National Culinary Review - November/December 2010

This assorted charcuterie board is on the menu at Restaurant Eve.

Kentucky Department of Parks, where he instituted a direct-from-the-farm buying program. Perry now serves on the Chefs Collaborative Board of Overseers and coordinates the food-systems initiative at the University of Kentucky, working to link government, academia and advocacy groups with farmers and chefs. “Culinary schools rarely teach whole-animal butchery,” he says. “And chefs increasingly really want to know how to do it. Meat fabrication is not only economical and yields much more potentially interesting cuts than the typical primal, but also helps keep local producers in business.”

IT’S MOBILE For most chefs, meat fabrication begins with a certain amount of trial and error. It is still largely self-taught, although there are apprenticeships, and culinary schools and state land-grant universities are incorporating it into their curricula.

On the grounds of The Garrison, a golf
club across the Hudson River from the
U.S. Military Academy at West Point, N. Y.,
Brandon Collins and Vinny Mocarski are
co-chefs at Valley, a restaurant that grows
much of its own produce and has developed
a network of local suppliers. “In general,
life as a chef is completely different from
what it was 15 years ago,” says Collins. “It
is now a recognized profession. But it has
also evolved from picking up the phone
and calling your food supplier and having
everything delivered cut, cleaned and ready
to go. Now, it’s ‘ What farm will I get this
from?’ ‘How will I find this?’ Sourcing is
much more hands-on than it used to be.”
Valley chefs began fabrication with pigs
and lambs, serving crispy pig’s ears in
addition to the usual chops and terrines.
They recently got their first beef, a Red
Devon, which was slaughtered in the first
mobile slaughterhouse licensed by the
USDA east of New Mexico, and only the
fifth in the country. The slaughterhouse is
a project of Glynwood, Cold Spring, N. Y.,
a nonprofit organization whose mission
is to help communities save farming. The
plan is to institute a network of these
mobile units, which will, hopefully, begin
to address what remains the logjam for
small producers and their eager customers
looking for grass-fed and non-feedlot-
raised meat—the major shortage of USDA-
certified slaughterhouses.

Meshelle Armstrong

“Some gets ground into burgers, and some, for instance, the braising cuts, like our kabob meat, we utilize for banquets and staff meals,” says Collins of the meat from the Red Devon. “We’ve seared spleen on a country-style bread, sautéed sweetbreads, served bone-marrow croustade on toasted brioche and figured out different ways to prepare the tongue so that our customers will eat it. It didn’t work when we ran it as beef tongue pastrami on the menu, but when we had our servers call it pastrami beef tongue, and served it with soup, we had reorders.”

GOING WHOLE-HOG—OR BEEF In Alexandria, Va., Cathal Armstrong, one of Food & Wine’s Top 10 Best New Chefs 2006, is chef/co-owner of three restaurants— including Restaurant Eve, awarded 4 stars by The Washington Post—and a soon-to-be-opened full-service butcher shop. For Armstrong, purchasing whole animals is more than just serving quality meat; it contributes to saving endangered breeds. He purchases beef and veal from Chapel Hill Farm,