Santa Monica's Farmers Market Turns 30: Candid Shots Of LA Chefs Shopping (PHOTOS)

Among Los Angeles chefs, the Wednesday Santa Monica Farmers' Market is sustenance-sacred. This week, the market is 30 years old, and the intersection of Arizona and Second Street is, now more than ever, the Hump Day hubbub for the city's top locavore chefs. You might find usual suspects like Josiah Citrin of Melisse fingering sprouts (he's a late bird, and at 8:30am, he's still nursing coffee around the corner) or David Wilcox of Gjelina (who gracefully declined a photograph; apologies if we looked menacing). The leading farms are easily Shaner and Coleman, where if you look behind the retail stand, you'll find stacks of produce-filled crates carefully labeled Ammo, Canele, AOC and so on.

To fete the market's 30th birthday, we approached (or, uh, "ambushed") as many chefs as we spotted, from 8am to 10am, shopping -- copious grape-shopping, as a matter of fact -- and included them in a candid gallery below: