Recently I’ve found myself, when discussing the Linkery, using the term “farm-driven” instead of the standard “farm-to-table.” I think I’m using “farm-driven” because, now that more restaurants are using local produce and justifiably calling themselves “farm-to-table”, I’m searching for the way to describe what’s distinct about the Linkery.

In my mind, restaurants that focus primarily on food (as opposed to ambience, theme, cocktails, etc) divide into two classes: farm-driven, and menu-driven. My summary of the two would be as follows.

Farm-driven: Supplier farms grow what they can grow the best at that time, and sell their products to the restaurant, without worrying about what the ingredients are. The restaurant then each day creates dishes from whatever great ingredients are in house, and those dishes compose the day’s menu. Usually the menu has some preset structure (i.e., an approximate number of selections, desired pricing, a given number each of vegetarian items, flatbreads, etc.), but the exact dishes are determined only after the best possible ingredients are procured.

Menu-driven: The chef or proprietor creates a menu that will appeal to his/her clientele, and then purchases the ingredients need to compose the dishes. A farm-to-table, menu-driven restaurant will keep seasonality and local farms in mind when developing the menu; any quality-minded menu-driven restaurant will restrict itself to ingredients which can procured at good quality and will work for the best quality ingredients.

Most restaurants are menu-driven, I think because the economics of menu-driven make more sense: the restaurant can focus principally on tailoring its menu to meet the needs of its market; and since the menu is largely fixed, managers can use repetition-based training for it cooks and servers, which is good for both finances and quality of execution.

In my opinion, for most types of cuisine — and especially if you really value eating with a sense of place — the most excellent possible restaurants are farm-driven, because in that system, it’s built-in that the restaurant is working with the best possible ingredients it can obtain, and ingredients that reflect the surrounding physical and cultural landscape. In contrast, with a menu-driven approach, there will often be some ingredient that is the best thing growing this week, which isn’t on the menu.

The catch is that, while farm-driven restaurants have sublime potential, in any given community menu-driven restaurants are more likely to be consistently very good (after all, there is more time to plan, practice and execute things). So for a patron that is spending his/her hard-earned money on one dinner out a week — and wants to have maximum assurance that they will enjoy every dish they order — the established menu-driven restaurant is often going to be preferred.

Our big project (we’re 4 1/2 years into it now) has been to become principally farm-driven while developing the skill and teamwork that will provide consistent excellence.

I think, as a neighborhood restaurant in North Park, we’re almost as farm-driven as we’re likely to get: We’re never going to be as completely from-the-day’s-harvest as, say, Farm 255 or Laja (both of which grow most of their ingredients), but we develop most of our daily menu dishes in the spirit of, say, upstairs at Chez Panisse, which is very farm-driven but also has a consistent structure to their menu. (Additionally, we also keep a few fixed, menu-driven items, such as sausage tacos and our burger. It will be interesting to see if they continue to be always on the menu as we evolve. Farm 255, for instance, doesn’t serve a burger unless they’ve slaughtered their cattle recently enough to have that beef.)

As far as quality goes, all of you who have been with us for a while know how much it has been elevated over the years. We’re proud to have accomplished that but also know we are still learning and improving. Consistency is probably the hardest challenge with a farm-driven restaurant, and while that too has greatly improved over the years I think all of us at the shop are still primarily focused on improving our systems so that mistakes become exceptionally rare.

Because developing an excellent farm-driven restaurant is so difficult, it is totally a partnership between you, as our community of guests, and us. An excellent farm-driven community restaurant is not something you can roll out at a ribbon-cutting ceremony; we’ve all been working together at it for years and there will probably never be a “Mission Accomplished” banner to hang across the bar. But if we’re doing it well, the small rewards — a transcendent meal, a joyous conversation, friendships with our neighbors — should present themselves along the way.