Introducing El Take It Easy #

What is El Take It Easy? How do you describe it to people?

In an essential way, it’s like the Linkery, in that it’s a neighborhood gathering place. It’s a gathering place for people. But it’s a very unique kind of gathering place, in that we’ve chosen to express the idiom of a cantina as the primary way in which we create the space.

A cantina is a place where you feel super comfortable, where there’s no expectation of a coursed meal or of turning a table. You go to a cantina because you want to be in a public space and maybe have a drink, maybe have a snack. You might stay there five minutes, you might stay there 10 hours. You might start with two people at your table and end with 30 because it’s so freeform.

The Cantina is an idiom that isn’t explored very often in San Diego, despite the fact that we’re culturally integrated largely with Mexico, we’re physically al lado. We’re right next to it.

Are there cantinas in Tijuana that would resemble this place?

We’re borrowing the idiom. Cantinas in Tijuana might function in a similar way, but the culture in North Park is different than the culture in Tijuana or Mexico City. We’re adapting the idiom in a way that makes sense to how people live in San Diego. Take the hours, for instance: we’re open for lunch and we stay open late, whereas the cantinas I know of in Mexico City often are open for lunch and closed by the middle of the evening. And certainly, we who work here have our own set of interests, passions, and culture, and we express those as well.

We’ve chosen the idiom of the cantina, but the menu that we’re presenting is not in accordance with any rules about what cantina food should be, or Mexican restaurants should be, or North Park restaurants should be, or a table restaurant should be. We conceive of it as something that’s unapologetically sensuous and delicious—something meant to strike you in the head with deliciousness. That comes from our passions about food and how we want to live.

Look at our draught list. It’s craft beers. The financially expedient thing to do is to put another four handles on that have mass market beers. 95 percent of the people who walk in without any understanding of us and our interests would feel more comfortable if we served Corona and Dos Equis and Heineken—they would be more likely to stay around and experience other parts that we do.

But to us, that experience is not worth providing. The experience of drinking Corona is not worth our time to provide to our neighbors. They can get that experience anywhere. There’s nothing special about that. And, as you know, I used to work in an industry where I did lots of nothing special and sold it to America.

You’re talking about Directv?

I worked for Directv, yeah, so I worked providing 1,000 channels of nothing special.

Of Heineken commercials…

Yeah, potentially to hundreds of millions of Americans, and I found that to be not worth the gift of life we are given.

The state of Linkery, Inc. #

You’ve been talking about “us.” Who are you talking about?

“Us” refers to this group of likeminded people that compose the business called Linkery, Inc., which in reality is a group 40 people who come to work every day and provide food and drink to our neighborhood. There’s something that ties this group together, and we’re not monolithic. Everyone has different priorities and feels different things, but there’s an overlap for our passions and our interests which have created this thing, which is the Linkery, which is now El Take It Easy as well.

We often get cast as puritans at the Linkery. We walk a little straighter there in order to make our farm to table ideals as approachable as possible. There’s a very louche side to food and alcohol that was at the Linkery the year we opened—we were boozing it up in the bar with a lot of our guests. But the Linkery has become an established door to farm-to-table eating establishment. We have a particular food consciousness and consciousness of drinks. For instance, we get Domaine Tempier world class rosé and we’re proud of it, we think it’s great. The Linkery is a casual place, but it’s a high-quality, upright farm-to-table place too, a place worthy to serve world class wines.

It’s possible to go into the Linkery and be quite moderate and get a meal that’s full of life that’s not terribly expensive. But because of where it is, a lot of people make a special effort to go there and they dine really well. I think people go to the Linkery and feel compelled to have a three-course meal because of the idiom of “a restaurant.” That tends to be more expensive than casual dining.

One of the things we wanted to do with our cuisine was make it much more approachable. At El Take it Easy we want to create an environment in which you have three beers and a salad and nobody even notices, let alone makes you feel like you’re not following the script.

What’s more, we all got into the food and drink world because of the experience that goes along with eating and drinking. It can be intellectual or cognitive, which it often is at the Linkery. But sometimes it’s experiential in base, and fun, and a little bit dirty, which is the kind of experience we’re trying to create at El Take It Easy. The food at El Take It Easy is unapologetic, it’s a little bit naughty.

What kind of food do you serve?

It’s really interesting from a culinary point of view. The menu is largely a mixture of some very refined cultivated cooking techniques. We’ve combined French technique with some really authentic rustic Mexican preparations. In fact, there’s probably more French culinary influence here than at the Linkery, which is mostly based on the grill.

