What makes this restaurant the most thrilling farm-to-table experience in the region?

Perhaps no restaurant in the region approaches preservation in the same evolving, patient, and extensive fashion as West Chester’s Andiario. Its open, street-level kitchen is the stage upon which diners feast their eyes. Backstage, in a basement filled with with desiccated and pickled ingredients, is a veritable library of our region’s terroir. Anthony Andiario, 46, is its careful steward.

While the bounty sourced from nearby farms (including one that belongs to the chef and his partner Maria van Schaijik, 34) often makes a direct, straightforward journey to the table — a recent dinner featured an austere salad of black walnuts, candied quince, Birchrun Blue cheese, and forced Tardivo radicchio from Campo Rosso Farm in Gilbertsville, Pa. — the real secret is Andiario’s larder, where ingredients cure, ferment, age, and, in its refrigerated section, languish under oil.

The larder starts in the dining room, where you can walk around and see the ingredients you consume stored in the space, arranged like decor. Glass apothecary jars filled with black trumpet mushrooms sit in the middle of the floor, surrounded by dining tables bedecked in white tablecloths and lacey, sculptural tea lights. Another dish from dinner, a spiky cockscomb-shaped pasta, stuffed with ground capon and dressed in a black trumpet crema, was made with mushrooms that were dried above the dining room. (The bundles of dried oregano suspended from pipes above the dining room are purely decorative — “we had too much at the farm,” explained longtime server Aidan Barber.)

Continuing toward the open kitchen, the baseboards of the corridor are lined with a row of 64-ounce mason jars filled with pickled eggplant. The trail culminates in an altar of sorts that is fashioned from wooden produce crates and beset with jars of pickled ramps, preserved asparagus, and mint syrup, like acolytes worshipping an enormous bouquet of dried wild teasel.

But the real treasure trove is in the basement. Anthony (I’ll refer to him by his first name in this article, to separate the man from the restaurant) led me downstairs into its hushed, cool quiet. There I meet the kabocha squash served with the ribs and loin of a Maple Arch Farm hog cooked over the hearth, the herbs that seasoned the dishes, and dried tomatoes (featured on a sliver of focaccia piled as tomatoes sott’olio, with puntarelle, and whipped Caputo Brothers’ ricotta), along with many more ingredients, awaiting their day on the plate.

“I’m really getting constant communication with the farmers who I’ve been working closely with for the last six years. I want to know what works for them. Like they know better than I do what’s at its peak or, the antithesis of that — what they need to sell,” Anthony said. “Monday I do most of my ordering, so I’ll be on the phone with Chris Field of Campo Rosso, asking him what’s good, what’s perfect, and he’ll say, ‘The endives are a little behind because of the cold weather but next week, they’ll be perfect.’ So in my mind, next week will be an endive salad. And we got puntarelle a few weeks ago, and they’re in a different dish every week.”

Bumpy marina di chioggia pumpkins and smooth, Cinderella coach-style Musquée de Provence pumpkins sit in long neat rows on cardboard beds on wooden shelves. They heave with gallon plastic bags, neatly dated, labeled with their contents — beans, mushrooms, curly leeks, peppers, verbena — and kept from tumbling off the shelves by chicken wire. Cardboard bankers boxes are crammed with more gallon bags still. “Our preservation has gotten less sexy,” Anthony said, referring to his recent reliance on drying over jarring.

Back in 2019, Anthony had big plans for the basement, hoping to turn it into a speakeasy. “If we did that now, it would have to be an actual speakeasy,” he joked.

Seasons are dictated by vegetables. “I look forward to eggplant coming in, and eggplant going away. Same goes for tomatoes,” Anthony told me, referring to the possibilities held by both fresh and preserved versions of produce. “Each year I build a new approach to it. I’m excited when the conditions are right and you have a successful crop, but also when you don’t.”

I look forward to eggplant coming in, and eggplant going away.

Anthony relies on multiple forms of preservation that vary from season to season. “Ninety percent of our preservation now is drying. Peppers, mushrooms, tomatoes, beans, leeks, in our dehydrators and ovens,” he said. “We’ll do shorter term preservation on tomatoes. We won’t take them all the way dry, but we’ll do a sott’olio, which means ‘under oil.’ You dry them to 90%, splash them with vinegar, and then you can put them under oil. They have to stay refrigerated, but every winter, we learn how we need to extend stuff, what quantities we need.” Eggplants, puntarelle, and tiny local trout are receiving the same sott’olio treatment.

Beyond the walls of the restaurant, Anthony and Maria have delved deeper into producing their own ingredients than possibly any other chef in Philly. “In the past three years, we started a microfarm on our property,” he said.

Now, in addition to the well-stocked larder, there’s a flock of 90 chickens. “Eggs are something we’ve been working on. By the spring we should be producing almost all the eggs we use. Right now they’re primarily going into our pasta dishes and specific items at the bakery.” There’s also a herd of cattle being raised by Maria’s family. Anthony anticipates harvesting the first steer for the restaurant from this herd.

Still, Anthony said, “I’m not trying to compete with any of the farmers we work with, because that would be silly.”

Back upstairs, everyone — 30 diners on a full night, with room to add a couple seats or subtract them — in the dining room enjoys the same meal, at the same gentle but attentive pace, one dish at a time. The prix-fixe menu is $80 per person, not inclusive of tax or tip. “People only have four different plates,” Anthony said. “They can focus and enjoy themselves.”

That focus applies as much to perfecting a single dish, integrating the wealth of house-preserved ingredients in with fresh ones, as it does to the diner enjoying it, without the noise of any other dishes, unaware of the months or even years it takes some of those ingredients to reach their plates.

But should the apocalypse come, you’ll find me in Andiario’s larder.