. Enjoy.

Today we’re rolling out a new lunch/dinner menu, and tomorrow’s new brunch menu will be out shortly. We’ll also be making a few more changes over the next few days. But, anyway, we think you’ll like it.

* Our popular local pastured fried chicken is now a permanent item

* Pulled pork barbecue from heritage pork cooked over local red oak, is also a permanent item

* We have a new vegan entree, from last Wednesday’s dinner, epazote masa dumplings in mole, with oysters, kale, carrots, and organic brown rice (pictured above)

* We’ll be replacing pizzettas with new shareable dishes including vegan / vegetarian options

* Our chicken “cured on blue” dish is now a small plate (it is a pretty rich dish, we think this is a better way to enjoy it)

* Look for a new local fish dish to join the menu soon (and we are still offering local fish fry on Fridays)

* Our selection of house cured meats is prominently featured

You can see the whole menu here (PDF link). Enjoy!

Sunday, April 14th, we are hosting an event with Slow Food Urban San Diego that brings together a bunch of our favorite things:

* Heritage breed pork (in this case, Wooly Pigs)
* Traditional Mexican outdoor cooking
* House made nixtamal
* Our chef, farmer, and slow food friends
* Sundays!

We’ll be making heirtage pork carnitas according to the recipe of the Magaña family, who operate an amazing carnitas stand in the Valle de Guadalupe. The days supervising chef will be our great friend Jair Téllez (of Laja in the Valle de Guadalupe, Merotoro in Mexico City).

The pigs are Woolly Pigs, or more properly Mangalitsa breed, a rare Hungarian breed prized for the luscious quality of its fat, and known for its long, curly hair. (Long hair for a pig, anyway, they don’t look like Maradona or anything.) (But if they did — Ham of God.)

These pigs are raised locally by rancher Sam Woolley (really). He’ll be on hand to talk about Mangalitsa pigs and raising them here.

Lastly, we’ll be making tortillas from organic yellow corn, that we’re nixtamalizing in house. Max and I will be around to talk about that process.

We’re really excited to host this event, it brings me back to our early days of the Linkery when we really got to explore the flavors heritage pork breeds such as Ossabaw and Gloucestershire Old Spot.

The event runs from noon until 5pm on Sunday. For $15, you get three tacos and small drink (craft beer or nonalcoholic). In order to make sure we have enough food, this a ticketed event, and you can pre-buy tickets here. Also, we will sell tickets at the event (until it sells out). I hope you’ll join us.

You may have noticed this artwork at the Linkery, and wondered what it’s about. I’ll tell you.

LOVELIKEBEER.

LOVELIKEBEER partners with good local restaurants to throw awesome beer dinners that happen to be vegan. On April 3rd, we’re doin’ it, with them and AleSmith.

It’s called “Cornucopia” because we’ll be building a lot of dishes on house nixtamalized organic (non-GMO) corn. We all agreed this would be cool, since field corn is kind of at the root of what’s wrong with the industrial food system, to showcase the ways in which field corn can also be awesome.

AleSmith contributed by making 4 never-before-done casks of beer featuring several pre-Columbian adjuncts.

Chefs Keith Adams (The Linkery) and Max Bonacci (El Take It Easy) put the menu together. Everything will be available a la carte.

15% of the night’s sales will be donated to the local chapter of Engineers Without Borders.

There will be no reservations this night, it will be first-come, first-served, to maximize the number of people who get to experience this menu. However, we encourage you to RSVP on the event’s Facebook page, so we can be sure to make enough food for everyone. We expect this to be a very special celebration and hope you join us.

This Sunday, we’re offering some a brunch special featuring our house-cured city hams. These are the city cousins to our Good Food Award winning country hams, of course! The special dish is cider-brined Easter ham, local asparagus from Wingshadows Hacienda, pastured hen egg quiche, sweet potato gratin.

NB Local asparagus season is lightning quick, so jump on this while you can.

Also, we’ll have house-cured grass-fed corned beef hash, Sunday lunch fish n chips, and Linkery Loco Moco.

Local iceberg lettuce from Suzie’s Farm, Point Reyes Blue Cheese, house cured bacon, local strawberries, and avocado.

It’s what a wedge should always have been.

This Saturday is 30th on 30th – when a bunch of bars & restaurants on 30th Street feature inexpensive bites & sips to make it fun and easy to experience a lot of places on the street. When it happens on weekends, like this month, it’s particularly fun.

We’ll be slinging $2 half pours of Alesmith X and pulled pork sliders for $3 (cash only, includes tax and service. You can see many of our neighbors’ specials here.

