Every year there's a small window when tomatoes actually taste like tomatoes, and right now a restaurant in New York is making the most of it. Farzi, an Indian concept restaurant in the city, has a seasonal tomato chaat on the menu, and if you've ever written chaat off as "snacky street food," this is the dish that changes your mind.

Chaat is a whole category of Indian street snacks, tangy, crunchy, sweet, spicy all at once, usually built on fried dough, yogurt, chutneys, and chaos in the best way. Farzi's version puts summer's heirloom tomatoes front and center, which is exactly the right move. You get the sweetness of a peak tomato against the sour-spicy crunch of chaat seasoning, and it works because the produce is doing half the lifting. Soon enough these tomatoes go back to being pale, mealy disappointments, and the dish will presumably disappear with them. Seasonal menus are honest like that.

The other headliner is crab-stuffed squash blossoms, one of those dishes that sounds fancy and is really just an excuse to eat something delicate before it's gone. Squash blossoms don't stick around long. Stuff them with crab, fry them lightly, and you've got a bite restaurant menus everywhere should be jealous of.

To me Farzi has always seemed like a place that enjoys the dramatic side of Indian cooking, so seasonal produce getting a spotlight treatment tracks. But I keep coming back to the tomato chaat specifically because it's such a good argument for eating with the calendar. The trend version of a dish is never better than the source, and the "source" here is literally a ripe heirloom at the peak of summer. You can't fake that in February. Places try. It never works.

If you're in the city while these dishes are on, this is your errand. Order the chaat, order the blossoms, and accept that you're eating something with an expiration date built in. Nation's Restaurant News has the full rundown if you want the complete menu details.

I've planned entire trips around shorter windows than this. Once I drove three hours for a peach stand I'd read about in a newsletter, got there, and they'd sold out by 10 a.m. Sat in the parking lot eating a gas station granola bar. Worth it anyway, somehow.

The ugly heirlooms taste identical to the pretty ones, by the way. Grab the weird ones at the farmers market this weekend and try a rough version at home, tomato, chaat masala, a squeeze of lime, something crunchy on top. Then go let Farzi show you how it's done properly.