Kory Stetina is co-founder of LOVELIKEBEER, a local organization that puts on vegan pop-up beer dinners for charity. He and Derek Humbard also have a special beer and food pairing available at Sea Rocket Bistro in North Park that benefits Seeds @ City Urban Farm on the campus of San Diego City College.
Menus from past events hosted by Stetina and Humbard have paired almond brown sugar-glazed doughnuts with St. Louise Framboise at Tiger!Tiger!, roasted garlic and almond ravioli with The Bruery’s Loakal Red at Local Habit, and herb-pressed tofu with English peas, smoked tempeh and truffle vinaigrette with Stone Ruination IPA at Sea Rocket Bistro.
Coming up on April 3 they’re hosting “CORNUCOPIA” at The Linkery, showcasing vegan dishes inspired by Meso-American cuisine from Chefs Keith Adams (The Linkery) and Max Bonacci (El Take It Easy), plus custom cask ales from AleSmith Brewing Company. This is a one-night only event with an a la carte menu and no cover. And in keeping with the LOVELIKEBEER spirit, 15% of proceeds will benefit Engineers Without Borders – San Diego. Check out the menu scoop, left.
Why The Linkery?
The Linkery has long been a pioneer of San Diego’s farm-to-table and craft beer movements. They’re an important anchor on the 30th Street corridor for both, and from the beginning, embraced a wide variety of culinary directions and diets. They’ve had incredible vegan options on their menu and we’ve been long-time personal fans of the restaurant and what it stands for. They’ve been on our radar for a potential collaboration for quite some time so we finally were able to circle back and make it happen.
Why Meso-American cuisine and why the focus on corn?
The team at The Linkery holds steadfastly towards local, hand-crafted, non-processed foods, and the LOVELIKEBEER concept holds equally true to filling, artful, and most importantly, protein-rich vegan cuisine. In exploring our conceptual direction, Jay Porter and I realized that the two married quite nicely when looking south of our border. We also discovered going back in time to pre-Columbian (i.e. pre-Columbus) eras would actually take us to a time and place when the indigenous cuisine was almost 100% vegan naturally since meat, including fish, were rare. With the chefs at the Linkery and El Take It Easy having recently perfected their house made masa, ideas quickly turned to incorporating this in a few of the dishes, and from there sparked the idea to actually base the menu’s entire direction on a historically-infused reclamation of corn, an often demonized food based on the fact that we rarely actually consume it as a food (see fuel, glue, and the infamous sugar substitute).
After the conceptual foundation was laid, ideas got momentum, including our excitement to have Josh Higgins, our graphic designer, run wild with the art direction. We’ll actually be giving limited, hand signed and numbered screen printed menus with poster art to the first few dozen CORNUCOPIA-goers, as well as screen printing apparel on the spot and pressing a new glassware series incorporating his event artwork.
Why AleSmith?
We were actually a bit star-struck when Peter Zien and his fiancee Vicky showed up at our very first event to check out what we were doing. They’re both fans of vegetarian-cuisine and they’ve made it to most of our events since. AleSmith is probably at the top of our list in terms of San Diego breweries, and we have a large respect for their commitment to both the past and future of brewing. In addition to chatting with Peter at our events, Bill Batten collaborated in the brewing process for event #2′s Automatic Coconut Coffee Wheat Beer served at Blind Lady Ale House. So, we had been chatting for a while, and when I sat next to Peter by chance on the flight back from GABF 2012 we solidified plans to put something together (he had no choice but to listen to my ideas). I went back to Peter when CORNUCOPIA really started coming together and shared the idea of placing some of the culinary flavors of the dishes in the actual casks of beer, and both Bill and he were excited to join.
We’ve met a few times with the AleSmith team since and crafted a showing of four custom cask ales, only available at this event. We’re particular excited about the Mexican-chocolate-inspired version of Speedway Stout with cinnamon sticks and cocoa nibs, which we actually just placed in the casks today to mature for a few weeks before the event. This will be the first time ever this beer – arguably the best in the world – will have cinnamon flavors incorporated.
Any updates on the second menu series idea?
Menu Series Dish #2 is in the womb and starting to kick. What we can share at this point though is that it will be a collaboration with Scot and Karen Blair, and it will pop-up on the menu full time at one, perhaps two of their infamous locations, probably within the next month or two. It’s been in the works for quite some time and we’re perfecting the recipe at the moment, and sticking to the comfort-style pub-grub their spots are known for. Vegans can be decadent too you, know!
What breweries are you looking forward to trying this year?
Without a doubt, we are most looking forward to the tall cans scheduled for release this year from San Diego’s Modern Times Beer. Jacob McKean is a good friend and has impeccable taste in all things beer-related, so we’re certain his brewery is going to take the city by storm and we cannot wait to taste the first batches. Jacob is vegan too but I promise this was not considered in the aforementioned statement.