On the menu now.

Grilled yellow tail, organic brown rice, local vegetables, house made kimchee, radish, green garlic, ginger soy glaze.

On the menu tonite!

Wednesday is Burns Nite, and we are, as always, getting our haggis on. House made — Max says this year is his best haggis yet. We’ll also have Alesmith Wee Heavy and Moylan’s Kiltlifter. In the “not actually Scottish, but delicious bar food” category, we’re making Scotch eggs, with house made sausage and pastured chicken eggs.

Poetry reading is on you. We’ll have the book.

- fish or sausage tacos
- soup and house salad
- bread & oil and house salad
- house salad with link
- el salchichero (fries with a gazillion toppings)

You can see our whole menu (newly re-done as of today) here. Join us for lunch!

We believe where your food comes from is more important than where you eat it. So we don’t do Restaurant Week, we do Farm Week. In which we serve you meals in which every dish highlights food from local farms.

From this Sunday, January 16th, through Friday, January 23rd, we’ll be offering a fixed price, three course meal featuring food from local farms, for $25 at The Linkery and $20 at El Take It Easy. It’s good from 5pm to close each day. The menus are vegetarian-friendly, too.

We hope to see you!

This Sunday we’re partying all day with Green Flash…we’ve got 10 of their drafts and 2 casks. We’ll be grilling up a variety of pastured meats, and of course there will be football all day, with sound in part of the restaurant.

Here’s the beer lineup:
On Cask
Pasilla Chili Double Stout
Imperial IPA

On Draft
Fizzy Yellow Beer
30th Street Pale Ale
Hop Head Red
West Coast IPA
Imperial IPA
Winter’s Folly Winter Warmer
Double Stout
Barleywine
Saison Diego
Le Freak

We’ll open at 10am and the kitchen will open at 11am, and we’ll be serving all day and nite. Join us!

Available now ’till it’s gone.

At the beginning/end of every year, I take a little time to appreciate what we (you and us together) have accomplished here in the last twelve months; and size up what we can look forward to in the next twelve. Stock-taking, visioning, and all that. It’s helpful, no? Plus, I think this year was interesting for us, and will in time prove to have been pivotal for our project.

One year ago, we had just re-opened a re-designed, re-engineered Linkery. We de-emphasized sausages, brought our commitment to local and seasonal produce sharply into focus, narrowed the menu, reduced the frequent menu changes, and jumped aboard the nothing-under-$20 train that started rolling after the 2008 economic breakdown. Personally, I really loved the menu, and everyone agreed the dishes were tight. We saw more guests come through the door, I think due to the number of lower-priced dishes we were offering.

Over the course of six to nine months, though, we felt the energy wane, and it became clear that this was a cost of the commitment to offering only inexpensive dishes: with the quality of ingredients we’re interested in serving, there’s a very limited universe of things we can offer at a low price. What’s more, those things tend to be flour-based — you’ll notice that a lot of under-$20 restaurants are loosely Italian-inspired, leaning heavily on pasta, pizza, and polenta. Flour based food isn’t the most interesting thing in the world, and those dishes start to lose appeal, at least to us, after a while.

During summer and fall we experimented with a few ideas to liven up the menu, offering more specials, bringing back a wide selection of house made sausages, offering dishes centering on pastured-beef-tallow-cooked fries, even getting playful with the menu format itself. At the same, we noticed that a many local restaurants we consider our colleagues just bit the bullet and started offering a wider selection of dishes, including more expensive ones. And, frankly, that seemed only sane.

I think a lot of chefs and owners came to the conclusion this year that, if we’re going to serve the best possible food to our guests, we’re going to have to offer a complete range of ingredients and prices. I personally was particularly inspired by our neighbor Matt Gordon at Urban Solace, who added “luxury” dishes to his menu like grass-fed steak and veal preparations and, if I recall correctly, foie gras. With this “new new paradigm” in mind, our offerings evolved by the end of the year to include a lot of the things that I think makes our chef, Max Bonacci, special: dishes using every part of every animal; super-premium ingredients like grass-fed steak in delicious, unpretentious contexts; daily menu changes reflecting what our farmers have brought us.

