RON DUARTE

Ron duarte, who lives above his family’s hundred-year-old tavern in Pescadero, California, comes down for breakfast a little after 7 a.m. carrying an egg, the gift of a local farmer whose chickens, he rhapsodizes, lay “beautiful eggs, big brown ones.” After greeting the handful of morning regulars who gather at Duarte’s daily for coffee and conversation in the dining room before work, he walks into the kitchen. As his egg fries, he chats with the staff: “Have you guys done chicken and dumplings lately?”

About a quarter century ago, Ron Duarte instructed us in olallieberry pie baking.

“Last Wednesday,” a cook answers.

“The pears?” Duarte asks, referring to a bushel of fruits just brought in from the backyard orchard.

“Ready for pie,” comes the answer.

Mr. Duarte says he doesn’t do much anymore; his kids, Tim and Kathy, run the place. But every detail matters to him, and he doesn’t miss a trick. Walking through the back of the kitchen, he shows how the apple pie gets a flat crust, the pear latticework, so they can easily be distinguished. He shows off a box of Watsonville olallieberries, used to make Duarte’s most popular pie.

Although his place remains the rugged old tavern it was throughout the twentieth century, Ron Duarte’s respect for its food’s seasonal correctness rivals that of any hifalutin’ bistro chef in wine country. Mr. Duarte, who took over the business from his parents in the 1960s, cannot hide his happiness when Dungeness crab season starts in November, because that means the restaurant’s cioppino is at its best. “We don’t buy frozen,” he says. “We like to get them live and cook them.”

A huge garden in back of the restaurant, where much of the kitchen’s provender is grown, helps explain Ron Duarte’s seasonal savvy. Walking through rows of Swiss chard, heirloom tomatoes, leeks, and artichokes, he can tell you exactly when each is at its peak. It’s the artichokes for which the restaurant is most famous. They can’t grow enough in the family garden, but neither do they rely on a big foodservice supplier. “Those artichoke balloons you see in the store?” he asks rhetorically. “They drive me nuts.” Artichokes from his backyard garden are grand, meaty things, used in the kitchen for the most basic preparation—steaming— where no other flavor vies with the thistle’s deep green goodness. For sausage-stuffed artichokes, artichoke omelets, fried artichokes, and the restaurant’s legendary cream of artichoke soup, supplies come from farms an hour south, around Castroville, the Artichoke Capital of the World and source of nearly all grown in America. (In 1951, a little-known starlet named Marilyn Monroe was the city’s first Artichoke Queen.)