We periodically write State-of-the-Link reports for our stakeholders. Our core stakeholders are our guest community and the folks who work here; over time, our stakeholder group has grown to include blog readers, real-food activists, and, starting in 2008, actual financial shareholders in the Linkery business (more on that later).
Anyway, I haven’t really articulated an assessment of where we are in a while, and the end of the year seems like an appropriate time.
THE BIG PICTURE
Our principal goal is to create a great place to work that enables us to excel at serving our community with food and meaning.
We measure our progress in four dimensions:
- Quality: excellence in food and service
- Transparency: exposing all aspects of our work to any interested observers, taking integrity to the next level
- Respect: for each other, our guests, and our community at large
- Community: bringing people together at their best.
1. QUALITY
WHERE WE’VE COME: In 2007 we made big strides in our quality, both in individual preparations (including ingredients) and in consistency (which is basically a measurement of quality deviations over time).
We were able to increase our use of local, high-quality produce; find myriad sources of independently raised animals, including local pastured meat; and increase the quality of our beverages including our coffee, wine list, and beer selection.
In June we achieved a big goal: eliminating all commodity meat from our menu. We were able to make this switch while maintaining a balanced menu and entree prices in the 11 to 19 dollar range, in line with our role as a neighborhood restaurant.
Most notably, we significantly improved our consistency, which had been a bugaboo for us since we opened, and particularly troubled us as we got busier. In this success, we were helped in large part by Rey, who was able to introduce processes for us to maintain quality control in spite of our large volume and small space. Rey has moved on from the Linkery, but he’s left a legacy of consistency befitting our goals for the restaurant.
Of course, all is not perfect with consistency — I doubt it could ever be. We periodically have problems with execution (of both food and table service) during service, particularly when things are unexpectedly busy. More troubling, we still occasionally mis-prep something without catching it, leading to multiple servings of below par dishes until a guest calls it to our attention. This obviously represents our biggest opportunity for improvement.
Also, as we focused on consistency and continually rotating our market menu, some of longstanding, well-loved dishes suffered from neglect. We woke up one day and realized that slowly, our recipes had changed for some of our favorite dishes (it’s weird how that can happen, actually) and we didn’t think they were as good as they had been. At the end of the year we made it a project (still continuing) to revive the excitement in some of these dishes. The veggie lasagna, for instance, after a couple weeks of tinkering I think we really nailed it on Christmas Eve! But it is disappointing to us that we didn’t keep it at its best all year long. We’ll be more attentive to that.
WHERE WE’RE GOING: Foodwise, we recently added a “line-up” process for internally quality-checking new dishes before they’re introduced to the menu; in the short time we’ve used it rigorously it seems to have elevated the quality of individual dishes and the menu as a complete offering. The line-up also has some benefit for consistency, as at least some of the team has seen the “model” of each dish and can help catch any execution errors. We’ll continue with the line-up and, I expect, continue to see improvements resulting from the increased teamwork it engenders.
In order to continue improving consistency over prep, we’ll have to look to introduce processes that can help us catch mistakes before they reach the pass. We’ll count on the folks in the kitchen to help us develop and implement these processes.
Similarly, reducing mistakes in table service, and being more effective in addressing mistakes that do occur, is an ongoing challenge for us that we have yet to whip. One area we could certainly improve on is training — although I think it’s fair to say our training quality has risen this year from completely ineffective to somewhat chaotic, which is really a big improvement and has helped us a lot. In 2008, we’ll focus on moving from chaotic to comprehensive.
For further improving table service, I think we should begin considering real feedback mechanisms to our system, whether they be quantitative (measuring our error rates, ticket times, etc.) and/or qualitative (guest feedback). I know that none of us want to work against a stopwatch or a schoolmarmish computer counting our mistakes; and as a restaurant diner I don’t really like many kinds of comment cards as they can sometimes communicate a sense of absentee management (not always, though.) On the other hand, it seems likely that there are tools out there that we could happily use to understand our strengths and weaknesses and to improve our skills. I think this is an area which merits our investigation.
Lastly, our next big frontier is increasing the sense of place we’re able to capture with our menu. We’ve done well in this regard by increasing the number of local ingredients and drawing upon influences which are familiar to the area: for instance, the dish of handmade sopes with local pastured goat and local squash puree seems to me to have some sense of place. And our increasing procurement of Mexilocal food (Baja fish, Guadalupe Valley wine and olive oil, Ensenada mussels) and Central Coast cuisine (pinquito beans, red oak, pastured lamb) is helping “locate” us nicely. But I think we can improve significantly on this. One area of interest is to develop our use of local “pre-contact” (i.e., Native American) ingredients, which in the world of food are going to be signature ingredients to this region. We took a step in this direction with the serving of sage-infused water, but the opportunity here is rich and could really help solidify our cuisine into something that is totally intertwined with where we live. We’re pondering the possibilities elderberries, acorns, blue dick (don’t laugh…okay, laugh, but it’s a real food), chia, sea greens, sardines, smelt, bonito, and wild game and poultry. Who knows?