We stil have almost the same number of inexpensive dishes, but we’ve complemented them with dishes using more precious ingredients, as well. I’m hopeful everyone will find their sweet spot, so to speak.

In another subtle change you may have noticed, we reduced the broad array of vegetarian dishes we serve; now we’re more like most restaurants, with just a few, carefully composed vegetarian options, and some other dishes that you can order without meat and are still tasty. The reason for this? The vegetarian plates, for the most part, don’t sell very well. We kept the ones that sold the best, and the others we replaced with meat dishes (which also, it turns out, showcase what most makes us unique, the quality of meat we serve). At the same time, to better accommodate vegetarians and vegans, we’ve started offering a weekly 3-course vegetarian dinner for $20, at El Take It Easy (and once a month we offer the meal as vegan). I think this is better for everyone: it’s a great deal, and because we do a different dinner each week, it’s always unique and totally driven by local, seasonal ingredients. I encourage all you vegetarians in our community to check it out.

Other evolutions this year at the Link:

* We added taps to where we generally have 10 or 11 craft beers on draft, and reduced casks so where we generally have one or two. Cellarmanship of casks in San Diego (where we don’t have actual cellars) is really expensive, it just got to be too hard to explain why we had 5 or 6 beers on at $8/glass (which was actually too low anyway considering our costs). So we reduced to just one or two, for the cask lovers ready to pay a premium for great cask beer with a great dinner; and made up the difference in a wider selection of drafts. That’s gone over really well, I’d say.

* Speaking of beer drinkers, to properly service our neighborhood imbibers, we added a late nite happy hour where all beers are $3.93 ($5 after tax & service) after 10pm. We figure some of you are going to have a beer before you go to bed, anyway, and we’d like you to have it with us.

* We hooked up with some new, great local wine! On tap, no less. Our relationship with winemakers Chris Broomell and Alysha Stehly of Vesper Vineyards/Triple-B Ranches finally bore fermented fruit, as we added four of their wines to both of our restaurants, plus a fifth (Los Pilares) they make for a another, amazing, craft wine project in town. Local wine made like this had been too expensive for us to serve, but together we made it work by eliminating bottling and moving the wine in kegs. Look for a Sauvignon Blanc and a beautiful rosé to arrive this Spring.

All that said, the biggest changes/accomplishments this year were over at El Take It Easy. I’ve written in depth about the evolution of that restaurant both here and on my personal blog, so I won’t recount all the details here. Suffice it to say that we developed a craft cocktail program people love, a mezcal selection which is really enjoyable for us to share with you, and a focus on Mexican wine country cuisine which has allowed us to cook the great local ingredients we get in a way that’s delicious and still new to a lot of people in San Diego.

On a numbers basis, El Take It Easy is now twice as popular as it was a year ago and appears to be continually growing. I’m super proud to be a part of what’s going on there. While I always enjoy visiting both of our restaurants as a guest, I find the small scale of EZ and the dynamism of its youth particularly invigorating. If you haven’t checked it out recently, I hope you do soon.

As for my personal year, like most people’s, it had plenty of ups and downs. It seems that’s the new normal, in an economy that continues to decline (cf. finite resources, maladapted species). One purely joyous occurrence: I rediscovered the music of Paul Simon, at first due to the unexplained ubiquitous playing in counter-service restaurants of Negotiations and Love Songs this fall, and then due to Cerebral Decanting’s review of Simon’s latest album, So Beautiful or So What. If you didn’t listen to both records a hundred thousand times in 2011, you still have 2012. At least until the Mayans get done with it, I guess.

