When I was a kid, Japanese steakhouses were the most popular way to see your food prepared from scratch.  The chefs cooked the food at your table—lighting onion flowers on fire, performing knife tricks with filet mignon, flipping shrimp for diners to catch in their mouths.  But Japanese steakhouse chefs are no longer the rock stars of the preparing-dinner-before-your-eyes faction of restaurants.  Running with the new consumer trend of tracking food to table, artisan butchers are showing diners where their meat really comes from, in front of and behind the scenes, and becoming culinary celebrities in the process. 

Before the 1960’s, most restaurants and hotels had an in-house butcher that would artfully prepare all of their meats. Other butchers ran their own stand-alone butcher shops. This type of butcher was replaced quickly with cheaper alternatives--mostly huge packing plants in the Midwest.  The assembly line made a lot of people skilled at cutting a certain cut of meat, but no one could butcher a whole animal.  These shops only produced a few easy cuts, leaving the skilled butcher out of his or her specialty market.  

The popularity of butchers increased more recently with the need for “off” cuts or the kind of cuts not found in everyday grocery stores.  Most chefs are taught how to butcher an animal properly in culinary school. 

Today, a butchery revolution is happening in major urban centers like New York and San Francisco.  Old school butchers are surprised that these places are the home to the renewal of old skills, since so much of artisan butchery requires the butcher to have a relationship to the farm where the animal was raised.  In rural areas, artisanal butchery is still a rarity.   

Perhaps cities being the centerpieces of the renewal of butchery really isn’t so surprising.  Because the return to traditional butchery really isn’t that traditional.  Cities have always been the instigators of foodie trends--charcuterie, specialty cocktails, descriptions of organic farm-raised chickens on the menus.  Because of that history, the instigation of a new relationship between meat and butchery happening in major cities, despite a lack of proximity to farms, isn’t that surprising.

But the way butchers are being received is.  In all the pictures I’ve seen, most of the butchers have been tattooed, their sleeves rolled up, their hair slicked back. They carry big knives and wear blood-spattered aprons.  Butchery has become performance art. This is a strange turn of events in the move for consumers to be more connected to their food--that connection is now entertainment.  

For example, in shops being dubbed “boutique” butcher shops, butchers have organized cutting demonstrations, parsing up the animal in front of their customers.  They serve cocktails and little sausages, sort of like a wine tasting with blood. At a local bar, a San Francisco butcher cooks up corn dogs and pulled pork sliders as his customers watch him butcher a pig. Still others want to learn to break down the animal themselves.  At San Francisco’s 4505 Meats, customers can learn to break down a 90-pound pig for $75.  

In huge cities like New York and San Francisco, there’s little chance to get right up close to where your food is produced.  But, thanks to artisanal butcheries, there doesn’t seem to be a more visceral way to understand the meat you eat than having it broken down right in front of your eyes.