison Farm.”

Bread: “We cook a lot of our breads in-house. We get some other breads from Iggy’s. And there’s another companycalled Pain D’Avignon.”

Herbs/spices: “Her name is Eva and she has Eva’s. She goes to some of the farmers’ markets, but she also supplies some of the restaurants in the city. It can be a little spendy, but she has some really, really interesting herbs and varieties that she grows that I really appreciate. She grows burnet, which is kind of a melon-flavored herb that looks like a really small parsley. And she grows lemon verbena and lemon balm and calumet and all these really cool heirloom herbs. Not only [is it] good to support sustainable agriculture, but they have historical significance as well, which I really like to weave into the food. Food that represents a time and a place.”

Alison Hearn, executive chef at Myers+Chang
Meat/poultry: “I use Kinnealey for most of my meats. It’s actually a purveyor. They sell meat to restaurants everywhere, all over Boston and New England. Super 88 over in South Bay Shopping Plaza has super-fresh chickens. They have head-on, feet-on chickens. The Chinese tend to be really fanatical about having super-fresh chickens.”

Fish: “Captain Marden’s, hands-down. Captain Marden’s is run by Kim Marden; it’s out in Wellesley. They have a retail store that’s got a pretty wide selection as well.”

Produce: “We have a certain challenge, which is that we’re trying to get a lot of Asian greens and Asian produce. I’d love to find some farms, and I’m hoping to, maybe next spring, where I can get some of the things we use. When I walk around the South End there’s these little garden plots. I’ve seen various people out there, and people growing their own Asian greens. Maybe I’ll go tap one of them on the shoulder and see if they want to sell to me. But I find that Russo’s has a pretty good selection of Asian greens, and that’s someplace I like to go on my days off. It’s a purveyor that also has a retail market, so they get a very brisk turnover and very good prices.”

Herbs/spices: “I really like the herbs I get from Specialty Foods. Some stuff I can’t find from them, though, which is a shame. I have to go pound the pavement to track down yellow chives.

Cheese/dairy: “[Dairy isn’t relevant to Asian restaurants]. I do use tofu, which is what Asian people use. There’s a place right around the corner from me called Ho Kong, and I call up Ho Kong every morning for my fresh tofu and super-fresh, gorgeous bean sprouts. They get it from somebody who makes it every day; it’s local.”

Exotic items: “I use the same places for myself personally if I’m cooking Asian at home as I do if I’m cooking for the restaurant. Of course, Super 88, which carries tons of great Asian ingredients.” @

[Additional reporting by Melissa Cronin]

[Photos by Kelly Davidson]