Fatted Calf
House-made sausage and salumi from a counter that has written two books about it, inside Oxbow. Nine to seven, every day.
Why go
Fatted Calf cures and grinds its own, and the sourcing is named out loud: heritage pork, grass-fed beef, local lamb, pastured poultry.1 The counter also builds charcuterie and cheese boards to order, and sells sandwiches, salads, boxed lunches, broths and soups.1 Two cookbooks came out of this shop.1 One is on making sausage, salumi, pates and confits, the other on jerky, and they teach the same material in three-hour classes that send you home with a bag of what you made.1
Order this / avoid
- Order: the house sausage and salumi. It is the thing the shop wrote a book about.1
- Order: a boxed lunch if you are heading up-valley. Oxbow is on the way out of town.1
- Avoid: a late stop. The Napa counter closes at 7pm daily.1
Good to know
- Hours: daily, 9am to 7pm.1
- Which door: this is the Oxbow Public Market counter, suite C. The other Fatted Calf is in the San Francisco Ferry Building and keeps different hours.1
- Classes: three hours, hands-on. Dates are on the shop's events page.1
- Hygiene: not established. No inspection instrument for this county is on file here.
Verdict
should-visit — This is a charcuterie house with a butcher counter attached, not the other way round, and the two cookbooks on sausage, salumi, pates and confits are the proof. The sourcing is named out loud, heritage pork through pastured poultry, which is more than most shops will commit to in writing. It is open nine to seven every day inside Oxbow, so a sandwich or a boxed lunch here is the easiest good meal in downtown Napa. The three-hour butchery class is the reason to build a day around it. Nobody with a byline has written about this counter in anything read here, which is what keeps it off the top rung.