Butcher blocks meat1/10/2023 ![]() “And so, what we did is we went out and sourced boxes of beef that were very similar and sort of our aesthetic and our desired quality range and production ability,” Niel said. 1 selling SKUs which meant a lot of money was being left on the butcher block. The problem came when one animal produced about seven to eight beef filet mignons, and that cut is one of the shop’s No. Niel said the argument in favor of the “holistic side” of the business was to just break down one whole animal and then try to sell the pieces of it. “So, we knew we wanted to maintain our whole animal butchery – and so that’s a separate conversation from this – but again this only works in this world, if you have whole animal butchery paired with box beef.” “It was about bringing in what we call boxed beef. “We had this great internal debate when I first took over – amongst myself our other butchers, the owners that were partners with me,” he explained. But recalling the terrible economics of operating a stand-alone butchery, Niel again adopted a hybrid model. Niel’s vision for Main Street Meats was to be the neighborhood butcher shop that offers locally sourced meats harvested from a whole animal. The restaurant and bar provide financial stability for the butcher shop. “I’m happy we’ve done it and we’re finally kind of on the other side of rehabbing this old shop and with the equipment we have now we’re able to do so much more than we were before,” he added. “I’ve spent the better part of the last eight years rehabbing this butcher shop, piece by piece, and you know, even when you know you’re talking about band saws and big giant meat grinders that are $20 to $25,000 a pop,” he said, adding, “you know, smokers that run 70 to 80 grand you know it is a very heavily capital-intensive project, so we had to take our time and do it as best we could. Main Street Meats already was outfitted with some of the necessary equipment, but some of the hardware needed to be replaced. Butchery is a craft that requires specialized – and expensive – tools to execute. Niel said he is proud of the neighborhood butcher Main Street Meats has become, but it couldn’t happen without the restaurant. “So, if you’re looking at it on paper, and when I talk to friends in the restaurant business, they look at it and they just, ‘It doesn’t make any sense, like, how could you dedicate that much space to the butchery?’ But really the butchery is what makes it special.” “The restaurant works, because the butchery does what it does,” Niel said. The butchery accounts for roughly 20% of sales, but it’s the butchery that drives sales in the restaurant. Main Street Meats is 2,600 square feet with half of the space dedicated to the butchery and the resale counter while the other half is dedicated to the kitchen, the dining room and the bar. It’s the same way in a grocery store Whole Foods can’t support a butchery without some herbal supplements and stuff like that.” “It’s the restaurant and bar that really makes the butcher shop financially OK. “But we also have a restaurant and bar attached to it,” he added. We bring in whole animals, we break them down, we have our own retail side. “We have a restaurant attached to a butcher shop, and we’re a USDA-inspected butcher shop. ![]() “That’s exactly what Main Street Meats is – it’s a hybrid model,” he said. “But it was a long and interesting slog to figure out how to run a quasi-modern butcher shop with old-school techniques in the modern South.” Building a businessĪ butcher shop in the modern era cannot survive on meat alone, so Niel adopted a hybrid model for Main Street Meats – restaurant and butcher shop. ![]() “I really sort of dove headlong into it and you know the rest, as they say, is history,” he said. In 2014, the Niels took over Main Street Meats. He said the brand was well accepted by the community already, and it was completely different from anything he’d ever done before. ![]() ![]() “So, some guys had gotten together before me to start a butcher shop with the idea of being locally owned, locally sourced, only whole animal butchery and they were doing a good job but struggling through the sort of economics of trying to sell enough food to make a business work.”Ĭhef Niel briefly got involved as a consultant. “Main Street Meats came to me as a kind of a kernel of an idea that already existed,” Erik Niel said. In 2005, after working in professional kitchens the couple – both in their 20s at the time – opened Easy Bistro & Bar in downtown Chattanooga. Erik and Amanda already were established in the local restaurant scene. ![]()
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