Restaurateur Arturo Kassel and chef Ryan Johnston have infused their passion for eating local, fresh food that is cooked simply and artfully into their latest endeavor at 7556 Fay Ave. – Prepkitchen, which opened six months ago. The pair, along with three other business partners, run the Whisknladle restaurant at 1044 Wall St., which opened in February 2008. Kassel and Johnston began brainstorming the idea to open an auxiliary kitchen after they grew frustrated at not being able to find healthy, good food in a hurry to accommodate their own busy schedules. “We thought, ‘Why can’t we get Whisknladle food to take home?’” Kassel said. “That planted the seed.” So Kassel and his crew set up the “prep” part of Whisknladle kitchen at the small café to offer made-to-order dishes like gnocchi with kitchen-braised beef in a tomato sauce to take home or eat at the indoor bar or outdoor patio. Prepkitchen also caters parties, and offers a family meal for five – three courses for $65.  Kassel describes the menu as comfort foods that might push people’s culinary comfort boundaries. For example, the cooks make a turkey sandwich that they brine, roast and season in-house, and serve with bacon and onion marmalade or a date chutney on Bread and Cie bread.  “We offer slow fast-food… it might take 10 minutes to prepare, but it’s cooked to order and made fresh,” Kassel said. Prepkitchen and Whisknladle take the Alice Waters approach to eating locally and seasonally. They source their ingredients from four farms that offer high-quality produce: La Milpa Organic Farm five miles north of Escondido, Chino Farms in Rancho Santa Fe that draws chefs from Los Angeles, Crows Pass Farm in Temecula and Niman Ranch based near San Francisco. The squash are falling off their vines right now, and Prepkitchen sells a butternut squash and pear panini with Gruyere cheese and fresh sage for a fall taste. The kitchen also sells a selection of in-house cured meats and artisan cheeses. The menu continually changes with the evolving seasons — a few dozen in San Diego, to be sure — and to keep the eight cooks inspired. “[The cooks] put their personality and spin on their food,” Kassel said. “It would be easier to perfect 16 dishes and serve them year-round but that’s not what we’re about.” Kassel, 29, grew up on Mount Soledad with a burning desire to enter the restaurant business since the age of 13. He describes his mother as “an excellent cook, his own Julia Child.” Kassel graduated from the French Culinary Institute in New York in and spent nearly four years managing restaurants in the city before moving back to La Jolla in 2006 to be close to family. Opening his own restaurant at an early age “has been a school of hard knocks,” said Kassel, who mentioned that Prepkitchen is “swimming upwards” as he attempts to warm locals to his taste for high-quality food off the cuff. Restaurant recommendation: A homebody who spends time in his own kitchen and circulating to friends’ and families’ dinner tables as part of his own “cooking club,” Kassel, nonetheless, recommends the Cowboy Star, 640 10th Ave., as a good, unpretentious steakhouse. Farm House Café, a French bistro at 2121 Adams Ave., also tops his list. Cookbook picks: Anything by Alice Waters, “Au Pied De Cochon” by Martin Picard and “Culinary Artistry” by Andrew Dornenburg and Karen Page.