Some of the sauces are family recipes from various people who are or have been in the group. Some of the dishes have really slow-cooked, really complex components to them that highlight some of the things we’ve learned about authentic Mexican cooking. But this is by no means a Mexican restaurant. Because of where we work and who we are and where we’ve traveled and who our friends are, we’ve learned some of these things, both these high-end preparations and these very traditional, equally complex preparations.

Looking at it from the dining side, it’s freewheeling. The underlying theme of the menu is that the stuff is going to be delicious. I describe it as stuff that when you finish, you’re already craving again. It’s food like crack. That’s the spirit we’re looking for—stuff that when you wake up the next morning, the first thing you’re going to think of is “damn, I want another one of those cazuelas.”

I’m fairly sure that yellowtail gravlax is not a dish associated with any cuisine in Mexico. There’s a reason that we open the menu with that particular thing. It’s local—yellowtail’s phenomenal here. It’s a great preparation. It’s super delicious. It reflects curing fish, which is a very authentic thing to do in a localist cuisine. If you respect the idea that the animal you have is not limitless, then something that you do is cure parts of it to preserve it. And here we are on the sea, so we’re going to cure this fish.

It’s funny that people think El Take It Easy might be Mexican because one of the four words in the name is a definite article of Spanish. It shows you how tied in we are to this Latin place we live, where putting a definite article in Spanish in front of the name of your restaurant immediately triggers culture “oh, that’s obviously a Mexican restaurant.”

I look at this menu thinking this is San Diegan food or this is American food. It reminds me of how David Chang talks about American food, insisting “We serve American food.”

I don’t think any of us would be offended if somebody said, “Oh, they’re taking a David Chang approach to San Diego.” I think we share that idea. And I would even go so far as to say it’s not so much American food as it’s here food. It’s food for here from here by people who live here and experience this place.

San Diegan food #

This is getting at what I think is the next step of culinary growth in San Diego. Good chefs know that their food is only going to be great with the best ingredients in the world. In a place like New York, which is served by the Hudson Valley, or the Bay area which is served by these fantastic markets in Sonoma, there is the ability for chefs to put together a menu that reflects their vision.

Oftentimes in San Francisco, you see a lot of Italian, real nurturing influenced things. That’s the culture. There are historical reasons for that. But chefs in those places are privileged to put together menus that reflect their desires and get world-class ingredients to prepare and make those menus come alive.

In San Diego, there hasn’t been a viable infrastructure for world-class food getting to restaurants. When we started the Linkery, almost all the food that was available was simply, at best, high-end commodity food. And the difference between high-end commodity food and real ingredients is significant enough for your palate to notice. You can’t make those sows’ ears into silk purses.

You can’t have fantastic food with ingredients that are merely above average. The infrastructure to get world-class food into San Diego has started to be developed in the past few years.

Suzie’s Farm is a great example. In the last year, Suzie’s Farm has come to be an amazing producer of world-class ingredients—locally farmed, delivered five days a week to restaurants, insanely fresh. They’re real people, doing everything by hand. They’ll plant things for you if you want. They run the farm like a small operation, but it’s large enough to supply a lot of produce to restaurants. This is the kind of farm that exists in areas that have world-class food. And there are more places coming up like that.

La Milpa has been around for a long time and they’re also the same quality, fantastic quality. They haven’t been able to deliver as much product because they have stronger limits on how much food they can produce.

So now these farms exist and more and more of them exist. It’s now possible to get world-class, fresh, ingredients—at least on the produce side.

I should point out that we’ve had Chino Farms for a long time, too, and they’re obviously delivering the same quality of produce. But again, there are limitations, in terms of price, availability, and accessibility that restricted Chino produce to a few very high-priced fine dining restaurants.

And it’s important to qualify when I’m talking about restaurants like this—it’s always been possible in San Diego to do a place with world-class food if you’re charging the equivalent of $45 a plate. It’s possible anywhere. Hell, you can fly shit in at whatever price.

So, I realize now if I were reading this interview, I’d be calling bullshit on myself because “What about Chino, what about these really high-end places?” To me, they don’t exist. If it’s only a special occasion restaurant for rich people, then it’s not affecting cultural change.

Which if you look back at our first interview, that’s the game.

