“I fight with our customers who want to eat Brussels sprouts all year round,” says Daniel Loperfido, co-owner of Prep Neighborhood Kitchen, a 26-seat restaurant in Arlington Heights that describes its cooking as “simple, hearty meals with truly in-season New England produce, vegetables, artisan cheese and farm-raised meats.”
Loperfido and Prep co-owner John Cassino, friends since high school on Long Island, wanted to build a restaurant that has a “little bit of everything,” where diners could “enjoy homemade pizza for dinner one night and a roast chicken the next,” Loperfido says.
You’d be forgiven for assuming that Brussels sprouts—the bitter, earthy cruciferous vegetable known to virtue signal “I am healthyish,” whether served deep-fried at a pub or shaved raw in a salad—would appear on the classical new American menu at Prep Neighborhood Kitchen. Only Prep isn’t exaggerating when it describes its use of New England produce as “truly in-season.”
Loperfido jokingly pontificates about the 26 seasons of the restaurant — one for each two-week period that a new vegetable or fruit comes into season in New England — and muses about replacing a 12-month calendar with a New England harvest calendar at the restaurant.
Just a mile from Prep Neighborhood Kitchen is Lexington Community Farm, where CSA and greenhouse manager Katerina Kyuchokova and a crew of five women harvest the farm’s third succession of broccolini on a damp, chilly fall morning. Kyuchokova recalls that Loperfido began to shop at the farm in 2024, and after his visits, “we would be cleared out of a lot of things.”
A couple of years ago, former LexFarm board member Lisa Farrell noticed that while the farm was using its space to host popular community events such as outdoor concerts and movies, the farm’s core product – local food – was noticeably absent. Farrell worked with Prep to provide food at a few events that summer, and remembers one night in particular when she delivered 60 meals preordered from Prep to farm concertgoers. “It was such a nice way to celebrate the produce of the farm and enjoy being outside,” LexFarm education director Rachel Curtin says about the evenings. “I love [Prep]. My family goes all the time.”
Today, Prep buys most of its ingredients from Myers Produce, a regional distributor for farms in western Massachusetts and Vermont, but the LexFarm team is still happy to support the restaurant. “I have a great relationship with Daniel,” Kyuchokova says. “I still text him to say ‘I have a lot of this vegetable, would you be interested?’’” The farm crew is known to get pizza at Prep after work as a bonding activity.
When Prep first opened, Loperfido used the best local stone-ground flour he could find to make pizza dough. As he reached the bottom of the 50-pound bag of Kamut, an ancient, organic, non-GMO Khorasan wheat, he noticed taste degradation compared to the top of the bag. Loperfido and Cassino shy away from calling themselves chefs, but it’s hard to imagine what other kind of professional would notice and respond to such a detail by stepping backward into the production chain and learning to mill and blend wheat berries into dough to keep the taste fresh. This fall, the pizza and bread doughs at Prep include up to 25% of house-milled red fife, Kamut, warthog and spelt; rye, winter wheat, spring wheat and Rouge de Bordeaux will cycle in as availability permits.
Prep’s pizza dough has just four ingredients — water, flour, salt and time — and an eight-step recipe that is more impressionistic than formulaic, with instructions like “mix dough with salt and as much water as it likes and rest zero minutes to three hours depending on the time of year.” Loperfido describes learning to make pizza dough for the restaurant as “hands-on trial and error,” especially since the kitchen is far from a temperature-controlled environment and, as Loperfido admits, he doesn’t write down much. “I’m not a good scientist, but me and John talk a lot so we remember what works,” he says. Like someone who probably learned this lesson the hard way, Cassino adds, “Always set a timer when you put things in the oven.”
Loperfido laughs as he remembers learning — the hard way — what the maximum amount of bran that a pizza dough can handle is, and is apologetic for the texture and holes in the pizza last summer. “Everything is about watching,” he says, which is also how he noticed that the sun pouring in through the restaurant’s front windows would proof dough better than any other area of the kitchen could. But for the moments when watching isn’t enough, there is always step eight in the recipe: “pray.”
A self-taught baker, Loperfido briefly made and sold croissants during the pandemic, but that was the extent of his baking experience before starting Prep. Neither Loperfido nor Cassino grew up watching Julia Child or living with families who centered their lives around farming or food. Loperfido wonders whether his family fully understands his pursuit today. Both men worked for years on the hospitality side of restaurants; the closest either Loperfido or Cassino got to working with food was a summer on Cape Cod, where Loperfido wistfully remembers working at Chatham Bars Inn and being delighted to pick up shifts as a farmhand.
