If all goes according to plan and modern Chicago’s first all-local, humanely raised, whole-animal butchery opens next week, don’t be surprised if Rob Levitt talks you out of buying some pricey Dietzler Farms rib eyes and instead pushes something a little more economical, with less cachet. How about some sirloin flaps or spider steak?
When I talked to Levitt a few weeks ago he’d just returned from a stage at Brooklyn’s Meat Hook—one of the more renowned shops in the movement—where he spent a few days cutting meat and familiarizing himself with the business end of a thriving butcher shop. Back in Chicago, his business license was still in the works, the contractors were behind schedule, and he was still homing in on a three-horsepower sausage grinder. But the giant stainless steel walk-in where Dietzler cows and Slagel Farms hogs will hang from meat hooks had been installed. And the smoker, salvaged via Craigslist, waited in a back room along with the shiny new red meat slicer that Levitt took in trade for butchering a whey-fed hog for Marion Street Cheese Market.
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“It was a wonderful experience, but I would rather just have Allie be my wife,” Rob says. “For a while it was a very romantic idea because we could see each other every day. We could be around each other’s food every day, which is great. But the reality was that I very rarely got to eat her desserts, and she very rarely got to eat my cooking.” (Allie’s currently looking for another restaurant job.)
“The aesthetic attraction is that you walk up to the counter and there are butchers there working,” he says. “There might be half a cow on the table and someone like me sweating and grunting and cutting an arm chuck. Which might turn some people off. I’m guessing it’ll really excite a lot of people to see what’s happening. You can say, ‘Hey, what are you doing?’ and I can explain, ‘This is flatiron. This is the chuck eye, and so suddenly you start a dialogue.”
