When Dan Honig first visited Rising Spring Meat Company,  a small-scale USDA certified slaughter and processing facility in the heart of Penns Valley, he reached into his pocket and preemptively took out his cell phone. He was used to being asked for it by suspecting slaughterhouse owners who didn’t want photos of their operations surfacing in the news.

“Why would we need your cell?” Rising Spring co-owner Jay Young asked. He had nothing to hide, and welcomed interested partners into the facility.

It was a good sign for Honig, who was in the early stages of starting a business that would connect chefs at New York restaurants with the meat from small, humane farms. A “mostly” vegetarian who alighted in the sustainable meat industry, first in sales and later at a butcher shop, Honig’s professional journey has brought him closer to a food system that, as a child, had been a mystery.

“We didn’t talk about food [growing up],” he said. At some point, however, “it was like the wool had been pulled over my eyes. I realized it sucked to be an animal and farmer in the current climate.”

The impact on its namesake is significant. “Happy Valley Meat is writing checks to the tune of about a million [dollars] a year to our farmers,” says Rising Spring’s Young.

And their meat is landing in the kitchens of some of the country’s finest restaurants. Earlier this summer Rising Spring shipped five bone-in tenderloins to one of Honig’s most well-known customers: the storied Delmonico’s Restaurant. “Yes, that Delmonico’s,” Young crowed on Instagram.

The list of restaurants sourcing from Happy Valley Meat has grown to 120. (It now works with two additional processors who meet the same standards as Rising Spring.) Most of its customers are restaurants in New York and New Jersey, although some come from Connecticut, Washington, D.C., Virginia and Pennsylvania—even central Pennsylvania, including The Deli and EcoVents, a catering and event planning company based in Millheim’s Bremen Town Ballroom. (See sidebar for a complete list of PA restaurants that source from Happy Valley Meat.)

Happy Valley Meat and Rising Spring grew up together. In the early days of the company, as Honig worked to keep supply steady, he made the four-hour trek from Brooklyn to Penns Valley weekly, sleeping at Jay and his wife, Laura’s, home. When one of Rising Spring’s employees suffered a shattered spine after he was kicked in the neck by an animal, Honig stayed for a month helping out in various jobs, including working on the kill floor. At one point during that stint, his hands started tingling from fatigue. “That’s a day’s worth of work, boy,” a Rising Spring employee noted after Honig asked what was happening. “You’ve finally done one.”

Honig makes monthly field trips with chefs interested in a decidedly different food system: one that tracks an animal’s journey from the pasture to their plates. They leave at 6 a.m., starting their morning on a central PA farm and ending with a trip to the slaughterhouse. It’s an intimate glimpse into the process that transforms farm animals into a $50 ribeye finished with demi-glace and garnished with a sprig of thyme.

Or a relatively inexpensive mushroom burger. In a partnership with To-Jo Mushrooms, a fourth generation family-owned and operated mushroom farm in Avondale, Pennsylvania, Happy Valley Meat is rolling out a new product: the beef-mushroom blended burger, which replaces a quarter of its beef with mushrooms. The newfangled burgers are distributed through the Common Market, a Philly-based distributor with a focus to bring local foods to institutions.

The addition of mushrooms brings Happy Valley Meat’s price down, making a burger made with small-farm meat more accessible for schools, hospitals and other institutions. It also makes something pedestrian—ground beef formed into a patty—new and exciting.