Pat LaFrieda - MEAT: Everything You Need to Know

Pat Sr., Pat Jr., and Mark

Its Saturday around midnight and Im dressed in a suit, sitting in the back of a Lincoln Town Car with my wife, Jennifer, coming home from a fund-raiser for our sons school, when my cell phone rings. Its the organizer of an enormous, meat-heavy food event that is taking place in Prospect Park in Brooklyn. Its the first of the two-day event and the organizer is telling me that a good number of the vendors have run out of meat. There was such a shortage of food that earlier in the day riots broke out. Two people got stabbed in the hand with skewers over who would get the last chicken breast. So now the organizer is with the New York Police Department, who were brought in because of the fighting. The police are refusing to open the event the next day unless the event organizers can guarantee there will be enough food. Which is why they are calling me: Im a butcher.

I run a businessalong with my father (also Pat LaFrieda) and my cousin, Mark Pastorethat my great-grandfather put in motion almost one hundred years ago. Back then we were one of many small butchers in Greenwich Village, many Italian American like us, and all of them vying for their little piece of the pie. Twenty or thirty small restaurants in and around the neighborhoodthat was our piece. Today, we supply more than 1,200 restaurants from New York to Las Vegas with the best meat in America: dry-aged steaks, milk-fed veal, Colorado lamb, and custom chopped meat blends.

My men and I have been busy all week getting meat ready for our customers participating in this event. But everyone ordered short. They braced for five thousand or ten thousand people over the course of the weekend, but instead, they got hit with thirty thousand on the first day. Now the NYPD is refusing to let the show go on unless LaFrieda Meats will guarantee that there will be food.

Im a guy who likes to make the impossible happen. In fact, even though its interrupting my evening, theres a part of me that loves a call like this. I look at it as a challenge. Can you help? Can you deliver? Can you and your company operate in case of emergency in ways that nobody else can? We supplied our customers when the blackout happened in 2003 and we did it again when Hurricane Sandy hit. The organizer has me on speakerphone so the police will know what my answer is, and if its no, the event will be canceled. I tell them I can do it.

Our plant is open through the night six days a week. We are closed only from Saturday afternoon until Sunday evening, and thats where I am now: right in the middle of that time. So after dropping my wife at home, on my way to the plant I call up a couple of my regular guys who meet me there, and together we work through the night cutting and packing beef ribs, St. Louis ribs, skirt steaks and hanger steaks, some chicken items, and all kinds of meats for burgers. In addition to supplying their vendors, Im also serving a whole 875-pound steerthis was plannedand my guys have been at the festival cooking since early that morning, but the festival organizers have now asked me to open a burger stand for which I must make four thousand 8-ounce patties myself. By 8:00 a.m., Ive packed my Escalade to the roof with meat and am headed to Brooklyn with another packed truck behind me.

My guys and I have barely set up in Prospect Park when the festival-goers start pouring in. We split our burgers in half and make eight thousand portions. The steer is another two thousand portions. Still, by 6:00 p.m. we dont have a bite of food left. But the day is over and the crowd is happy.

At the end of the day, Mark and I are sitting back to back, leaning against each other on top of a picnic table. Were both exhausted. Hes worked all day serving burgers, and I have blisters on my hands from slicing two thousand portions of steer as quickly as I did. Were talking about the day, and how great the event turned out. He laughs that were the only ones who didnt make any money, and its true. It costs a lot to get your guys to work on a Saturday night at the last minute. But thats not what this day was about for me. It was about being needed and being able to come through against all odds. It was the perfect execution of a Doomsday plan and it was definitely one of the best days of work Ive ever had.

I know. Its only meat. Im not saving the world. But people need to eat. And getting meat to people is my business. This is what I do. Being a butcher in New York Citythis is who I am.

Top left to right: My grandfather Pat LaFrieda the first; my grandfather, my great-uncles Tom and Frank, my father; my great-uncle Lou; my great-uncle Lou, his wife, and two apprentice butchers; my father in the 70s; Mark, my father, and me; my aunt Lisa; our delivery truck in the 90s.

Introduction

M y father never wanted me to be a butcher.

When I was growing up, he had a restaurant supply butcher shop in a 1,500-square-foot space on the corner of Bleecker and West 10th Streets, in Greenwich Village. It was a business that he ran with his father, the first Pat LaFrieda. My grandfather Pat and his older brother Lou learned the trade from my great-grandfather Anthony LaFrieda, who had opened a retail butcher shop in Brooklyn in 1922, thirteen years after he and his son Lou landed on Ellis Island from Naples, Italy. During a meat workers strike that made it difficult for restaurants to get meat in New York City, the two boys opened their own shop, the original LaFrieda Meats, in a sawdust-covered space on 14th Street, in the 14th Street Meat Market (todays Meatpacking District), a chaotic, congested congregation of over 250 meat purveyors in an oddly shaped, 44-acre corner on the far west side of lower Manhattan. The area was bordered by 14th Street to the north and extended seven blocks south, where guys split lambs heads in their shops on pretty cobblestoned streets right next to Village brownstones as far down as Jane Street.