Exactly, that is the game. And actually with the recession, we’ve been pushed into a relatively higher price point. Our prices stayed the same for two years. From the end of 2007 to the beginning of 2010, our price structure changed essentially zero. Through our move, we made a real effort to keep it the same for quite a while because we didn’t want people to say, “They raised their prices when they moved.” Of course, everyone said it anyway.

But during that time, we went from being what I considered a very approachable restaurant for a lot of our neighborhood to more of a special occasion restaurant for a lot of our neighborhood, without our prices changing because the economy changed. And yet the economy going to hell did not lower the prices of real food and we’re too deep to change.

Real food has never been tied into the fake economy anyway. You’re always going to get what you paid for with food, no matter what.

Exactly.

But a lot has changed since 2005. Now, through the efforts of a lot of people, world-class quality produce is available at prices that—while still expensive compared to high-end commodity ingredients—allow you to operate a restaurant in a middle-range price.

Good meat is hard to get because have a processing facility in the region, correct?

There’s one processor in LA that will handle cows under certain circumstances, Mendenhall Beef and Home Grown Meats use it. We haven’t worked with Home Grown because by the time they came on the scene, we had finally developed some relationships we were really happy with.

We have worked hard to establish relationships with our meat suppliers, and it’s still incredibly, incredibly expensive. Because of that, there are very few restaurants that are using the kind of meat we’re using.

There was a flash where O’Brothers (an organic burger joint) had to stop because the price of good meat became prohibitive. I know exactly what that’s like since we’re in the business of selling meat like that. It’s really fucking expensive.

Good food will always be expensive #

Fortunately, because of the growing infrastructure and the relationships we’ve developed at the Linkery, we’re about to see more restaurants reach their culinary vision while using world-class ingredients, including meat. This was very unlikely before unless your culinary vision involved uni and yellowtail.

There’s another problem though. The infrastructure for quality beef is tiny and basically beyond the reach of restaurants because the consumer base—99 percent of the peak diners in San Diego—is not clued into the ramifications healthwise, tastewise, and socially of paying for grass-fed beef versus corn-fed. They’re just not willing to pay for it.

I look at our burger at the Linkery, which we charge $15.50 for, which is the lowest margin item on our menu. It’s grass-fed beef. We buy the whole animal. It comes from a small farm in San Luis Obispo. I can’t say I’ve ever tasted better beef than what we’re getting from this farm. It probably exists, but I don’t know of any beef that’s better in the world. On top of the burger, in addition to the roll we make and the rocket that we get locally, we’re putting an egg from a pastured chicken from one of two or three local farms. Pastured chicken eggs cost roughly eight or nine times what a factory egg costs. And the combination of those things is such that that burger should cost a lot of money.

Compared to what we pay for fish—say we put a fish dish on the menu for 19 or 20 bucks—the burger should really cost 23. But at this point in the consumers’ awareness of food and how the food system works, you put a $23 burger on the menu in San Diego and you will get personally vilified as being somehow offensive.

While we, as a community, have made a lot of progress in understanding food, tasting food, and learning how the food system works, we are not yet ready to accept the realities of food to a large degree. Charging what it costs to serve pastured animals forces people to look at the difference between pastured animals and corn-fed animals. It’s jarring for people to be confronted with something as stark as a burger that costs three times as much as it would if it were a commodity.

It’s a really unpleasant experience for a lot of people because once you really understand it and get to the point where you can taste it, you’re not going to eat commodity meat anymore. You’re not going to eat garbage anymore.

People see those pictures of pelicans dying in the Gulf of Mexico and they think “I should drive my car less.” They don’t think “I need to stop eating meat, I need to put down the chicken sandwich,” but the chicken sandwich is more responsible for that deepwater drilling more than the car is.

The moment when someone faces not being able to go to Umberto’s and get rolled tacos with a clean conscience is a really unpleasant moment. That future looks really bleak and painful. At this point in our evolution of consciousness in San Diego, few people have experienced that moment. I went through it, and now I’ve had the experience of living a life with constraints in what I’m willing to eat, what I’m happily willing to eat. I’m not pure, but I’m conscious about it. When I’m eating stuff that’s destructive to me and the world, I know it and I taste it. I do it anyway, but…

Right, I eat Dorito’s and I’m like “what am I doing?”

Yeah, and I have my own personal rules. When I’m traveling and I want to experience a cuisine of a place, I want to experience a cuisine of a place because that’s how you get to understand the people. And if a personal friend, if somebody I know makes me something with love in their heart, even if the original ingredients were cynical, I’m not going to refuse it. And you know what? Sometimes I’m drunk! And the only place open is the taco shop and boy that shrimp quesadilla is really good. But I know what farmed shrimp from Thailand really means.

