Eat the City(32)

By the 1870s, Tom Mylan’s predecessors still cut up the 320,500 cattle, 1.2 million hogs, 1 million sheep, and 100,000 calves slaughtered annually within Manhattan. “The lowing and moaning of the cattle, the clatter of their hoofs upon the stones, the noises, not loud, but suggestive, connected with the act of killing,” offended the ear, requiring segregated districts for slaughterhouses, wrote the public health experts. Yet it was hard to imagine banning cattle altogether in a city largely lacking refrigeration. “Slaughtering establishments are just as essential to a large city as dry goods houses,” wrote one supporter to the newspaper in 1899.

The presence of animals had inspired the creation of health codes and agencies, and enlisted armies of enforcers, but the city would continue to house cows, pigs, and sheep, alive and dead.


IN the months before opening the Meat Hook, his spare, minimalist butcher shop in the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn, Tom Mylan donned safety goggles and old jeans to renovate his 1,000-square-foot space. The Meat Hook would be part of the Brooklyn Kitchen, a “food dork megaplex” including a cooking supplies shop, a food bookstore, a grocery store, a homebrew shop, and a lab with classes on food and drink. Tom mounted wall panels, set up display cases, and assembled butcher tables. He looked into installing a meat hook system to hang the meat, but the ceilings were too low. He was so excited to get a used band saw that he blogged about its delivery at 11:30 on a Sunday night, and promised to buff and polish it to shine like chrome. “Please tune in for the next episode of Pimp my Band Saw.”

The Meat Hook, Tom’s new-style homage to old-school butchering, opened in the fall of 2009. The well-lit main room has a wooden table for cutting meat and a glass counter for displaying it. On the counter is a framed photograph of a guy eating sausage, with the handwritten message, “Tom, that’s your motherf*cking sausage in my motherf*cking mouth. –Adam.” A sign on the wall reads MOTHERFUCKING MEAT, MOTHERFUCKER! Nearby are books such as Raising Beef Cattle, Pocketful of Poultry, Basic Butchering of Livestock and Game. Another counter is piled with scabbards—holsters for butchers’ knives—and iPods; while the one iPod in use in the dock shuffles through Cypress Hill, Lynyrd Skynyrd, and Soulja Boy. Most important, though, is the meat, which comes exclusively from small farms nearby and is appetizingly arrayed in stainless-steel refrigerators with green-lined shelves that highlight the red flesh and perfect lines of white fat. If something dead can be glowing with health, it’s the meat at the Meat Hook.

Here, Tom and his partners, Brent Young and Ben Turley, and their staff of two more “born-again meat cutters,” receive whole animals from nearby farms and turn them into cuts of meat. Each week, they get an average of two cows, three pigs, two lambs, a hundred and fifty chickens, ten ducks, a few rabbits, and, seasonally, turkeys—thousands of pounds to sell. They cut hams specially for their friends. They produce dozens of kinds of sausages. They make country paté. They sell leaf lard, duck fat, suet, and old-fashioned schmaltz. On the butcher’s table in the middle of the room, in sight of their customers, like some kind of performance, they cube bits of pork shoulder and pull cheeks of lambs to make sausages. They visit all the family farms that supply them to see that the animals continue to be sustainably raised with wholesome diets and care. Tom married his girlfriend, Annaliese, just before the butcher shop opened, but he has had barely any time with his bride. He spends about seventy hours a week at the Meat Hook. “Everything that’s in these cases,” Tom says, gesturing at the surrounding meat, “it’s like our heart and soul.” He told a visitor once, “I spend every waking moment doing it. It’s nuts. I’m nuts.”

“We’re doing things the old way,” says Tom, long after the shop has closed for the day, sitting at the counter with a gin and tonic—a position clearly familiar to him. “To be quite honest, we’re in over our heads.” They’re not old guys, he says—they don’t even know old guys. So they have to figure out for themselves the best, most efficient old way—that is, often, a new way.

Beyond the butcher shop, the Brooklyn Kitchen store sells nearly limitless variations on standard kitchen gadgets. There are basters, dual basters, bulb basters, half a dozen kinds of timers, four kinds of popsicle molds, a cherry pitter, apple and tomato corers, five kinds of fruit peelers, and three kinds of fruit slicers. This is a temple to a particular vision of the good life for young, urban America, and you get the sense that you can buy this good life with Tom’s skirt steaks and pork rounds and chicken livers.

Once upon a time, the fantasy of the rock star meant sex and debauchery—the reckless freedom a generation wanted to taste. Now, apparently, rock star status includes the domestic fantasy of a married butcher in a flannel shirt who works in a store full of kitchen gadgets and likes to talk about environmental issues while he cuts meat for dinner.

· · ·


IN the 1870s, the Chicago clearinghouses shipping beef and pork to East Coast cities realized it would be cheaper to send dead meat than live steers. They built massive stockyards and slaughterhouses where they could “disassemble” cows and pack the carcasses to travel efficiently. In a leap of technology, they harvested ice from the Great Lakes and stored it in stations along the train routes to cool the meat they sent in rail cars all the way to eastern cities. Prices went down, and Harper’s Weekly heralded a new “era of cheap beef.”