Jay Porter is the founder and proprietor of The Linkery and El Take It Easy. Tonight both restaurants will be participating in the monthly “30th on 30th” event. Here’s the description of the event from its website: “Here’s the program in general: on the 30th of each month, a bunch of restaurants and bars on and near 30th Street offer specials, such as a feature appetizer for $3. This makes it easy for you to go on a restaurant crawl and check out all the amazing places on the 30th Street Corridor. Most places start their specials between 5 and 6pm. So come on out and join us!” The Linkery will have $2 half pours of craft beer and and BBQ pulled lamb sliders for $2 or $3 (cash only, includes tax and service). El Take It Easy will have $3 Pork Belly Tacos, $5 Whiskey Sours made with Fighting Cock Bourbon, and $2 half pours of 30th Street Pale Ale – all cash only.
In a post on The Linkery’s blog in May, “What’ll Be Brewing At The Linkery?”, you discussed the possibility of The Linkery becoming a brewpub, or, as you put it, “a brewery with an excellent restaurant or an excellent restaurant that brews its own beer.” What can you tell us about that idea’s development?
We’re working with a homebrewer who has some backers. The fermenters would be in back and the bright tanks in the dining room where they’d be seen; we’d draw straight from those. Not much else will change. We are only using 3,000 sq ft out of the 5,000 currently so we have the space back there; there’s very little that has to be done. It’s more likely to come together than not.
Does this mean additional taps?
Yes. We’d go to about 15 taps total.
El Take It Easy didn’t have a phone number for the longest time. What was the reason for that?
For every person who calls the restaurant asking a legitimate question, we’d have 30 people trying to sell you something. So we had this idea that if we eliminated distractions we could do a better job, and from a restaurant’s point of view, the phone is mostly distraction. But we lost the battle to Google as they connected The Linkery and El Take It Easy. Google needs you to have a phone number; customers would call here (The Linkery) and ask about something about El Take It Easy.
On your personal website, you made a post “Dinner, Beyond the Machines” about the Sept. 8 countywide blackout. Can you tell us more about that evening?
That experience really showed that a lot of the work we’ve done in the last 6-7 years has been successful. We’ve worked to become a community place, and we believe so passionately that that’s what the biggest reward of the job is – to facilitate this community experience, so there was no question about not trying. It was a real challenge trying to make it work on a transactional level, but we tried our best. It was really ******* hard!
San Diego Beer Blog originally posted about Craft Brews on 30th Street, a new concession package coming to Lindbergh Field with your name attached. It has since been updated to say that you will not be involved, but that the two concepts had similar names. Any comment?
We submitted a proposal with a really similar name and concept as the one that got selected; we were put together with a bunch of other names and that package wasn’t selected. The name we came up with was 30TH & SAN. But now if somebody else is doing it, that’s awesome. We all benefit when people coming into the airport know about 30th Street as a whole. That’s much more important than our involvement.