Over the last couple of years and more seriously over the last several months we’ve tried to peg down–for lack of a better term–our identity.  It’s hard to put into words, but this is who we are.   This is why The Meat Hook can be an enduring part of the ever-changing frontier of food in New York.

Please read on.  You’ll realize you’re much more a part of this than you ever thought.  Because, frankly, the most important part of all of this is the customer.  Which is just the way we like it.

What is the Meat Hook, exactly?

Well, we’re a lot of things but, at our core, we are now what we were the day we opened the shop doors for the first time: three best friends jumping into the void and trying to figure out not what a butcher shop was but what a butcher shop could be.

What we came up with was the idea that a butcher shop could sell local, properly raised meat from small family farms but without all the piety of the farmers market and without all the preciousness of boutique restaurants who served that meat to the dining elite. Good meat, we decided, could be fun. Everyone, it seemed, had a fancy påte with a pedigree but we wondered if there wasn’t a bigger market for a hot dog you could feel good about feeding your kids? As it turns out we now make both fancy terrines and grass-fed hot dogs but the hot dogs outsell charcuterie twenty to one.

The Meat Hook is a pretty strange animal, even in the context of a city full of strange animals. It is a chimera that is equal parts NYC restaurant culture, psychedelic rock band and old-school butcher shop. Its structure is a democracy, a dictatorship and pure anarchy depending on the hour of the day and the only law is that whoever has the best idea at the time is in charge.

The Meat Hook Mission

The existential question of what we will do with our lives is a pretty hard one to answer. Luckily, through a series of happy accidents the three of us ended up with the unlikely solution of owning a butcher shop. While we weren’t exactly sure how we were going to pull off opening this shop we did know what we wanted it to be: fun, unpretentious, accessible and most importantly, financial sustainable.

As unromantic as that last bit sounds, without making money all the good feelings and high moral ideals in the world will not save you. At the Meat Hook we are really in the business of paying our farmers. To that end we strive each and every day to simply Do It Right. From farm visits to pick our animals for the next month’s slaughter to chatting up regulars at the counter; everything we do is for the purpose of properly representing our farmer’s hard work, deep knowledge and quality animals. We never forget that without them we’re just another bunch of jerks selling pork chops.

The Food Dollar Diagram

The best way to understand the difference between spending your money at our shop or the supermarket is to look at how much of every dollar you spend ends up in the hands of the farmer who raises your meat.

When you buy a family pack of steaks at your neighborhood chain store about 11 cents of each dollar you spend goes to the farmer. Where does the rest go? Multi-national corporations, out-of-state distributors, giant packing houses and all manner of middle men in the complex supply chain that bring the package of meat in your hands thousands of miles from where it was raised.

At the Meat Hook 32 cents of every dollar (or roughly 300% more) goes directly to our farmers giving them a financial incentive to continue properly raising local animals on pasture. Where does the rest go? Small, local, family-owned slaughterhouses, our local trucking companies that bring the animals from slaughter to our door and to pay our rent, taxes and the people who make the Meat Hook worth shopping at. The important thing here is that all of this dollar (well, except the part that goes to pay federal taxes) stays in our local economy, creating more and better jobs that, hopefully, end up as more people who want to buy local meat.

What Can I Get at The Meat Hook?

EVERYTHING!

We specialize in locally produced Beef, Pork, Lamb and Poultry and when you come in the shop about 99% of what is in the cases at any given time is just that. That said, we are also a full-service shop and we can get you pretty much anything you might want from semi-boneless quail to a whole pig and everything in between. If we cannot source it for you from local farms we will tell you where it’s coming from and how it was raised and let you, our customer, decide.

Please note that special orders often need at least 2-3 working days notice so we can track down what you’re looking for and order it.