I suppose it’s because of Michael’s Irish Midwestern roots, but St. Patrick’s is always a bit of a big deal around here. We’ll open at 11am and feature:

* America’s most handmade Reuben, with grass-fed house-cured corned beef, house made swirly rye bread, house cured sauerkraut and house made dressing;
* House cured corned beef dinner with house baked soda bread (3pm to close)
* House cured corned beef farm hash (11am-3pm)
* Local fish n chips
* Dragoons dry Irish stout from Moylans on nitro
* Julian hard cider on draft
* Red Trolley ale from Karl Strauss on nitro
* $7 Snakebites (1/2 Dragoons, 1/2 Julian cider)
* $6 Black and Tans (1/2 Dragoons, 1/2 Red Seal ale from North Coast)

See you here!

We’ve literally had requests for this for years, and our business has matured to the point where we can do this, and do it the right way. A selection of house cured meats.

Enjoy country ham (2013 Good Food Award winner), country pork pâté, thick cut bacon, pancetta, whipped lardo, spicy coppa, guanciale, and peperone, all from heritage breed pork.

On the menu all the time.

Served with maple-mustard sauce. Pork.

This Wednesday we are hosting a fundraiser for the Unitarian Cooperative Preschool. It promises to be a busy, fun night, and 15% of all proceeds will go to the school. You can make reservations here.

It is hard to express in words how stoked and grateful we are to be still serving this food and drink that we love, in this neighborhood, 8 years into it. Thank you. We’re planning to celebrate with you all weekend, with IPAs, pork belly, bacon-wrapped octopus and the best fish in the sea.

Starting on Friday we’ll be marking the big oh-eight with eight IPA on draft and cask. Depending on when you come in, they will include 8 beers from the following selection:

(cask) Sublimely Self Righteous, Stone Brewing
(cask) Black IPA, Green Flash
The Maharaja IIPA Avery
Avery IPA
Dorado IIPA, Ballast Point
LeFreak, Green Flash
Green Bullet IIIPA, Green Flash
Mongo IIPA, Port Brewing
Idiot IIPA, Coronado
Pupil, Societe
Hop Head Red, Green Flash (yes, it’s not billed as an IPA, but we think it fits in here as a variation)
X, AleSmith (see above)

Also, all weekend we will be featuring a couple blasts from our past : 1) Baja octopus wrapped in house cured bacon, and 2) pork belly (acorn-fed pastured Duroc from Jim & Christine Maguire in Santa Margarita), glazed, braised and grilled, just like the old days. We’re also going to run a special of parchment-steamed fish with the best local catch they have at Catalina Offshore on Friday morning.

We hope you join us, I’ll see you here!

Jay

Also — all attendees to this dinner will also receive complimentary admission to our private tasting of Pliny The Younger the following night (Friday the 22nd).

Eight years ago this month — the last weekend in February, to be official — we opened the Linkery. It has been a long, strange, fun and delicious trip.

One of the first things we became known for in San Diego was being a sit-down restaurant that offered an extensive (for the time) selection of craft beer. Because of this, we became friends with many awesome people in the brewing community, and those friendships have fueled a lot of what we do ever since.

All of which is a long way of saying that we are kicking off our 8th Anniversary weekend on Thursday, 21 Feb with a major dinner featuring Avery Brewing beers, hosted by Adam Avery.

Adam is bringing many very rare beers from his personal cellar for this one, and we’re going all out with the food.

The menu:

openers
Avery IPA
Our IPA demands to be poured into your favorite glass to truly appreciate the citrusy, floral bouquet and the rich, malty, yet dry finish. In 1996, the first IPA ever packaged in Colorado! Brewed by hop heads, for hop heads. Malt: Two-row barley, Munich malt, Caramel 120. Hops: Columbus, Cascade, Chinook, Centennial. 75 IBU’s, 6.5% ABV.

course 1
Muscat d’Amour
30% Feremented White Muscat grapes from Bookcliff Winery aged in Chardonnay barrels
Bottled January 2012. 10.78% ABV.

Recolte Sauvage
30% Fermented Cabernet Sauvignon grapes from Bookcliff Winery aged in Cabernet Sauvignon barrels. Bottled January 2012. 11.03% ABV.

