Linkery Stakeholders Report 2009

Every year around this time I write up an “annual report” for all our stakeholders, which includes not only our team here and our financial partners, but our guests, our suppliers, our neighbors, and anyone who reads this blog. In other words, you.

On the whole, I think we as a community have a lot to be proud of and thankful for this year. In the midst of a dreadful economy, we were able to sustain over 25 jobs that served as the main or only source of support for people in our neighborhood. And these jobs center around buying great raw ingredients and turning them into dinner, which is a honorable craft I’m glad to be a part of. Thank you for making this happen.

Also, we (you and us together) supported local and independent agriculture like never before. By the end of the year, when we got in a groove with Suzie’s Farm among others, we reached a point where close to all of our produce is from local and/or independent regional farms (all of our meat is already from independent farmers). Juan, who posts here about our coffee program as well as some farms, is a big reason we’re able to do so much buying from small farmers. It entails a lot of complexity but he stays on top of things. Fortunately, the added work is worth it, as the flavor diffeerence is very clear.

On a more micro level, I’m really proud to be a part of a group that accomplished so many specific achievements with our restuarant and community in the last 12 months. I wrote in an email to my co-workers:

I was just going through the blog looking at stuff from earlier in the year and it blows me away what we accomplished:

* Smokehouse Sundays every week
* Working closely with Curtis’ and Albert’s farms on many levels
* Working with a bunch of new local farms such as Suzie’s, Valdivia, Sage, and many many more
* Expanding our wine selection via Mr. Roboto [our white wine cruvinet], offering tastes, and a lot of great wines that Bobby brought in
* Finishing the Caskenstein and offering a great selection of beer
* Making a ton more stuff in house, from sparkling water to sodas, to a wide variety of desserts
* Swapping out almost all of our non-organic/independent ingredients for organic/independent ingredients
* Numerous mentions and awards, such as the New York Times, the Silver Fork award, and so on.
* An amazing amount of special events such as Mad River, Green Flash, and Magnolia dinners.

And most importantly, we really upgraded the quality and consistency of our food, drink and service over the year. Our food menu pops more than ever right now, the wine, beer and coffee are amazing. In the last few weeks, I have had so many guests tell me that their experience at our place was among the best they’ve ever had. That includes both food and service. Probably that’s the single most repeated comment I’ve heard in the last couple months, and I’ve heard it more recently than in the previous few years combined. It’s really impressive to me that, in this economy, you have been able to do this quality work, and I hope you feel pride about what you’ve accomplished. I do, and I’m grateful to be a part of it.

That also gets to what I think are the biggest achievements we made this year: refining the quality and flavor of all the food and drink we serve here. So much of what we’ve embarked upon here has been fairly experimental, at least for a modern restaurant — whether it’s meat curing, the kinds of in-house baking we’ve done, offal, and some of the more unusual dishes we put together. Plus there are the challenges of putting together a different menu every day from the ingredients we’ve gotten from our farmers. All this complexity definitely created an environment where excellence is achieved only through time, familiarity, repetition, and understanding.

After the tumult of 2008′s expansion, 2009 provided the space we needed to really unlock the potential that lies here. By the end of the year, my experience is that our food and service reached levels of consistency and excellence that we had never before be able to sustain. That feels great to be a part of, and from what I’ve heard from you, you’ve noticed and enjoyed this too. We’ve always been committed to becoming the best neighborhood restaurant in America, which is of course a group effort including us and you, and we are lucky to be working in a community that thinks it’s as good of an idea as we do.

Last year I identified two areas that would be our main focus this year: 1) achieving financial sustainability and 2) developing our consistency so that we deliver on the Linkery promise — world class food from great, independently grown ingredients — effectively every time you visit, with mistakes or mishaps being exceedingly rare.

While we made a lot of progress on the second task, as mentioned above, it seems to me that while we improved our financial state somewhat, due to the dreadful general economy, we weren’t able to make satisfactory progress in that regard. It’s just been a tough economic climate for everyone, including our guests.

Partially to increase our mass, and mostly to do something fun and, we think, that will be good for the neighborhood, we are expanding again in 2010. This time, though, instead of tripling our size it is a much smaller project: a restaurant at 3926 30th St, two blocks north of us. We’ll be serving small plate dishes, using only ingredients from local or independent farms. The prices will be approachable, similar to the less-expensive items on the existing Linkery menu.

The cusine at the new restaurant will, like that at the Linkery, aim to be relevant to the place where we live, and in this new space we wlil also work from the compelling cultural landscape existing on both sides of the border fence which runs right through the heart of our city. Nominally, the cuisine might be Spanish influenced, if anything, but really it will be from exactly right here. We figure to open some time between late Spring and late Fall. It’s an exciting project with a lot of opportunity to be a transformational force in the community, which is exactly what we love about the Linkery.

This is the end of our fifth year of operation, which is amazing when you consider the odds and the economy, and frankly how little market there seemed to be, in 2004, for food grown and produced by humans instead of by factories. Nothing is more impressive and pleasing for us than to discover that there are loads of people who want to eat this way.

This recession has put real food, with its lack of public subsidy and its higher price, out of reach of increasing number of people. More and more restaurants and stores are financially unable to stick to their plans of offering local and independent food, and sustaining the local economy. That sobering reality has pushed us to redouble our efforts to find and cook the best, most carefully raised and crafted food possible. In a crunch, everyone has to decide what’s most important to them. What’s most important to us is making good food right. I know that there’s enough of you who feel the same way, that we’ll be able to make it keep working.

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