By Vegas Tenold
Savarese, the last in his family’s line of butchers, barely has time to explain that the shop has been in his family for 80 years, before he ducks into the storage room and returns with the leg of an animal.
A holiday week like this one, roughly 8,000 pounds of meat will arrive at Michael’s Prime Meats on Nostrand Avenue in Flatbush – the equivalent of 10 fully grown cows. About 6,000 pounds will leave, cut, trimmed and neatly rapped in wax paper.
Michael’s Meats is crowded. The small space in front of the counter is packed with customers. Behind the counter, a handful of workers rush to cut, slice and wrap. It is fast and, owing to a large bone saw in the back, loud.
“The week leading up to Thanksgiving is by far the busiest for any butcher,” Savarese says. “A lot of people buy turkey but they really buy all sorts of meat.”
He explains that Michael’s Meats is one of dwindling number of traditional butcher shops left in New York, before he interrupts himself again and vanishes into the throng of workers and customers filling the tiny space. He comes back holding an old family photograph. He points to his dad as a young child, to his grandfather, and on the far left to a young girl who, he says, is the only one in the picture still alive. “That’s my godmother,” he says. “She’s 100 years old. Let me show you the storage room.”
Savarese is middle-aged. He has grey hair under his baseball hat and a short cropped grey beard. His face is open and friendly and he engages with his customers in a way that makes it look like he’s known them all for years.
The walls in the storage room are lined, floor-to-ceiling, with shelves filled with meat. Three men with knives sit in the center of the room working the blades through various animal parts. From the ceiling hang giant chunks of beef that Savarese describes as “neck.” With a loud slap he pushes the neck along a rail that runs along the ceiling throughout the shop.
“This is what we get,” he says, inspecting the slab of meat in the bright light outside the storage room. “This is what arrives and then we cut it up for our customers. The best meat you can get. We get customers who have come here for years. One woman drives up here all the way from Virginia, then she turns back and goes home.” He gives the slab another push, sending it careening back into the storage room to the men with the knives.
Most meat shops get their meats pre-cut from large abattoirs. It’s cheaper and faster. Michael’s cuts the carcasses themselves. Doing things the way Savarese’s family has done it for 80 years is not only time consuming, but harder than it needs to be. But it makes for better meat, Savarese says.
He is the only one left in his family who’s a butcher. His son is training to be an executive and Savarese says he would never let him touch a knife. “It’s hard work,” he says. “In the morning my bones make more noise than the alarm.”
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