It’s particularly hard at times when I really am poor, which happens more than I wish. It’s really a bummer to not be able to load up on cheap stuff and feel good about it, except that really it’s not. You feel so much better when you’re not loaded up on cheap destructive shit.

So we have a mortgage now, but we’re not going to stop the CSA. We’re not going to start skimping on food and buying fake food because it’s so important to us.

We haven’t had a lot of financial luxuries at our house in the last year or two, and when that started, boy, the TV went right away. I know what Directv costs, having been on both sides of that cost equation. That’s an easy $100 a month to get out. Not that eating good ingredients only costs $100 a month more, but it’s a start. How much does your CSA cost?

It’s 240 bucks for 8 weeks, which we spread out over 4 months. We belong to Inland Empire’s CSA.

It’s probably comparable to getting the bonus package from Directv. So, you have to ask, “How much value are we getting from being able to watch something that’s on Channel 717, versus being able to have locally grown fantastic quality, nutritious produce in our fridge all the time?”

The people v. the city attorney #

Let’s talk about tipping. The New York Times covered you in October 2008, talking about the Linkery’s no-tipping policy. You don’t accept tips at El Take it Easy either.

We charge for table service. It’s a profession. We charge for it.

Then earlier this year, the Consumer Protection Division of the city attorney’s office sent you a letter, saying it was unfair for you to automatically charge for table service.

Asserting that it was consumer fraud actually, that we were defrauding our customers.

They backed down though, after a lot of people spoke up on your behalf.

Basically, there was an immense outpouring of concern about whether this was a legitimate use of the city’s resources. There were actually a lot of people who didn’t care about the Linkery or Jay Porter all that much. There were plenty who did, but plenty who didn’t, and I think a lot of people shared the same reaction which is: trying to punish businesses that have openly disclosed charges and are very upfront about it is probably not in the best interests of the city and the taxpayers in a recession.

I think that was the issue people saw, regardless of whether they like our food or me personally. People see what we do and they see it’s insanely open and transparent. It was apparent that whoever wrote the letter wasn’t paying close enough attention. And like you said, our “secret charges” were talked about in the New York fucking Times. I think people saw that and just saw the kind of Kafkaesque absurdity to the situation, maybe more Joseph Helleresque absurdity of the situation, of the city trying to eat itself. The outpouring concern about that appears to be what led to the cessation of actions.

Remember: the city attorney’s office is a political office. Doing something that angers so many people that it prompts them to send impromptu letters of non-support to you in the course of a day suggests that it will not be an issue that plays favorably at reelection.

This speaks also to the power that you get from blogging and for standing for something in the community. You have strong opinions about how you go about things, so much that you can write about them in a way that’s interesting to people. It allows for a blog where you can say something and people will hear it.

Yeah, that’s always surprising, both surprising and humbling. You know how it is when you’re writing on the Internet, I’m pretty sure my mom reads it. Now we know we can track hits and everything, but it’s really unclear whether everybody’s paying attention, so it’s insanely humbling to get a reaction.

I explained your policy to a friend who responded “Well, I don’t know if that money’s actually going to the servers.” Is there any way to handle this kind of skepticism?

I don’t know. I suppose the fundamental proposition of our business to our guests is not just that we distribute our revenues according to any specific formula, although we do. We make that point to the public because we know we’re doing something unusual. We know that people will be thrown off by it and will want it to be explained to them. We need to reassure them that this is essentially functionally similar to a tipping system, except improved.

I suppose that a central promise to our patrons is that we do this thing because we believe it’s worth charging for and that we will provide good value for your money. And internally, at the base of any business operation, is an understanding that we will use the revenue wisely and according to principle and with integrity and in a way that helps the community, and, obviously, that includes taking good care of the team.

Do you have any evidence that it’s working? Do you have less turnover than other restaurants?

For a long time, we certainly did. There was a time at the old Linkery location when we had practically zero turnover. From about late 2006, shortly after we instituted the service charge and came together with our core team who believed in it to the time we moved to the current location. I’m sure there was some, but there was almost no turnover. It’s insane for a restaurant to go 16 months without major turnover.

Especially among servers.

Exactly.

Growing pains #

With the move and us getting bigger, our business has fundamentally changed. The experience of working for the business has fundamentally changed. It’s more fragmented. People’s roles are less holistic because when you work for a 40-person company, there’s not as much opportunity to do every job in the house.

