Nancy Silverton, the award-winning Los Angeles chef and author who owns the Mozza restaurant group with Mario Batali and Joe Bastianich, has been buying Harry’s berries since she tasted her first one in 1989. Jeremy Fox, the executive chef at Rustic Canyon restaurant in Santa Monica and the author of “On Vegetables,” won’t use anything else.

Mr. Fox sometimes identifies the berry’s provenance on the menu, for a dish like the strawberry Pavlova with yogurt and black pepper. Ms. Silverton, on the other hand, assumes that by now most of her customers know exactly where the berries come from.

Their East Coast counterparts, from Philadelphia to Boston, jockey for an allotment from a far smaller shipped harvest. They have included the New York restaurants Wildair, Upland and Le Bernardin; a few retailers — like Eataly, owned by Mr. Batali and Mr. Bastianich; the online grocer FreshDirect; and the Doughnut Plant, which features strawberry-forward doughnuts in the spring.

Ms. Silverton and Mr. Fox rhapsodized about the fuller, sweeter berry taste, the juice-dribbling texture (compared with the chalky innards of some commercial berries) and an aroma that wafts toward marketgoers before they reach the stall. When they ran out of superlatives, they both settled on a single adjective: “red,” summing up all a strawberry should be.

The farm didn’t start out this way. In 1967, Mrs. Gean’s father, Harry Iwamoto, a Japanese immigrant, leased 120 acres in Oxnard and planted what the Geans refer to as “commodity” berries, a hardy strain picked when they are still partly white inside, to extend their shelf life. They didn’t taste like fully ripe berries, but that was beside the point. They made it to the grocery store intact.

Mrs. Gean grew up on that farm, and married Mr. Gean, her high school sweetheart. In 1986, she was running a Harry’s Berries roadside stand and he was driving a beer truck when they heard about a new farmers’ market in nearby Ventura. They drove out to take a look.