Wednesday morning — not to brag — I had a breakfast prepared by chef Aaron Courtney, who has worked in kitchens at Mot Hai Ba and The Local Oak, among other celebrated eateries. To start, we had blistered shishito peppers, tossed with thyme and rice wine vinegar. The main course consisted of boiled-then-crisped baby potatoes accompanying breakfast tacos stuffed with eggs, fresh-made pico and pecan-smoked pork.

I am no food critic, but I give the meal all the stars.

The setting for this celebratory feast of sorts was in one of Dallas' poorest neighborhoods, where Bexar Street dead-ends into a Trinity River levee in South Dallas.

Here you, too, can soon try the food at The Market at Bonton Farms — a happy ending to a story that began in the spring of 2017 when the concept existed only as rendering and the promise of what could be. The $450,000 sales pitch to would-be investors — among them Dallas City Hall and AT&T — called for a healthy grocery in a place where were only junk-food stores, a restaurant where there was none.

Daron Babcock planted the vision that, in 2014, sprouted Bonton Farms, which transformed this neighborhood with new homes, good-paying jobs, healthy food. Babcock and wife Theda have committed to this area; they ditched big-money jobs, in private equity and fashion, respectively, to live here, embedded among the crime and poverty.

Babcock had thought the farm and his market would be a good, necessary start for this neglected, abused part of the city. But he didn't, for a single moment, imagine his new 2,500-square-foot market would be the panacea.

When it officially opens Nov. 19, the market will not erase South Dallas' food desert. Nor will it end diabetes or the heart diseases that fell many residents of Bonton. Nor does Babcock believe his new market will attract more than a few curious visitors from the northern climes like Preston Hollow. Its opening should not even be that big a deal. Businesses like this open all over town, all the time.

And yet, it is a milestone.

1 / 4Vegetables on display inside The Market at Bonton Farms, which will offer fresh food, including meat, milk, eggs, and other items, as well as dine-in and carry-out meals(Vernon Bryant / Staff Photographer) 2 / 4Bonton Farms founder Daron Babcock, left, visited with state Rep. Eric Johnson during the market's groundbreaking on December 12. AT&T donated $100,000 to the project.(Andy Jacobsohn / Staff Photographer) 3 / 4A dream in spring 2017 has become reality in the fall of 2018, as The Market at Bonton Farms prepares to open its doors Nov. 19.(Vernon Bryant / Staff Photographer) 4 / 4If Bonton Farms is Shangri-La, then The Market at Bonton Farms is its gift shop.(Vernon Bryant / Staff Photographer)

The market will offer "everything you can possibly need to prepare a meal," Babcock said. Chefs — amateurs trained by pros — will prepare meals using food grown a few feet from the back door, honest-to-God farm-to-table offerings. Neighborhood residents will get their eats at discounted rates. Welcome interlopers with fuller wallets will pay full freight. There will be cooking classes, too, and wellness classes and yoga on the back patio.

The Babcocks have bigger plans there, too, such as a coffee shop and visitors' center next door in an old home and an Agape Clinic down the street. A calling has become a career.

Already, there is interest in expanding the brand. City Council member Casey Thomas wants one in Red Bird. Keisha Wyatt, who works in player relations for the Dallas Mavericks, stopped by Wednesday to discuss expanding outside of Daron's beloved Bonton.

He said he is reluctant.

"It would take extreme circumstances for me to come into another neighborhood and do this," Babcock said. "I want to empower someone else."

Babcock said over breakfast that Bonton Farms' success isn't about his vision anyway. He nodded toward the men and women working in the farm, just out the window, and in the market: "They do the work."

"My role is to fight to build a ladder that has every rung on it," he said. "The people down here have been given a ladder with no rungs and expected to somehow scale to the top of it. It's impossible."

1 / 3Chef Mike Noyes, left, talks to Derrick Runnels, center, and brother Darrell Runnels about the rice that was made using two different methods of cooking in the kitchen at The Market at Bonton Farms in Dallas. The Runnels brothers are from the Bonton area.(Vernon Bryant / Staff Photographer) 2 / 3Chef Aaron Courtney, left, and Chef Mike Noyes are in what they call their R&D phase as they fine-tune the market's menu and teach amateur chefs how to cook like pros in the weeks leading up to the eatery's opening.(Vernon Bryant / Staff Photographer) 3 / 3Keisha Wyatt, of the Dallas Mavericks' front office, stopped by the market Wednesday to talk about expanding operations in South Dallas -- before it has even opened.(Vernon Bryant / Staff Photographer)

After breakfast I hung out in the kitchen, where Courtney and fellow chef Mike Noyes, of the early-days Daddy Jack's, are in what they term their "R&D" phase. Led by Justin Box, of Bolsa and Cedars Social and Chad Houser's equally do-gooding Café Momentum, the chefs are also training neighborhood residents.

"The whole idea is to get people in here who have no experience or very little, but have ambition and drive and a positive attitude," said Noyes, a private chef and musician. "If they have a good attitude, you can teach them to do anything."

"I would rather take someone who wants to be here than some kid who just got out of culinary school with a $200 knife," Courtney said.

Noyes and Courtney were teaching brothers Derrick and Darrell Runnels to prep collards for a 15-hour slow-cook in a bath of onions, garlic, brown sugar, honey. "A different kind of soul food," the 45-year-old Darrell said as he confidently laid blade into the long, rolled-up leaves pulled from the nearby earth.

Derrick and Darrell, who remember the terror this neighborhood could be when they were kids, still live nearby in a house they share with their mom. They've held other jobs — Derrick at Aramark, Darrell at Allstate. But this one is different.

"It's good to be cooking with my brother," said the 43-year-old Derrick. "And it's good to be giving back to the community."

Darrell found out about the gig from Kim High, who's been a manager at the farm for more than two years. She, too, worked at Allstate, for 31 years collecting claims. She used to eat what she could when she could, anything to fill her belly. By the time High hit 50, she had become a full-blown diabetic. "I was just sick," she said.

High grew up in Joppa, and was told that she needed to find the farm and that Daron could save her life. She couldn't imagine such a thing, not in Bonton. When she was a kid, her older brothers said they had to run through Bonton to get home. "Because Bonton was bad," she said. "Bad."

But she found the farm. "And it was like ..." She smiled. "The Garden of Eden."