For years, it was not uncommon for a dish or dessert to appear on the menu because one of the servers came in early and really wanted to cook it. That sort of thing just can’t happen with scale and that’s a tradeoff that we unfortunately had to accept in a search to grow to a point where we could become financially sustainable.

When we moved from a small place to a big place in 2008, everyone’s job became less fun, too. Honestly, we work a lot harder and make less money. We lean on people to do the same damn thing over and over again. People want to grow, and growing doesn’t happen until the expansion’s established. Right now, we’re in the process of expanding—like your job’s not growing, but you’re doing the same thing harder, more times per hour and for less money. That’s the reality of growth.

During these periods where we really have to just grind it out, we experience turnover because it’s just not for everybody. Hell, I’m not sure it’s for me, but I’m wedded to the thing and I think there’s a group of people here who are wedded to each other. We’re all committed to this idea of what we can accomplish, in terms of transforming our community. And so, we grind it out. Some people leave, and we get some new people in.

So you were able to enjoy less turnover by offering work that was more fulfilling, richer, less rote?

Yeah. It was hard and people worked hard, but it was more unexpected and lively. Unfortunately, that was also tied to the lack of financial viability. For a long time, we’ve been running not just a non-profit, but what’s effectively a community charity. In the end, it will grow to be a profitable entity, and all of the people that have invested money and time and believe in the project will receive an ample reward.

I don’t think anyone’s ever going to get rich on it, but the investors will receive something, a payoff commensurate with the risk slightly greater than if they’d invested in CDs or something. And the long-time employees who have fucking sweated out months and years, we’ll be in a position to compensate them in a worthwhile way. We’re five years in, five and a half years in, and that’s still on the horizon.

When we look at the numbers of what we do in this market, in this economy, expansion continues to be the key. In North Park in 2010, with the amount of disposable income that’s in this neighborhood, there’s not going to be a wait for a table every hour of every night we’re open. It’s just not going to happen. It’s not going to be Chez Panisse, in terms of the market. Even if eventually we execute as well as Chez Panisse does and do it for 30 years, unless the economics of this area change drastically, we’re not going to have that size of a market.

So, we have to be content with a restaurant that has a moderate market, that’s busy on the weekends, that’s fun on the weekdays, that pays for itself and pays for the capital it’s using. Then we’ll do that at another place and then possibly do that at another place. That is the path we see to financial sustainability.

So, are you coming to La Jolla or Baja La Jolla? Because I live in Baja La Jolla (Pacific Beach).

We’ve moved to north of University.

You don’t have to answer that question.

No, seriously, our farm-to-table empire now straddles University Avenue. 100 yards each direction.

And it’s taken you about five years.

It’s taken five years and we’re working our asses in order to consistently achieve the best quality, to keep innovating in terms of the kinds of foods we’re serving and the kind of ingredients we’re using, and to continue to contribute to the community. We’ve gone from 5,000 square feet in one facility to where now we cover 200 yards. I think it’s a lot.

We learned a lot in getting this restaurant open. If this is successful and the Linkery continues to be successful, if the opportunity presented itself to do something else that we viewed as a positive contribution to our world, I think we’d pursue it.

Although if we ever get to where we’re making enough money that we don’t have to work as hard, we probably won’t work this hard.

OK, I can respect that.

If these things were successful and I could spend my time blogging, I might just do that.

Food trucks in San Diego #

Some Linkery folks are now running the MIHO Gastrotruck. And we have Tabe BBQ, which is another kind of gourmetish food truck. Those are the only two gourmet food trucks I know of in San Diego. (Is there a better term than gourmet? Please?)

Yeah, do you know anything about the sourcing that Tabe uses?

No.

Because I know what MIHO’s doing. They’re using real food, they’re starting with real food. Obviously like most start-ups, they don’t have the flexibility to be 100 percent where they probably will be eventually. They’re buying a lot of really good ingredients. The way I experience food in the restaurant business is that there are places that I know I want to eat—people are making food I know I want to eat and then there is a bunch of stuff that I don’t pay attention to. So, I don’t know anything about Tabe because nobody’s told me, “Hey, these guys are using real ingredients and making real food,” so I’m kind of just not interested.

So they’re ostensibly gourmet.

It’s marketed that way, whether or not. It’s marketed to be gourmet to a community that is still learning about food.

It’s weird because just up the street in LA, there’s this huge food truck thing.