Also, concurrent with both restaurants developing to the point where I’m not necessary to their operations — they now are run, better than I ever did, by Michael, Max, Jeezy, Rachel, Ethan, Chuckey and a bunch of other talented folks — I discovered that I no longer envision myself living in San Diego when I grow up. Which is, for a lifelong and proud San Diegan, an interesting thing to experience.

For most of my lifetime, I rejected the idea of city-shopping as consumerist and shallow, but now…well, the truth is I want to live somewhere where I can safely and happily ride a bike most places; where I rarely have to drive a car; where there are lots of restaurants and stores trafficking in local food and handmade products; where there is a well-developed wine culture; and where pursuing excellence in craft is culturally encouraged. On one hand, a lot of talented people have been working to make these things true in San Diego; on the other hand, those changes will take decades if they ever happen all, and I’d like to have a better quality of life while I’m still able to enjoy it.

When the whole Velo Cult store — owner, staff, and stock — up and moved to Portland at the end of December, it really hit home with me and a lot of my friends. An internationally-acclaimed business dedicated to pushing our culture forward so we can enjoy our city life more, finally just threw their hands up, quit, and moved to a place where there’s already a market for what they do. It’s hard to believe they won’t be better off for it. And that, of course, makes me suspect I should be thinking the same way about my own life.

So, for me, 2012 promises to be a year of exploration. Of places, ideas, and, of course, food and drink. I’ll keep you updated about interesting things I discover, on my personal blog and, when it pertains to the restaurants, here.

Many thanks to all of you, as always, for being a part of this project. I think I speak for all of us who work at both restaurants when I say how grateful we are that your support lets us do this work that is so interesting and fun. Next month it’ll be seven years! It’s amazing to be able to say that, and we appreciate the privilege.

Happy 2012!

Now the good news. You can still avoid the mall madness. In response to several customer inquiries, we’ve got Holiday Sausages for sale.

Here are the styles:

Alsatian Christmas – Pork, sugar, cinnamon, clove, nutmeg
Swedish Potato Sausage – Pork, beef, potato, onion, mustard, caraway, marjoram (This also goes by the name Minnesota Potato Sausage)
Smoked Polish (aka Kielbasa) – Pork, marjoram, coriander, green onion, red oak smoke

But Wait! There’s more!

On Christmas eve, we’re bringing back an old time customer favorite—our Choucroute Plate. It’s so good and festive that it seemed like the perfect thing to do.

The Holiday Special includes: House cured sauerkraut from local organic cabbage, braised in white wine and cooked with pork, melted Spring Hill cheese, braised pork belly, house made sausage, house baked beer bread.

And Don’t Forget…

* $125 in gift cards for $100. Specifically, buy a $100 gift card by the 24th and we’ll give you a $25 card for free. The only catch is that you agree not to use either card until the 26th.

* Tamales. We’re still making our delicious tamales with real, house-rendered lard and righteous pastured meats. They’re $3 each, to go, buy a bundle and share ‘em with your family.

* Nothing says Merry Christmas OR Happy Hanukkah like the gift of bacon (CAUTION: might not actually be a good Hanukkah gift). In any event, our famous house-cured bacon is available for $6 per half pound.

Jay’s in the running…?

The holiday season has been fantastic around here, so it’s come as no surprise to us hear that Linkery/El Take It Easy’s own Jay Porter has declared himself in the running for the Arizona GOP Presidential primary.

We’re guessing it was a case of too much Festivus spirit. We do know that he’s declared that he’ll make the gimlet the official White House cocktail. We’ll let you jump over to the page at CityBeat for the rest of the story...

Skip the malls, get your holiday gifts here. Here’s what we’ve got for you:

* $125 in gift cards for $100. Specifically, buy a $100 gift card by the 24th and we’ll give you a $25 card for free. The only catch is that you agree not to use either card until the 26th.

* Holiday hams! House cured city hams from Berkshire pork. Each ham runs about 5 pounds, and we’re selling them for $50 each. We have 4 total to sell. This is the ham which Jed Sundwall called “by far the best ham we’ve ever had.”

