Every Wednesday morning, weather permitting, I go to a small tailgate market maybe fifteen minutes from my place, not the big weekend one downtown that’s more of a scene than a market, this is smaller, mostly the same eight or nine growers every week, and I’ve been going long enough now that a couple of them know my order before I say it. There’s a woman who grows tomatoes on a plot outside the city, heirlooms mostly, and she’s the actual reason I still go every week even in months when I don’t strictly need anything from the market for a job.
I didn’t grow up going to markets like this. My family bought groceries the normal way, whatever’s on sale at whatever store is closest, and it took me years of working restaurant lines before I understood why chefs kept talking about knowing your growers like it was some kind of moral position instead of just a practical one. It’s practical. You get better food, obviously, but you also get information you can’t get any other way, which crop had a rough spring, what’s about to peak, what’s going to be gone in two weeks whether you’re ready or not.
That last part is the thing that’s actually changed how I plan, not just how I cook. A market forces you to plan around what exists right now instead of what you’d ideally want, and I’ve noticed the same instinct creeping into how I run my own Friday table, honestly. I used to pick a game for the night based on some abstract sense of what I felt like playing. Now I look at who’s actually coming, what they’ve played recently, how much time we realistically have, and pick from what’s actually available to me that week instead of some fantasy version of the evening. The tomato woman doesn’t have peaches in March no matter how badly I want them, and pretending otherwise just wastes everyone’s time.
I’ve also just gotten attached to the rhythm of it, honestly, which is maybe the real reason I keep going even on weeks I don’t need much. There’s something steadying about a Wednesday morning that looks the same most weeks, the same faces, the same handful of tables, small talk about weather that actually matters because it changed what’s in front of you. Asheville’s got no shortage of things to do on a Wednesday morning. I keep choosing this one, mostly for a tomato and a woman whose name I’m slightly embarrassed to admit I’ve never actually asked, three years in.