Right, it’s fantastic.

And here, we’ve got two gourmet food trucks.

No, there’s Dave Du Jour too. I think gourmet is a euphemism for most of these trucks, a way of saying kind of like targeted to…

White people?

Yeah, drunk Anglo’s.

And obviously, we have tons of food trucks throughout the city like in City Heights.

Right. Because the kind of taco truck down at 22nd and Imperial is not a place that guys are going to go when they leave a bar on Garnet. Basically, I think some of these food trucks that go under the name “gourmet” are casting a net to catch young industrialists leaving a bar at night who are probably not going to make their way down to La Fachada after they leave the bar.

What do you think of the truck model? It’s been awesome in Portland, but is it something that could work in San Diego? Are you interested in that at all?

Well, I’m certainly not interested in doing it. We spent five and a half years getting better at doing the fixed restaurant model. I am sure that the skills to do a truck are different, but we’re at a point where we need to leverage the things we know how to do. We need to take what we’ve learned how to do and do it as good as possible and get San Diego more excited about it. So, a food truck isn’t for us.

One of the things I learned early in this business was: Do what you do. Don’t do what you don’t do.

We did catering for a little bit and learned “oh, we don’t do catering.” Our catering jobs tended to not be very good and we’d lose a ton of money at it. We’re not good enough to charge what we would have to charge to make money at it because we would be charging Waters catering prices, but we don’t have a catering kitchen. We don’t know how to run an event. So, we don’t do what we don’t do. We don’t do food trucks. We do restaurants.

Ham! #

Right, and then how’s the meat bar at the Linkery, is that still going?

Yeah. We figured out how to do it in a way that it’s what we do.

We took the idea of a retail meat counter and merged it with the thing that we do, which is cure the meat that we use on the menu. Basically, if you arrange with us beforehand, we can cure meat for you and sell it to you before it makes its way into the dishes at the restaurant. We’ve figured out how to make that work in a way where it’s doing what we do. It’s insignificant to our finances, in terms of the sales of the meat.

It’s actually probably a net negative on the whole, but it’s really great for the relationship we build with people. I can’t tell you how many of our hardcore regulars buy all of their bacon from the Linkery. Basically, they come in once every week or two, they have dinner and then they buy bacon for the next week or two. And that’s their clock as to when it’s time to come back to the Linkery.

We got a ham from you guys last Christmas and it was by far the best ham we’ve ever had. A lot of our guests said it was unbelievable. We made the mistake of getting a half ham and invited too many people and it ran out really quickly. We’re getting a full ham this year, at least.

I’m confident that unless they’ve grown up in a part of the south where you have neighbors naturally doing artisanally cured hams, or unless they’re friends with Herb Eckhouse at La Quercia, 99.9 percent of the people in the San Diego area have no idea what a ham tastes like. They think a ham is something you get from Costco or like black forest ham from Boar’s Head.

Kind of smoky, maybe, smoky, salty.

Yeah. Water, liquid and salt and water and smoke. People have no idea what ham tastes like. And the first time you taste real ham, it’s a revelation, whether it’s a country ham or city ham. But boy what a hard sell in San Diego where you put ham on the menu and people are like, “well ham’s kind of average food, why would I want to order it?”

It’s like this super self-destructive feedback loop where generations have gone by without people tasting a whole category of food. We want to sell that category of food in its original form, the good kind. But generations have gone by where people have only had the ersatz version, which tastes like garbage and is cheap. Building a market for people to enjoy country ham at what it costs to get a good country ham is insane. We still have not done that. You will be one of our eight ham customers.

Jay teaches me about restaurant regulatory agencies #

You mentioned La Fachada earlier. I just went there for the first time.

Outside or inside?

You can’t sit outside right now. This is what I wanted to talk about. The city came down on them and shut down their patio. The patio’s gone, although they might be rebuilding it somewhere else on the lot. The people I went with were devastated. They went on about how it’s so nice to sit outside, how they’d go after church with their kids and family. And I immediately thought this is bogus. It’s unfortunate that La Fachada doesn’t have a blog where they and their customers can speak up about the city’s impact on their business.

Yeah, although I don’t know if it would make any difference. We were in a very unique position in that we got proactively targeted by the city attorney. It was totally a discretionary action by that attorney, by that office. They were creatively applying some laws they felt would generate revenue from us and change the way we do business. Things like patios and health codes and city zoning ordinances and so forth are subject much less discretion.

