Eat the City(38)
“Watch your back—watch your back!” screams Ron as a man crosses the path of a swinging forequarter, his boot leaving footprints in the fat on the ground. Despite the crushing weight, the luggers work methodically, in a kind of audible rhythm: quiet as they lift meat from the truck’s hook; a ding as they hang it on the warehouse’s hook; an ear-shattering clang-clang-clang as they slide the hook with its meat out of the truck and send it along the line on the loading dock; then a sudden dull silence after one quarter hits the rest of the meat and all swing wildly. “You ain’t done yet?” Mark calls into the belly of the truck, where George and Ron have emptied a third of the beef. It takes hours to empty the load.
The meat swings into the fabrication room—more aptly, the defabrication room—where it is cut while still on the hook, shrinking in size and then waving more precipitously, emitting a tangy mineral smell. The workers hack with perfect choreography, burrowing their knives into the hunks of flesh that hang all around them, moving toward the deadline of morning, when the trucks pull out of the loading docks to make deliveries. The Spanish radio station La Mega occasionally raises its voice over the band saws, the thump of cuts of meat hitting the table, and the loud fans. In the permanent winter of refrigeration, the workers wear cheap work boots or sneakers, gloves, and hoodies with the hoods up under hardhats. They almost never slip on the floors greased with fat and as slippery as an ice rink. They almost never lose grip on the knife.
The workers don’t talk to each other; instead, they communicate with their knives: as one man slices into an animal, those around him move away. Every so often each meat cutter sharpens his knife or dips it into boiling water to sterilize and heat it so the blade cuts cleanly through the cold fat. This is close work. Guys hug opposite sides of a quarter steer as they each cut in, their blades facing each other. They carry sharp steel hooks they use like hands to move the meat where they need. Like Tom Mylan’s butchers, these men understand the arts of meat.
The aging room, with its rows of prime Angus hindquarters, is arranged something like a dry cleaner’s, but with the thick funk of decay. These giant hunks of meat contain cowboy, rib, T-bone and porterhouse steaks, short loins and sirloins and chateaubriands, filet mignons, and tournedos, which need only to be carved out. Aged sirloin is gray, very dry, and looks hard, but is soft to the touch, like a very tender beef jerky. The meat stays in this room for four weeks before being sold and its contents at any given time are worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. “The best of the best,” Sam says.
When Amy Rubinstein, part owner of the renowned Peter Luger Steak House, walks into the room to choose meat, Sam attends her. Amy moves slowly through the room, punching her brass stamp into the white fat and pink flesh of the hindquarters that strike her as sufficiently marbled, well shaped, and silky for her restaurant. “I’m looking to see what the true grain is like on it,” she will say as she pokes the meat with her latex-gloved finger. “I think this is bloodshot,” she will observe, massaging a $390 hunk of meat.
Her rejections irk Sam.
“Amy, nothing wrong with it,” he will wheedle. “Amy, you missed two good pieces of meat on that hook,” he will point out, but Amy will move on. Sam used to offer first pick of his meat to Amy’s mother, famous for wearing a fur hat and pearls into the meat coolers, and now her daughter has taken over as his chief customer. By the end of her inspection, her white butcher’s jacket purpled with ink from the stamp and pinked with blood, Amy might have claimed 130 hindquarters and 75 shells, and spent well over $40,000.
Mostly, though, Master Purveyors sells boxed meat. “Give me a boxful of tenders,” says Mark on the phone. “Did he get mixed bones today? Did he get any leg bones? Femurs? Ten of those. Don’t forget the top rounds.”
Mark is swaying a bit as he leans one hand on his desk, out of breath. He’s tired from being awake, this night and every night, and spending only four, five, six hours a day away from work; three, four, five hours sleeping. His desk is littered with Immodium, Pepcid, old paper espresso latte cups, and an imperially high pile of invoices, orders, uncashed checks, phones.
It’s hard on the family, said Mark. This job is like saying, “Hey, honey, I’m not coming home tonight—for the next sixteen to twenty years. And I’m going to work twenty-hour days every day.” Mark takes one phone call after another: “Can you get that off the truck? I need the weight on it! Quick, let’s go!” “I got to go downstairs and chop up those rounds of veal!”
The sun doesn’t so much as come up over the meat market as the blue-violet of the sky becomes less dense and a whiteness comes in from the east. Hundreds of pigeons and seagulls perch on the edge of the warehouses across the way as scraps, bones, and fat are carried outside. At the loading dock, workers move neat boxes of meat into the open mouths of trucks that bear the name MASTER PURVEYORS INC. PRIME CITY-DRESSED BEEF. A few hours after sunrise, Master Purveyors disgorges the last set of trucks into the South Bronx.
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THE slaughterhouse districts of Manhattan, the shochets for hire among the tenements, the neighborhoods studded with butcher-shops, have all disappeared. Supermarkets, with their own meat supply, have obliterated much of the independent meat trade. But much remains.
A handful of old-fashioned butchers still work in every borough of the city today. A whole lamb, two goats, and a rabbit, all skinned and naked-looking, hang in the window alongside pillowy lengths of tripe at Biancardi Meats on Arthur Avenue in the Bronx. “You want juicy? Like the last time?” asks the owner, Sal Biancardi, as a woman walks in. The parents and grandparents of many of his customers shopped at this store, buying meat from his own parents and grandparents.