The Local Butcher Shop
Whole carcasses, every farm inside 150 miles, and no premium on the rib-eye over the shank. Aaron Rocchino cooked for Alice Waters at Chez Panisse before he opened it in August 2011.
Why go
Aaron and Monica Rocchino met working at Oliveto and opened this in the old Red Hanger Kleaners space at Shattuck and Cedar.1 Their argument was that restaurant-grade meat was not reaching home cooks. Monica put it plainly to Berkeleyside in opening week: Most stores sell boxed meats. And most restaurants don't have the staff or space to accommodate whole animals. But farmers invest a lot of time and energy into raising their animals and we want to reflect that.
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The pricing is the part worth understanding before you go. They split each animal into front, middle and rear and price by section. For the farmer and for us the costs are fixed,
Monica said. It was the meat packers and distributors who decided to put a value on certain cuts, like tenderloin or rib-eye steaks.
1 Aaron added the other half of it: the cheaper cuts are the ones that need time, and the easy-to-cook ones got the premium. So a choice cut here costs meaningfully less than it does down the road.
Nothing leaves. What the cases do not sell becomes sausage, pâté, stock and sauce, and the counter runs a changing Sandwich of the Day.2 Every farm sits inside 150 miles of Berkeley, and the standard is pasture-raised with no antibiotics and no added hormones.2
Order this / avoid
- Order: the fennel sausage, and ask what came in whole this week. The butchers are cooks and will tell you how to handle it.2
- Avoid: shopping by supermarket vocabulary. What is in the case is what walked in the door.
What locals & experts say
- Berkeleyside, Tracey Taylor, 26 August 2011: Rocchino
joins a long line of Chez Panisse alumni who have gone on to open their own food businesses
and ispart of a movement centered in the Bay Area that is focused on the provenance of meat, sustainable raising methods and informed, responsible butchery.
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Good to know
- Classes: the shop teaches sausage making at $140, poultry butchery at $150 and a hog butchery demo at $200, in person, and sells recorded courses.2
- Butcher Basket: a rotating box of cuts at bulk pricing, on subscription.2
- Getting there: Shattuck at Cedar, with the entrance on Cedar, two blocks up from Chez Panisse.
Verdict
should-visit — Berkeleyside got the owners to argue their pricing on the record, and an argument you can disagree with is better evidence than a description you cannot check. Monica Rocchino explains why the premium on a rib-eye is a distributor's invention, and that claim changes what a home cook can afford. The shop's own standards line up with it rather than contradicting it. Two things hold the rung down. I have no critic's line on the sausages or the pâtés, and the only account of who owns the place now sits in a sponsored feature, which is not evidence.