BRATTLEBORO — If local, organic, grass-fed, humanely-raised meat seems like it costs more, it does, but there are ways to compensate: use less expensive cuts and smaller portions, say the meat guys at North End Butchers.
Kevin Hildreth, 36, and Chris Barry, 55, longtime former chefs, opened their very high-end meat, poultry, charcuterie, wine, cheese, bread, etc. shop about a year ago in Black Mountain Square, a little south of the Putney Road rotary.
Since then, they have expanded their services to include catering, preparing cold and hot foods - including whole meals, cooking classes and wine tastings. They've also offered caseloads of advice to their customers. Both said the response and the feedback to the business have far exceeded their expectations.
They say they spent more than $100,000 on new equipment, and a considerable sum beyond that on renovating the space. Their goal was to offer alternatives to what's already available in the area, using mostly local farmers and suppliers from a list of more than a dozen producers.
“People want to know where their food is coming from,” Barry said.
Their business plan, appealed to local money lenders and facilitators, including Brattleboro Savings and Loan, the Vermont Small Business Development Center and the Vermont Economic Development Authority. All of then, Hildreth and Barry said, assisted in developing and financing the shop.
The shop employs six full-time and three part-time people who, besides selling, assist with catering and preparations. They are led by Chef Krish Derrico.
North End Butchers now occupies about 2,600 square feet of space that houses meat cases, coolers containing light chicken stock, fancy soft drinks and beer, truffled butter, andouille sausage, potato salad, lavender jelly, kimchi, Castelvetrano Italian green olives and other similarly not-your-everyday items.
The deli case contains cheese, other imports including Serrano (Spanish ham), proscuitto and pancetta (both Italian hams, the latter an unsmoked variety) and several pates, including rabbit rillettes.
Wine racks hold selections from Australia and New Zealand and other medium-priced reds and whites, as well as much pricier French and Italian bottles. There's Prosecco, moderately priced Italian sparkling wine, and other champagnes, including Schramsberg, a favored American variety.
If you lose color in your face when you see that beef tenderloin medallions cost $24.99 a pound, and you had planned at last on making traditional Tournedos Rossini for a college reunion group of eight to prove you've grown up, Hildreth and Barry said you can change your plans and still eat well.
They suggested instead to buy three pounds of flat iron steak for $11.99 per pound, cut it into serving-size pieces (or leave it whole), sauté as you would the tenderloin and make a lovely pan sauce from Madeira or port or both, cream, and finish it off with a little black truffle butter or black truffle salt.
If you'd rather let them do the cooking, you can order complete dinners from $9.95 to $12.95. A recent Friday night dinner for $11.95 included sirloin tips, braised greens and roasted garlic mashed potatoes. Other menus might be quail stuffed with rabbit sausage for $5.95; or a pork sampler with something braised, a sausage selection and some crisp pork belly, under $12.95.
Or you could buy two whole, free-range chickens, roasted, for a lot less and have a great meal for eight.
To those used to supermarket meat counters, North End Butchers products cost a little more. But what you are paying for, said Hildreth and Berry, is fresh, locally raised and prepared products, or imported items that are often difficult to find in southern Vermont.
Hildreth and Barry met in New Hampshire at Walpole Grocery, where Hildreth had been the butcher, supplying meat to Burdick's, the high-end restaurant and chocolate emporium next door, for four years.
“It's where I developed relationships with local farmers,” said Hildreth, who grew up in Chester and said he's been working in kitchens since he was 13.
“I was a dishwasher at the Inn at Long Last [now the Fullerton Inn on Chester's Main Street],” he said.
After high school, he went to the New England Culinary Institute in Montpelier, and after graduation spent a couple of years at the Grafton Inn and several other local places. He worked in California's Napa Valley at the Auberge de Soleil.
Then he returned east to be near family and eventually went to the Walpole Grocery, where he became the head butcher. He lives in Westmoreland, N.H., with his wife, Cori, the pastry chef at Burdick's; their four-year-old daughter Anna; and a baby on the way.
Barry lives in Chesterfield, N.H. with his wife, Alisa, a photographer who owns Artisan Images, and is now getting a master's degree in school counseling at Keene State College, and their 11-year-old daughter, Nicole.
Barry said he grew up mostly in Andover, Mass., and also began working in kitchens at a young age. He went to the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and eventually worked as a chef at the Steak Out on Putney Road for 20 years.
Before that he worked at a Ruth's Chris Steak House in Atlanta, and once co-owned the Hollywood Café in Peterborough, N.H. He went to work for Hildreth at the grocery.
“One day,” Hildreth says, “I asked him if he'd like to open a butcher shop because I was looking for a partner.”
The shop is open 9 a.m. to 7 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday and 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Sunday. It's closed on Mondays. Its website can be found at northendbutchers.com.