Thin sliced house cured bresaola from Central Coast grass-fed beef, local little gem lettuce, grapes, radish d’avignon, grilled local purple spring onions.

course 2
Odio Equum
Lactic-forward sour beer, brewed with raspberries and aged in fresh Cabernet Sauvignon barrels from Montagna Vineyards in Napa Valley. Bottled September 2012. 7.10% ABV

Depuceleuse
100% Brettanomyces-fermented red ale aged with sour cherries in Zinfandel barrels. Bottled March 2010. 10.08% ABV

Country pate, Taj Farms chicken liver pâte sauce, smoked local strawberry mostarda, pickled local goat feta cheese, pickled Suzie’s Farm green onion & romanesco cauliflower, spicy Mangalitsa pork Coppa

course 3
New World Porter
Expanding the porter category, we’ve added a delightful dry-hop aroma to blend with the sweet caramel and robust chocolate characteristics of a traditional porter. It’s big, bold and black! Malt: Two-row barley, Munich malt, Chocolate malt, Black malt, Carapils, Caramel 120. Hops: Columbus, Cascade. 48 IBU’s, 6.7% ABV.

Maharaja
The Maharaja flaunts his authority with a deranged amount of hops: tangy, vibrant and pungent, along with an insane quantity of malted barley, fashioning a royal scarlet hue and an exquisite malt essence. Welcome to his kingdom! Malt: Two-row barley, Victory malt, Caramel 120. Hops: Columbus, Simcoe, Chinook, Centennial. Dry Hops: Simcoe, Centennial. 102 IBU’s, 10.5% ABV.

Grass-fed beef hanger steak, Avery beer battered pork rings (yes, like onion rings but with pork inside), baby carrot, baby turnip, house-cured pancetta

palate cleanser
Blood orange granita, peanut crumble

final course
Rumpkin
Pumpkin ale aged in Goslings Dark Rum Barrels and spiced with nutmeg, cinnamon, and ginger. Bottled October 2012. 18.3% ABV.

Uncle Jacob’s Bourbon Barrel Stout
Imperial stout aged in Makers Mark Bourbon Barrels for 6 months. Bottled February 2012. 17.42% ABV.

Oaxacan chocolate Uncle Jacob cake, Maker’s Mark anglaise, house made pumpkin lardo ice cream, candied local delicata squash.

PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT: Many of these are high-gravity, potent beers. While the pours of the high-alcohol beers will be modest, in the end if you’re not careful, you might not be legal to drive. Consider walking, taking the bus, hiring a cab, having a friend pick you up, or other alternative means of post-party transportation.

Obviously, both Adam and our Chef Keith are pulling out the rare goods for this nite. We hope you’ll join us. Admission is $88.50 which includes food, beer, and tips/service (no further tips accepted). The event starts at 6:45. You can purchase your admission here.

Adam will be personally presenting the beers during this dinner, and Michael, Keith and I from the Linkery will all be hosting as well.

You may have heard that next Thursday, the 14th of February, is a day in which a lot of couples like to go out to eat. We love going out to eat, and thus we support all “going out to eat” holidays.

To celebrate, in addition to our full menu on Thursday, Chef Keith also put together a special dinner for two for you:

note: full menu also available

first course (choose one for each person)

Red Frill Salad Local Red Frill, local strawberries, kohlrabi, Toma cheese, house baked rye bread cubes, pumpkin vinaigrette dressing
or
Shrimp Bisque Wild Mexican shrimp, cheddar crostini, green onion

second course (family style)
Steak and Gnocchi Framboise-marinated grass-fed hanger steak, house made Parisian gnocchi, glazed heirloom carrot, grilled red kale

third course (shared)
Chocolate and Orange blood orange cheesecake, chocolate graham crust, Cointreau whipped cream, cocoa nibs

also: two glasses (one per person) of French Champagne, beer or non-alcoholic beverage.

Dinner, including the drinks, costs $38/person. We’ll have it till we’re out, but if you note that you want it when you make your reservation, we’ll save one for you!

Pictured: last year’s V-Day dessert. This year we’re going orange.

PS We’ll have Alesmith’s awesome My Bloody Valentine on draft!

This post is a reading list, of books that shape how and why we do what we do. This reading list started out as something we could give to new employees to say, hey, if you read these things you’ll have a good understanding of why this company exists, and what our goals are, with food, hospitality and community.

Of course, that turned out to be a big ball of twine. My list of Linkery-essential books is a little more than one person is likely to take on in any short period of time, and probably there’s no one (other than me) for whom the whole list makes interesting reading.

But, here it is. I reckon some of you readers might be interested in some of these books, and also perhaps knowing what manifestos make us tick will make your experiences with us richer in some way. I’m going to put them in the sidebar in lieu of our blogroll, too.

So, here’s the current Linkery reading list. Enjoy.