The enforcement agent is following a script there. Now the script can be changed and the scripts will be changed. The scripts we have are unsustainable—they’re a product of this moment in which we believe we have this thing called “wealth” in our city. Lots of appendages have sprung up that are funded by this very transitory kind of wealth that cities have, which in 20 or 40 or 60 years—I mean, you’ve traveled, you know what it looks like when it goes away.

The people from the County Health Department, in our experience, are really good people. The inspectors that come by are super positive. When we’ve gone through the process of opening the restaurant, they’ve been helpful. Our experience with the Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control is the same way. These are people whose jobs are entirely dependent upon the existence of restaurants! They’re all about helping us.

Jay predicts the future of restaurant regulatory agencies #

But I think there will be some point when the people of San Diego, when we’re much poorer than we are today, look at that service and say, “I’d rather restaurants maintain their own health codes. We’ll just not patronize the ones that kill people.”

That’s how markets work, right?

That’s how the world works in every place except this handful of “industrialized” nations that are living a momentary fiction since World War II.

We will see what a funny weird luxury some of these rules we have are—these rules about the ways we approach zoning and land use. We will learn what people in cities across the world have learned, particularly cities in what we euphemistically call developing nations. They are actually much better developed nations than we are because they actually know what’s happening within their communities.

We will get to a point where we learn what a luxury item it was to be able to say “oh, you can’t possibly cook outdoors because we expect that you will use factory garbage for food, and factory garbage meat is super dangerous when combined with the bacteria that exists in the air.” Since us Americans have grown up in this bubble, we’re probably not even aware of the crazy things that happen if you take super bad, super unhealthfully raised ingredients that compose 99.9 percent of our food system and leave it out for a few hours. Real food doesn’t spoil the way factory garbage does.

But let’s get to a really emotional, existential question: why are we scared of food outside? Why is San Diego—which has a strong Latin component, but is basically an Anglo run city—so scared of people eating food outside in the community? Why does this regulation exist, whether it’s city or county or health or zoning, that makes it so that we have fewer food trucks and we have fewer patios?

There’s this really deep connection to the fact that we are so conditioned to eat food that’s dead—I don’t mean meat that’s dead—I mean lifeless produce, meat that’s been irradiated or frozen to death.

Full of ammonia, right?

Yeah, pink slime. We eat pink slime. There’re no butchers anymore in supermarkets, right? There’s shrink-wrapped gray meat. Or maybe it’s red if it’s been pumped up with oxygen that morning. We’re so insulated from things that are alive. We sit in our cars. We’re in cubicles. We’re in air-conditioning. We’re watching Directv. The places where people come together and talk are exceptions.

Honestly, as a society, a city, we’re not coming together and talking. We’re not around people. We’re not around things that are alive. We’re not eating food that’s alive. We’re not working outdoors. We’re not even traveling outdoors. We travel in our little steel bubble cars and it’s gotten to the point where that’s so normal that contact with life is really, really scary.

You go to any vibrant country in the world and you eat food cooked outside. You sit there and you’ve got real food and your drink and people and there’s bugs in the air, dirt on the ground, a kid playing in the dirt. And life is really rich and the air is full of microbial life and human life, and the food you eat is full of the same, actual nutrients.

We’ve completely pulled away from that. It mirrors what’s happened to our soil in our country. American food is grown in dead soil with petroleum added to create the energy, to imbue the “food” with the energy necessary to grow. So, our soil has no bugs in it, no life in it, the products of the soil have no life in it. When you interact with food in the supermarket, there’s no life in it. And now we create a governmental system in which our restaurants are expected to follow suit.

From the yeoman class to the flabby class #

Certainly there’s something really scary when you go from a place where everything is dead, all the way from the soil to your plate, to a place that’s full of liveliness and people and bugs, microbes in the air, possible imaginary contaminants. But that’s the choice, the fulcrum on which the future of our community rests: are we going to choose to be alive or dead? And are we going to choose to interact with things that are alive or only interact with things that are dead, only eat dead food or are we going to eat live food?

Right, but you’ll get food safety propaganda from Cargill or Monsanto talking about the security of our food system.

Now you’re getting into the really big picture, which is about dispossession of Americans from the Midwest farmlands and the concurrent growth of land grant universities. Basically, we’ve implemented policies and cooperated with corporations like Monsanto to remove all the family farmers from the American Midwest, and build land grant universities with money we got from the farmers. The dispossessed generations that would have inherited their family farms end up studying at the same land grant universities drinking the Monsanto kool-aid. We all did.