* Tamales. We’re still making our delicious tamales with real, house-rendered lard and righteous pastured meats. They’re $3 each, to go, buy a bundle and share ‘em with your family.

Happy holidays!

I’m an idea man Chuck, I get ideas, sometimes I get so many ideas that I can’t even fight them off…What if you mix the bourbon in the carton, WITH the eggs? Or… hold it! Chuck! I got it! Take LIVE chickens, and FEED ‘em bourbon! Oh this is great. [speaks into tape recorder] Call El Take It Easy!

Monday, December 19th at El Take It Easy is the second-to-last Manhattan Monday with Wes Hudson sharing the gems of his epic jazz on vinyl collection. To celebrate, we’re making eggnog with grassfed Jersey cow’s milk, pastured chicken eggs…and bourbon. Join us anytime from 5pm to midnite, Wes kicks in around 7pm.

The special guest star of tonite’s Ballast Point Tap Takeover: Candy Cane Victory At Sea, on cask. Served with a candy cane, of course!

Ballast Point Tap Takeover: Wednesday, December 14th at The Linkery

Twenty years ago Jack White opened Home Brew Mart, a place where dedicated beer fans could get the “good stuff” for their home brews. The store was an immediate success. Five years later Jack and his friend Yuseff Cherney opened Ballast Point Brewing in the back room of Home Brew Mart. The many fans of the store spread the word about the quality of Ballast Point’s products and demand skyrocketed.

In 2010, Ballast Point won three gold medals for their beers, as well as the “Small Brewery Champion” award at the World Beer Cup. BeerAdvocate says that they currently have 68 styles of beer in production. We’re not doing all those flavors this week, but we are giving our taps over to Ballast Point this Wednesday. Do stop by to try some of the best that San Diego has to offer.

Here are your options:

Victory at Sea (different versions on cask and draft) 10% – Imperial Porter. Brewed with cold extracted, freshly brewed coffee, specially roasted by our friends at Cafe Calabria. The addition of vanilla adds a layer of complexity and the result is full flavored, rich and delicious.

Sculpin IPA (different versions will be on cask and draft) 7% – Showcases bright flavors and aromas of apricot, peach, mango & lemon. The lighter body also brings out the crispness of the hops. This delicious Ballast Point Ale won a gold medal at the World Beer Cup 2010 in the International Pale Ale category

Barrel Aged Black Marlin Porter 6% – Rich, dark, chocolaty porter with distinctive American hop character. Great with hearty foods and desserts.

Brother Levonian Saison 5.5% – Saison/Farmhouse Ale. Smells of Belgium and pale malts. Some light funk. Tastes like a crisp and clean Belgian Saison. Some bitterness and earthiness. Brother Levonian Saison is named for the late Dave Levonian, a San Diegan who was a great homebrewer, an avid beer enthusiast and generally just a really good person. Ballast Point is donating all of the money from the beer to his daughter’s college fund.

Navigator Doppelbock 8.9% – (A doppelbock is traditionally a Bavarian specialty beer which is deep gold to dark brown, with a large, creamy, persistent head and strong malty aroma.) Caramel, toffee, toasted bread, prunes/dates. Alcohol is well-hidden by the malts. A little chocolate at the end.

Barrel Aged Sea Monster Stout 8% – Oatmeal stout. Roasted coffee notes, bittersweet chocolate, currant, balanced with hops.

Tongue Buckler 10% Imperial Red Ale. Big caramel presence up front. The malt is offset by huge citrus hop bitterness on the back end. There’s mango, tangerine and a bit of pineapple. Some booze is apparent in the finish and there’s a lingering bitter aftertaste. The beer is full bodied, quite thick and viscous.

Calico 5.5% – Amber Ale. A rich complexity comes from four types of malt—but it’s those distinct American hops that offer a crisp bitterness and unique floral aroma. To round out te traditional-English-yet-very-American Amber Ale, they use a proprietary yeast to develop a fruity, Madeira-like richness.

