But you do need vegetables. “It’s not enough now to pick up the phone and say to a distributor: ‘What have you got? O.K., give me a case.’ Now you want to see,” said Mr. Benno, 40. “You want to go there. They get to know us, and they see the possibilities for us. And for them.”

Top chefs can’t be lip-service locavores any longer. “Our customers travel to food and wine festivals,” Mr. White said, “and food devotees are more and more aware of the sourcing of products.” At the table, they can even surf the Web on their iPhones to check out the provenance of the steak, the chicken and the chicory.

The chef Daniel Boulud said that his relationship with some farmers goes back decades, and “they know our priorities and we know theirs,” he said. “We never argue about the price, and we support them in the hard times.”

To Mr. Benno, “This is not about currying favor, it is about developing a relationship. In this business, it’s about the handshake  looking them in the eye.” For there is an urgent new restaurant reality: “These days, carrots are in the ground Friday and on the plate Saturday night,” he said.

Locally, the farm-to-table revolution has seen an explosion of “varieties that have different color, flavor and cooking characteristics, instead of ordinary varieties chosen for their ease of shipping and stacking characteristics,” said John J. Mishanec, a specialist for the Cornell University Cooperative Extension program who has spent decades working to improve local farmers’ practices.

As Mr. White said, “You always want to be an innovator, and some farmers do, too.”

And so, he has scoured Italian Web sites to order spigarelli, arugula and radicchio seeds, and has asked farmers  including Rick Bishop of Mountain Sweet Berry Farm in Roscoe, N.Y.  to grow them. And Mr. Boulud has beaten the local bushes for sweet French radishes and cardoons.