MARKETING

The Cathedral and The Bazaar, Eric Raymond
Purple Cow: Transform Your Business by Being Remarkable, Seth Godin
All Marketers Are Liars: The Power of Telling Authentic Stories in a Low-Trust World, Seth Godin
The Icarus Deception: How High Will You Fly?, Seth Godin

I believe it all starts with marketing, in the sense that Seth Godin uses the word to mean “doing remarkable things, being transparent about it, and making it easy for people who dig what you’re doing to spread the word.” Purple Cow delves into the importance of being remarkable, and All Marketers Are Liars explores how transparency and good storytelling can help your fans get the word out about what you do. These books make up the core of our marketing philosophy. Godin’s newest book, The Icarus Deception, reframes, or pushes, the idea of “being remarkable” into “making art.” It’s a powerful, powerful idea.

The first title on this list – The Cathedral and The Bazaar — isn’t a book, but an essay that was first published online. It probably also seems a little orthogonal to those outside the tech field, but basically it’s an argument for the benefits of transparency and open information.

When we started the restaurant in 2005, in most parts of the country including San Diego, the fundamental idea of a restaurant was of a closed, secretive kitchen putting on a drama for guests — who both didn’t want and didn’t deserve to know what was going on behind the curtain.

Informed by such thought as The Cathedral and The Bazaar and Seth Godin’s work, we believed passionately that freeing the information about what we do was not only the best marketing we could do, it also made for a better restaurant. We were one of the first US restaurants with an active blog, and we shared so much detail about what we did that to this day you’ll find people who resent us because they were sure we were making it all up (we weren’t).

THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT

The Great Good Place: Cafes, Coffee Shops, Bookstores, Bars, Hair Salons, and Other Hangouts at the Heart of a Community, Ray Oldenburg
The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America’s Man-Made Landscape, James Howard Kunstler
The New Urbanism: Toward an Architecture of Community, Peter Katz
Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream, Andres Duany
Glitter Stucco & Dumpster Diving: Reflections on Building Production in the Vernacular City, John Chase
Joyride, Mia Birk

Infrastructure is destiny. We humans are already maladapted for the age of agriculture (having had only 10,000 years to evolve within its framework), and particularly so for the age of cheap energy (having had only a couple hundred years). Our built environment can ameliorate or exacerbate those stresses on us. These books look at what works to make our lives better, and what makes them worse, and what we can do literally on the street level to help improve things. While we need the support and cooperation of civic and municipal entities, the first line of engagement is local business owners, property owners, architects, designers, and residents.

The initial impetus for the Linkery, and what is still our primary focus, was to help improve our neighborhood and the city by creating a thriving local place that people could walk, bike or bus to, to be on either side of the counter — that is, to be a worker or a guest, or both.

We wanted to help make our streets more livable, to support local businesses by buying their products, and to create good jobs that people in the community could walk to. We have varying degrees of success at all of these at different times, but they remain our key business goals.

Along the way, we added the goal of helping transform the local food system, too. Because we learned that it would be necessary if we all wanted to eat well.

FOOD

How To Pick A Peach: The Search For Flavor from Farm to Table, Russ Parsons
Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals, Michael Pollan
The Botany of Desire: A Plant’s-Eye View of the World, Michael Pollan
Fruitless Fall: The Collapse of the Honey Bee and the Coming Agricultural Crisis, Rowan Jacobsen
Nourishing Traditions, Sally Fallon
Great Sausage Recipes and Meat Curing, Rytek Kutas
Charcuterie: The Craft of Salting, Smoking, and Curing, Michael Ruhlman
Moneyball, Michael Lewis

In its title and content How To Pick A Peach captures the exact thing that made me passionate about our restaurant being farm-to-table: I wanted us to serve peaches as good as we used to get from my grandfather’s farm and from his neighbors’ farms in Kingsburg, California. Which, in the current food system, can be damned near impossible.

Other books on this list cover humans’ relationship with agriculture, the corn economy, traditional nutrition, and of course the technical aspects of sausage making, charcuterie and fermentation.

What’s Moneyball doing here? For us, Moneyball might as well be an allegory about cooking nose-to-tail, and using the offal.

OUR ENERGY FUTURE

$20 Per Gallon: How the Inevitable Rise in the Price of Gasoline Will Change Our Lives for the Better, Christopher Steiner
The Long Descent: A User’s Guide to the End of the Industrial Age, John Michael Greer

Two distinctly different portraits of how we will live as the cost of energy puts much of what we currently take for granted, beyond our reach. What the two visions have in common is what’s most interesting: a world centered on local, self-sufficient communities.