Among the challenges that Loperfido and Cassino are out to prove as they build Prep is whether it is possible to only do business with people you know personally. Whereas most restaurants order their food from a mainline distributor with a large warehouse to be delivered within two days, Prep orders most of its produce directly from farms two weeks in advance. This introduces risk and complexity; on the demand side, business may fluctuate, and on the supply side, unexpected rain, drought or pests can wreak havoc on the quality or quantity of produce available. Similar to farm CSA shareholders, however, Prep willingly assumes the risk because it is committed to growing an economy that values “food that tastes as it should,” and is not bred simply for ease of growing.
Listening to Loperfido talk about running such a values-forward operation amidst rising costs sounds Sisyphean — a rare break from pushing the boulder uphill coming in the form of Sarah Norton and her upstart farm in Wayland, Mass., Rosemary Acres. Last year, Norton moved to Arlington, and after stumbling upon the restaurant, she began to sell herbs to Prep, an arrangement that both sides rave about. Norton appreciates the predictable business that Prep provides — it is much-needed stability that supports her farmers market business — and says, “they are very consistent with their ordering, which is nice — I can kind of expect what I’m going to do on a Tuesday morning.” Loperfido raves about the herbaceous aromas that fill the restaurant when Norton delivers — this is definitely “food that tastes as it should,” and fulfills the vision of food harvested in the morning and served that evening. Rosemary Acres does not yet have cold storage; whether this is a bottleneck to growth or quality insurance for its customers depends on one’s perspective.
In an ideal world, the strong relationship between Rosemary Acres and Prep Neighborhood Kitchen will help to grow both businesses, mirroring how Prep and Myers have grown in parallel. This year, Norton began to grow tomatoes, and Loperfido ordered them.
Food cost is “an ongoing crisis,” Loperfido says, though “once you become used to what’s available, anything is possible.” Loperfido proudly shares that no flour is imported from Italy and that he’s been able to minimize the use of olive oil since it is not locally produced.
Prep’s mission-driven ethos not only requires a high level of attention to detail and timing, but also a willingness and ability to pivot quickly. “It took us two years to really learn the seasons and how they shift,” Loperfido says. A few years ago, he began to juice carrots for a carrot-ginger salad dressing, but a few batches in, noticed that an earthy taste began to overpower the sweetness of the carrots. In other words, it was time to pivot, and a new salad dressing was rotated onto the menu. Unlike bell peppers, whose metamorphosis from green and vegetal to red and sweet as they ripen earns the vegetable different bins and SKUs at the grocery store, carrots are called carrots whether their predominant flavor is sweet or earthy. Operationally, it would be simpler to order from mainline distributors whose ingredients are sourced for consistent flavor and performance.
After tinkering with their business model for five years, Loperfido explains that they landed on a key lesson: “When we try to be a big restaurant, we fail.” This year, rather than listing out different preparations for multiple vegetable dishes, Prep offers one catch-all vegetable dish, “vegetables and spreads,” described on the menu as “a rotating selection of fresh from the farm vegetables with accompaniments.” Rosemary Acres farm owner Sarah Norton raves about the version she had last week for her birthday dinner. “Everyone at the table said that was the best thing,” Norton says, as she recalls enjoying navy bean hummus with shishito and corn, along with an order of the housemade bread.
Changes at the restaurant aren’t limited to the kitchen; Prep shifts its hours of operation as business changes. “Foot traffic in Arlington Heights just drops when school is out,” Loperfido says, so during the summer, Prep opens for dinner Monday through Friday, whereas during the school year, business is best from Wednesday through Saturday. Opening for lunch is an experiment Prep has run four times in five years — so far it hasn’t been the success they’d hoped, but Loperfido doesn’t rule anything out for the future. Maybe Prep just got the timing wrong.
For all of his efforts to source regional and sustainable products, there are still a few exceptions in the Prep pantry. Loperfido says this about pepperoni: “Much like ketchup is its own industrially processed wonder, I can’t seem to shake the general public of their love for factory pepperoni.”
As for the Brussels sprouts, Loperfido concedes, “Next week I’ll start to buy them, but they’ll just be the small ones at the top of the stalk and they’re impossible to make money on.”