2. TRANSPARENCY
Transparency is something we have generally been pretty good at, and I think we definitely improved in 2007, with some missteps along the way.
This blog was more active than ever, we visited lots of farmers and craftspeople and were able to share these experiences regularly. We were open with our Internet community about what we were doing, and what are values were in doing it. Web traffic exploded.
I received lots of email from “all those wonderful people out there in the dark”, ranging from unabashedly enthusiastic to pathologically angry, with most of the correspondence centering on helpful ideas, notes, and criticisms including calling attention to problems we weren’t fully aware of. This dialog we get to have with you is truly a gift, a joy of working at the Linkery.
Internally, we struggled a little bit with small-scale transparency, particularly as we moved into fall and got really busy, and it was easier to just put our heads down and work rather than share with each other what we were doing. I notice that, thanks to effort from a lot of people, we’ve really improved recently in that front, in both front (particularly beverage management) and back of house. Which is important, since it’s hard for us to share what we’re doing with our community if we don’t ourselves know.
With transparency, our goal for 2008 will be simply to build on the success we had in 2007.
3. RESPECT
This one’s simple: In 2007, we really improved in our ability to show respect for our community and our guests, by increasing our quality and consistency and procuring precious and delicious ingredients and drink to serve. On the other hand, in coping with our tremendous growth in business, we weren’t always as successful at treating each other as well as we deserve. We really made that a focus in the last part of the year and early returns are extremely positive. I’m confident that will continue.
4. COMMUNITY
This, on the other hand, is probably the hardest for us to judge. On a mechanical level, we know we’re having some success: We raised (you donated) thousands of dollars for charities, many of them local; we’ve had the joy of getting to know many of you both in person and over email; we’ve been able to introduce our community of diners to our community of farmers and artisans, both immediately in person (particularly at our special dinners) and also via the blog and personal discussions. We sense the vibe on the great nights when it seems like everybody in the place is attending the same party.
All that said, however, developing community and contributing meaningfully to it is such a long-term project that it’s really impossible to evaluate it over any window as short as a few months or a year. I’d just say that we’re definitely applying ourselves to it, and indications are positive. When we asked a few of our regular patrons to join us in a review of our design for our new location, we were moved by the passion and insight that you brought to the project. That won’t be easily forgotten.
THE SMALL STUFF
Business is, you know, booming. We’re busy and in many ways are basically operating at capacity. The weekends can get crazy crowded with a long wait for a table, which unfortunately is not effectively serving the community.
This over-demand is why we’re moving to a bigger location six blocks north, on the corner of 30th and North Park Way. We expect to begin construction in early January and intend to move in mid-April. Construction schedules, however, are not exemplars of certainty. In any event, you can check out the floor plans here.
(Regarding the space we currently occupy: we are committed to sustaining a non-Linkery restaurant in the “old” space that will serve the neighborhood well. I (and my current coworkers) will be focused on the Linkery at its new digs, so for the 30th & Upas space we will find new people as passionate as us about good food, who will be able to devote the energy necessary to operate a different, remarkable, restaurant. I hope to be able to announce our specific plans in early 2008.)
The cost of moving is high, and as part of financing the project we’ve taken on, for the first time, minority shareholders. These folks are putting their money behind a business and people they believe in, and we are grateful for their trust and excited to prove them right.
Our no-tipping, charge-for-table-service system has proven to be quite a success after a year, to the shock of many (and we ourselves were fairly curious to see how it would work). A small percentage of the community really no-likey, often with vehemence; some people really love it; and the vast majority of people don’t seem to care at all other than maybe appreciating not having to do math after drinking wine. Which is kind of the point (I mean, the point is that it’s not a big deal, not that it eliminates math). It’s definitely helped us create a working environment rich with the joy of teamwork and largely free from greed, which is good for everyone (except, presumably, greedy loners).
Finances are good (finally!). With more business and a stable revenue stream from our table-service charge, we’re now generally able to pay our co-workers comparably to other establishments, which is important. However, it seems it will take moving to a bigger location for us to really offer the opportunity for a career rather than a job. We are all looking forward to the day when it’s plausible for our team members to buy a home in the neighborhood where we work. I think that falls under a rubric of “sustainable”.
On the topics of benefits, our specific health insurance plan turned out to be inadequate for our needs, and we’ll be changing it shortly. To my coworkers, I apologize for not having figured our sooner the limitations of this plan and I am working with our broker to get a new one in January.
Reputation-wise, we got some nice love in the press this year, particularly with Gourmet Magazine naming us one of the 100 best farm-to-table restaurants in America. That stuff feels good and makes our parents less skeptical that we’re wasting our time, but it’s ultimately not as important as the day-to-day work we are lucky to do. If we continue to improve at our work, then both the finances and the press stuff will come as a byproduct.
Personally, this year, this moment, is a high-water mark. Getting to work with the people I work with, for the community I work for, doing really fun work, is a gift of which I am constantly appreciative. Thanks for letting me being a part of it.