Confirming a rendezvous at the Toronto Islands ferry dock recently, Tawfik Shehata, the chef behind King West’s Vertical, said, “I’ll be the one with the bags of topsoil. Oh, and I have an Afro.” He chuckled as he spoke, but was he laughing about the description of his hair, or the notion of a rising-star chef lugging around topsoil—38 bags of it on this trip—on his day off? With help from the kitchen staff at the Island Yacht Club, Shehata has created a dream garden of such exotic produce as fire candle radishes, Armenian cucumbers and some 30 varieties of tomatoes on the Yacht Club’s grounds—produce that has just begun turning up on his menu downtown. And he’s hardly alone among city chefs. Lorenzo Loseto, the chef at George, carved out space for a vegetable and herb garden on a balcony above the restaurant’s courtyard this spring; it’s one of three gardens the chef maintains to keep his kitchen in fresh greens (he’s recently begun using intensely flavourful long beans that his mother grows in her garden). And the heirloom-variety tomatoes that Jamie Kennedy grows on his farm near Picton (he planted 200 seedlings this year) and serves at his Wine Bar are rightly famous for their just-picked taste.

But what motivates a guy, who by all rights should be exhausted—Shehata is responsible for breakfast, lunch and dinner service—to do this? “I hate the limited ingredients available to us,” he said, mounding a shovelful of soil around a black zebra tomato plant. “And it’s a great way to teach my staff to develop a real respect for good, simple ingredients.”

“Simple,” of course, is in the eye of the beholder. Though the garden was still weeks away from its peak, it was already showing the promise of an excellent harvest; Shehata’s arugula was intense and incredibly peppery and the tomato plants were sporting hundreds of little flowers. “This is really restorative work. I can decompress here, and it’s so rewarding watching it grow.”