Fatted Calf
Taylor Boetticher and Toponia Miller started Fatted Calf in a rented Dogpatch kitchen in 2003. They sold at the Berkeley Farmers Market. They held a Hayes Valley shop on Fell Street for more than a decade, then moved it into the Ferry Building in the autumn of 2022. This is that stall.
Why go
The porchetta is the thing they have made longest. They season skin-on pork belly with the loin attached: garlic, lemon zest, fennel seed, rosemary, salt and pepper. Then they roll it and tie it to about twenty pounds. MacKenzie Chung Fegan and Cesar Hernandez ranked 29 Ferry Building vendors in July 2026. They put this counter at No. 17, back from a long renovation.
Ali Bouzari took the beef jerky apart for the Chronicle in 2019. The recipe reads like a lesson. The butchers trim bottom round, slice it thin and leave it two days in salt, bourbon, molasses and black pepper. Then they cold smoke it for 45 minutes over cherry, apple, hickory and alder. Three or four hours in the dehydrator finish it. Bouzari's point about the bourbon is worth stealing. Oak barrels break down into the same aromatic pieces long smoke puts into bark, so the marinade does part of a pit's work.
Order this / avoid
- Order: the Jambon-Beurre de Truffe. Fegan and Hernandez say
it's hard to beat a simple jambon beurre sandwich, the butter flecked with black truffles.
1 - Order: the lamb meatball soup on the days it is the daily soup.
- Order: the petite charcuterie plate, at $22.00 in September 2026, if you want the range in one go.
- Avoid: picking a sandwich at random. The critics found the rest of the list uneven.
What locals & experts say
- Taylor Boetticher, to 7x7 in December 2010:
I don't think people should buy meat that is responsibly raised just because it's the right thing to do.
Meat from a good source, raised well, is more delicious.6 - The shop's own account of what it does:
We make our own sausage, pates, terrines, and potted meats. We cure salumi, smoke pastrami, and roast porchetta. We butcher whole hogs, lamb and duck.
4 - Kelly O'Mara, KQED, on the format: the shops sell pasture-raised meat and housemade pates, and the counter runs a Butcher's Happy Hour with a live butchery demonstration.7
Good to know
- Which door: the Ferry Building stall. The other shop is at the Oxbow Public Market in Napa.
- Classes: three hours of hands-on butchery, with a snack and a bag of what you made.
- Where: 1 Ferry Plaza, Building 13.
Verdict
should-visit — Come with a cooler if you are driving. Ask what came off the whole hog this week.