This is definitely my story and I’m not unusual in this way at all. Almost everybody in our cohort (Jay is 39, I’m 32) has a grandfather or grandparent who grew up on a farm. That’s the story of America, right? Our legacy that we should have had, of knowing how to farm land and farming land in a meaningful way, was removed. We ended up in a system of going to land grant universities and becoming partners in a world of large organizations. We became the flabby class.

The effete.

Those of us who ended up in jobs in which we did little of value.

I often think about this John Adams quote: “I must study politics and war, that our sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy.” OK, so we did that. To the point that I was in school essentially until I was 28. Most of my life has been totally awesome, really perfect in a lot of ways. Compared to most humans throughout history, I’ve never had to work very hard. I’ve certainly never worried about starving. I’m not a unique case.

Also by not having to work very hard, you got to accomplish very little.

Precisely. Mission accomplished until we’re living like Wall-E.

The research that’s going on at these same land grant universities is reductionist and it’s all about “OK, well rather than have live soil, how can you break down its components and have fake live soil? There’re only three things that matter, NPK (nitrogen [N], phosphorus [P] and potassium [K]), so we put those in and now we know about soil, it has three components!”

But people who know—who really know, who aren’t scientists, because scientists don’t know, people who know—know that the millions of living organisms and components of good living soil are completely different than dead soil with three chemicals in it. But in the world of the land grant university and the world of the research university, they’re basically functionally identical.

And you see this nutritionism with our food. People might say “food is composed of vitamins and a certain amount of fat,” but what is the difference between an animal that was fed petroleum grown corn and never could turn around and an animal that lived outdoors and ate a myriad of different wonderfully grown foods that were raised in the soil? Does anybody really believe that they’re the same? Does anybody believe that a cut of meat from an animal that was raised with absolutely nothing of value going into it and no exercise could somehow be comparable to an animal that was raised in an environment in which it had been bred for 10,000 years?

This insanely rudimentary belief about the world emanates from a particular culture that exists in research universities. But this research exists alongside research that’s been occurring in neurophysiology and evolutionary neurobiology which indicates that merely thinking something can massively change your body chemistry.

So, on one side, people are asserting that a pig raised in a factory, that’s never seen daylight, is nutritious, while at the same time we know that a human who’s never seen daylight is non-functional and chemically wildly different. It’s so insane. So we, as a culture, have this knowledge that what is coming from “agricultural and nutritional research” is complete bullshit. And yet, it’s so wound up in our food system and funded by these corporations like Monsanto and Cargill.

And we’re the students and scientists doing this research. We’re the dispossessed grandchildren of farmers, who are in huge supply in California and Iowa and Nebraska and Illinois, places that have really well known research land grant universities. It’s all tied together.

That reductionism, that idea that you can somehow get to the essential qualities of a living thing in cubicles and then reproduce it synthetically with petroleum, is deceiving. It’s like the joke about the frog: “You can dissect it, but you kill it.” That process of trying to dissect and recreate these living things that sustain us kills them. And so, we live in a world of everything being dead because this process has happened and it’s all been broken down into something we can recreate with fossil fuel, which is inherently dead.

It’s so naïve because, like you said, a human that’s never been exposed to sunlight is non-functional.

And chemically distinct, different brain chemicals, everything. We know that when they’re alive, their meat is inherently different than the meat of a human who has loving parents.

Precisely. Love. We actually talked about love a lot in our first interview.

We know that human meat, while alive, is inherently different depending on the amount of love in the human’s life, and yet we pretend that an animal’s meat is perfectly fine.

I love empiricism as much as the next civilized person, but I don’t think we’re close to figuring out the algorithm that is a human being. We can’t say definitively that you put X into it and Y will come out of it. Nobody knows.

Empiricism is created by the things you can measure, so it’s almost a fallacy to rely on it because it’s only reliable when you’re in an artificial context, in which you can measure everything. Empiricism in roulette makes a lot of sense.

Or perhaps computer engineering, software design.

In anything involving the mysteries of the universe, which includes life, matter that was once organic or is organic, empiricism provides little more than a reassuring picture.

It keeps people busy.

Right and now that we don’t work on farms, we need a lot to keep us busy.

I imagine I could come up with some study to measure the awesomeness of the goat torta I just ate.

You could probably measure the torta’s awesomeness on six different axes, but really in the end, was it fucking delicious? Do you wake up tomorrow morning wanting one?