Wahoo Wheat 4% – Belgian Witbier-styled Wheat. Brewed to be light and refreshing—with a unique citrus character that comes from adding orange peel and coriander to the boil. What gives our Wahoo Wheat—and other wheat beers—a hazy appearance is the unmalted wheat it’s made from. A special yeast contributes to this beer’s refreshing tangy flavor—quite different from the banana and clovey Hefeweizens of Bavaria.

It seemed almost too easy to say “yes” when the local mafia asked about doing a holiday project. No, they didn’t have dragging knuckles and a boss named Guido—this was the San Diego North Park Craft Mafia, a collaborative effort by local artisans aimed at getting their wonderful works into your hands.

This, friends, is golden opportunity to put our money into an effort that supports our neighborhood’s fine craftspeople. If you’d like to preview samples of some of the great gifts that will be available at this event go here: http://goo.gl/e7SVy

So Thursday, December 15th they’ll be setting up shop at El Take It Easy from 7 to 9 pm. It’s a unique opportunity to shop “really local”, buy truly handmade gifts and enjoy the fine crafted food and beverages at El Take It Easy. The event will have many unique gifts for friends, family and pets! So shop local and avoid the malls. For more info: http://goo.gl/XEqZC

First things first: our whole social-economic system depends on everybody eating industrially produced food, no matter how bad it tastes. This is because industrial food is the only kind of food that can be produced and distributed cheaply enough to turn a substantial profit. That substantial profit is required to pay back capital and interest to the banks and institutions who fund the entire “free-market” economy. Without the possibility of profit in food production, our financial system will seize up and threaten our social structures.

Meanwhile, literally by a freak of nature, excellent quality food requires sustainable, not extractive, methods. Which means it is not “bankable”: businesses that favor human skill to petroleum-driven machinery, and leave the ecology in better condition than they found it, as a matter of simple math cannot generate enough profit to keep lenders and banks afloat. This means that when you choose excellent food over mass-produced food, you are chipping away at the economic foundation upon which America is built, and hastening an end to the way of life of its citizens.

To which I say, tough luck, suckers.

In his music video “Real Gangstas”, Jasiri X mocks the macho posturing of gats-and-gold hip-hop fashion, pointing out that “real gangstas” (financiers, industrialists, politicians), despite their boring clothes, make far more money than even platinum selling artists. The “real gangastas” ensure the system works to extract as much wealth as possible for their benefit, regardless of consequences to others. That kind of cold ruthlessness is what sets the captains of finance apart from us little people, who go about our daily lives doing the things we’re supposed to do, mindlessly contributing to the wealth of our keepers. Those guys figured it out, and mad props to them for it.

I don’t know how to use the global financial system to enrich myself at the expense of billions of people, but I do know how to eat and drink well. And, when I’m biting into a cut of pastured meat, or savoring a dollop of Valle de Guadalupe olive oil, I enjoy the additional satisfaction of knowing I took the financier’s profit and put it in my belly. The food may be sustainable in an ecological sense, but in our global economic system, it’s totally unsustainable in an economic sense. That gives me joy. I like taking those guys’ money and eating it. Their money tastes good.

Which is, naturally, why we built our restaurant entirely on serving the best ingredients. This kind of food tastes better, and we’ve always been more interested in good-tasting food than whether the big guys get their cut. Think of the Linkery as a parlor where you can see what happens to food when the banker’s share goes back into the food, as flavor.

And, hey, whenever you want to eat industrial food, go for it, we won’t judge. Plenty of opportunities abide for you to make the proper, loyal decision to eat what you’re fed, and even to feel good about how you’re treating yourself: corporate food behemoths generate “organic” versions of their industrial products; myriad restaurants label their corn-fed beef as “grass fed” and call their bagged Salinas produce “local and seasonal”; an army of faux-populists stand ready to cheer you whenever you eschew the elitism of living well. Whether you’re into all that, or you just like Big Macs, dig in, it’s cool.