BUSINESS

The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Small Giants: Companies That Choose to Be Great Instead of Big, Bo Burlingham
Joy at Work: A Revolutionary Approach To Fun on the Job by Dennis W. Bakke
The Answer To How Is Yes: Acting on What Matters, Peter Block
Stewardship: Choosing Service Over Self Interest, Peter Block
Community: The Structure of Belonging, Peter Block
The Company We Keep: Reinventing Small Business for People, Community, and Place, John Abrams
The Prince, Machiavelli

The biggest problem with most business books is that they are written by people who have been successful at business, who want to explain what they did to be successful. Unfortunately for us the readers, success in business — indeed, success in any field that lies fully within our dominant social/economic paradigm — is by and large a matter of luck, and those “ten steps to success” are a made-up explanation after the fact. The Black Swan lays out the math behind this situation, as part of clearly demonstrating the ways in which most of how we see our world is fallacious. One takeaway for me: if you want a degree of authorship over your fate, transgress the model you’re supposed to work within. Another takeway: don’t put too much stock in books written by successful businesspeople.

That said, I don’t know whether Peter Block, Dennis Bakke, and John Abrams show up on people’s radar as successful businesspeople, but I find their ideas about business, community and people to be inspirational.

Plus, Machiavelli, the author of the original Management for Dummies guide, gets a bad rap — I think this is because it’s so easy to adjectivize his name. In truth, he’s a forerunner of evolutionary psychology experts, and The Prince provides 80% of what any first-time manager needs to know to get by. I think everyone should read this book every decade, at least.

RESTAURANT

Setting the Table: The Transforming Power of Hospitality in Business, Danny Meyer

The only restaurant/hospitality book on my list. I’m sure there are others just as good — Charlie Trotter’s comes highly recommended to me — and of course they all are victims of the successful businessperson fallacy mentioned above. I mean, really, I want to read the book by a restauranteur whose place has amazing hospitality without adequate revenue — that would be educational. That said, Danny Meyer tells good stories about what hospitality looks like, and when it comes to understanding a concept, good stories are like gold.

FICTION

The Long Goodbye, Raymond Chandler

A book about integrity, and gimlets — written in San Diego, no less.

What do you think Suzie’s Farm has in common with The Linkery?

We are both about connecting people back to their food. We are both about community. We are both about diversity. At Suzie’s we have always been grateful to The Linkery since you guys have stuck with us since you opened up.

How is it knowing that you are part of the North Park community through your presence in restaurants here?

The owners of the farm actually reside here in North Park so you can only imagine how much they love it. It’s been great seeing the growth of all of us as the years go by. The growth of the community, of The Linkery and of Suzie’s Farm. It is great knowing that we are part of a community with family values.

What produce should we be excited about during this season?

At the moment there are a lot of root vegetables at the farm. We have also been harvesting a lot of big leafy veggies. We are loving a new lettuce mix that we created called the “Rustic Mix”. This mix includes oak leaves, little gem lettuce and lolarosa leaves. The three combine perfectly into a medley of different textures and flavors. This season is also exciting for us due to the green strawberries. These are an anticipation for the delicious strawberries that will be ripe and ready in the spring.

When speaking to guests about the farm, some have asked me if they are allowed to visit the farms. Can anyone come visit?

Right now we are offering a seedling tour where people can see how the harvesting process all begins. We are very excited about this spring when we are opening up the doors of our new fields to the community. On Saturday April 20th we will have our “Strawberry Jam”. There will be activities for everyone from picking the berries to making the sweetest strawberry jam. Everyone’s invited! For more information on tours contact: tours@suziesfarm.com.

***

It is great knowing that we share core values with our farmers. It brings us back to the realisation that we are working for something bigger than just serving at our restaurant. We are contributing to our community; and so are you when you join us at The Linkery. Cheers to that.

This Sunday, in addition to our wildly-well-recieved Linkery Loco Moco, we’ll be serving Bacon Explosion. Made with house cured bacon and house made sausage, of course.

Also, there’s a football game on, and we’ll have that on TV.

In addition to a dish of local clams & local mussels with a side of tallow fries for $15, our friends from Orange County’s The Bruery will be in house, pouring the following Belgian style brews:

*Saison De Lente
*Mischief
*Sour in the Rye
*Hottenroth

Each beer will be only $5, all night long.

Join us!

Thank you for supporting us, so that we can do our best work and occasionally even garner an accolade or two as a byproduct of that. Winning awards is not our goal, but it’s nice, and we are grateful.

Fellow SD winner Colby Chandler of Ballast Point – photo by Candice Woo

San Diegans