“There’s plenty of other farmers that we deal with that are clueless with all those things,” he says. “I wish there were more farmers like him.”

During tomato season, in fact, the only heirloom tomatoes Battersby and Dover will buy—unless the chefs are at a farmers market picking them out themselves—are from Snug Harbor. “You can’t order them because a lot of times people, like big companies, store them in the fridge or something, which totally fucks them up. Or you get them and they’re not ripe or they’re too ripe,” Stern says. “Or the worst is you get them, and then they’re from Canada or something.” Ogrodnek agrees: “I don’t even trust a cook to go and pick them out.”

Indeed, a flat full of Snug Harbor’s tomatoes is a thing of beauty, and watching Wilson meticulously putting them together, rearranging them by color, size and shape, is like watching an artist at work. Wilson knows to give restaurants fruit that’s ready to eat that very evening, as well as fruit that will be ready on the next day and the day after, but he also knows that chefs, and their customers, experience food as a feast for all senses. Woe to the farm apprentice who, giving no thought to visual aesthetics, places two similar tomatoes in the box side by side.

Back in the van, Wilson is making the last delivery of the day, to The Vanderbilt, a Prospect Heights restaurant founded by chef Saul Bolton. The restaurant’s order is beside him, ready to go, but he’s thinking about what else the chef might like, what else will be ready in the field next week, what other chefs are ordering—all so he may throw in a little something special, something with this specific menu in mind.

That attention pays off. Elise Kornack—the chef who with her wife, Anna Hieronimus, runs Take Root, the 12-seat, Michelin-starred Carroll Gardens restaurant—says she loves getting from Wilson surprise samples of ingredients she didn’t even know she needed. Last summer, for example, he brought her some orange daylilies and the encouragement to “play around with them.” Kornack says: “I wouldn’t have thought to order them, or pick them up at the market with intentions on making a dessert, but I ended up making my favorite dessert to date”—an eggless daylily custard poured over berries macerated in berry juice with toasted macadamia nuts. “It was sweet, oral, nutty and smelt like honey and summer,” she says.

No matter what comes from Snug Harbor, chef Angulo says he knows “it’s going to be pristine, really small production, and [Wilson’s] going to pick out the best of the best.” Snug Harbor greens are a regular item on the menu at French Louie and Buttermilk Channel, and when customers ask about them, he loves to tell the story of a small farm on Staten Island in an old sailors’ snug harbor that was almost destroyed by developers before being saved and revitalized with arts programming, a children’s museum and magnificent gardens, where food is grown by their farmer-friend Jon.

So while some chefs have the luxury of being close to farmers markets where they can form relationships with growers, says Angulo, “that’s what I have with Jon. He comes in. I give him a coffee. We stand outside and bullshit for a few minutes. And then we see each other next time he comes around.”