In the meantime, we’ll be here doing our thing for whenever you’re in the mood. Maybe we won’t all be poppin’ bottles of Dom in Saint-Tropez any time soon, but we take our spoils in a currency worth more than anything printed on paper: flavor, quality, joy, and communion. Join us for that, whenever you want.

Andrea J’Neene will be presenting 14 of her pieces and there will be very inexpensive wine, just like at a real art gallery. It will be fun. Be sure to make it a stop on your Saturday art walk. The opening starts at 6pm. The show will be open for 2 months.

This Tuesday, December 6th is Reuben Tuesday at the Linkery. We’ve got another batch of our house-cured grass-fed corned beef ready to roll. Made with house-cured sauerkraut from organic Suzie’s Farm cabbage, house-baked beer bread, Pt. Reyes Toma cheese, and house made Russian dressing, our Reuben is the single most popular item we make and serve.

We always thought of the Reuben as being one of the ultimate comfort foods. Little did we know about it’s checkered past. In 1956 Fern Snider, of the Rose Bowl Restaurant in Omaha, was named grand prize winner in the national sandwich idea contest sponsored by the National Restaurant Association. The Reuben Sandwich obtained almost immediate national fame.

Shortly thereafter the fighting began over who’d invented the Reuben. There was a actually a guy named Reuben from New York who claimed to have invented the sandwich in response to a request from Anna Selos, one of Charlie Chaplin’s leading ladies. In 1938, Arnold Reuben gave an interview for the American Life Histories: Manuscripts from the Federal Writers’ Project (One of FDR’s depression era programs), telling them:

Well, I’m feeling sort of good, so I figure I’ll clown around for the dame. That’s how it all came about. I’m clowning for the dame. Well, what do I do? I take a holy bread that I used to keep and grab up the knife and, you know, clowning like, I cut it right through on the bias. Then I take some roast beef, I don’t remember exactly what. But, anyway, I figure I’ll put anything on. So I take some meat and cheese and I slap it on, and I put on some spice and stuff and I make her up a sandwich; it was a foot high. Well the dame just eats it, that’s all. She must have been plenty hungry. And when she gets through she says, “Mr. Reuben, that’s the best sandwich I ever tasted in my life.”

“But wait a minute!” said food historians from Omaha, “Our Reuben Kulakofsky invented that sandwich for his poker playing buddies”. Kulakofsky was a wholesale grocer belonged to a weekly poker group whose members apparently enjoyed fixing their own sandwiches every bit as much as they enjoyed playing poker. One of the players, Charles Schimmel, owner of the Blackstone Hotel in Omaha, put the Reuben Sandwich on the hotel menu.

Well it turns out that Fern Snider—the contest winner—had, at one point in her life, been a waitress for Mr. Schimmel’s Blackstone Hotel. That, and the fact that “Reuben sandwiches” show up on other menus from Nebraska during the 1930’s, leads many historians to think that the Reuben’s Omaha origins are most likely true.

It’s also possible that the sandwich or something similar appeared in both places. Eastern European (and there were lots of immigrants from there during those days) cuisine has a long history of cured meats combined with various forms of cabbage. Old country cooks often whipped up “bierocks” or “pirozhkis” that were like calzones or pocket breads and stuffed with beef and cabbage.

We always get a crowd for Rueben Tuesday. It takes a lot of time and space to cure the corned beef, so we only offer the dish every month or three. It often (although not always) sells out in a day. And it goes wonderfully with any of our craft beers on tap. We’d love to see you!

With that in mind, we’ll be opening at 11am and serving brunch as well as lunch. And we’ll have Moonlight’s Death and Taxes black beer on tap. Join us!

Who knows, this might even be on the menu:

Local pastured turkey from TAJ farms, Yukon and purple potato mash, beer bread stuffing, local eggplant ad turkey gravy. One night only, Wednesday, from 5pm until 11 or until we run out.

Here’s a picture of last year’s dish: