- Michael Gebert
- Rob Levitt and Tom Mylan on the patio at Honey Butter Fried Chicken
“I learned a lot about cutting meat, but I also learned a lot about what kind of meat shop I wanted to open,” Rob Levitt says to a group of meat-eaters huddling inside Honey Butter Fried Chicken after being temporarily chased off the patio by a passing rainstorm. Levitt, the co-owner of the Butcher & Larder, was telling the crowd of about 50 about staging at Tom Mylan’s Brooklyn butcher shop the Meat Hook a few years ago, prior to opening his own Chicago butcher shop.
Tom Mylan: Oh, well, jeez. I mean, it says what it does and it does what it says. It is The Meat Hook Meat Book. I own a butcher shop in Wiiliamsburg [in Brooklyn] and we only do whole, local animals. There is butchering in it, but it’s really about meat and the way that we do meat at the butcher shop. What it really is is a complete education on every single part of the animal, that’s like hidden in all these recipes. The recipes seem really random, some of them are really time consuming and some are supersimple, but it’s really about arming you with a bunch of techniques and examples of what you do with different types of cuts, whether it’s something that really needs to be braised or something that needs to be cured and smoked.
So it’s things that go back to when people actually had a butcher they could go to and it wasn’t just boxed beef?
Bone marrow. I think it has more to do with the paleo lifestyle, but a lot of beef heart, a lot of bone marrow, a lot of relatively unknown cuts like an inside pork skirt steak called the secreto, we sell a lot of that.
Which is?
