The shop
A butcher is a counter first, and ours comes with a dry-ageing cabinet, a back room that makes sausages from six, a Christmas book kept to the day, a summer of barbecue boxes and a van that is at twenty restaurant doors before the shop opens. Each has a page with what it costs and how it works.
Twenty-five cuts on the counter on a normal day, all priced per kilo on the ticket and on this website: beef from three farms in the Vale and Monmouthshire, lamb from above Cowbridge, pork from Carmarthenshire, free-range chicken and duck from near Usk. Cut to order, weighed in front of you, wrapped in paper.
Beef mince £11.
Whole sirloins and fore ribs from the three beef farms hang on the bone in the dry-ageing cabinet in the shop window for thirty-five days before they are cut. The crust comes off, the flavour stays. Steaks cut to the thickness you ask for; rib of beef by the bone; a côte de boeuf for two.
Sirloin £32 a kilo, ribeye £34, rump £24, fillet £52, rib of beef on the bone £28.
Eight sausages made here every morning in natural casings: the Pontcanna pork, Glamorgan with leek and Caerphilly, Cumberland, pork and apple, a Welsh lamb merguez, a beef and ale, a chipolata and a gluten-free. Burgers pressed by hand from dry-aged trim and chuck. Faggots on Thursdays, pies on Fridays.
Sausages £9.
The Christmas book opens on the first of October and closes on the fifteenth of December, and this website says which from the clock. Free-range bronze turkeys from a farm near Usk at £13.50 a kilo, turkey crowns, geese, three-bird roasts, ribs of beef from the cabinet, gammons we cure, pigs in blankets, stuffing and the stock bones. A £20 deposit; collection on the twenty-third or twenty-fourth.
Bronze turkey £13.
Three boxes from May to September: the Four at £38, the Eight at £68, the Feast for sixteen at £125. Hand-pressed burgers, the Pontcanna and merguez sausages, chicken thighs in our own marinade, lamb kofta, a rack of ribs in the larger boxes, and a card with the cooking order. Ordered by Friday noon for a Saturday; delivered within four miles.
The Four £38, the Eight £68, the Feast (sixteen) £125.
About twenty kitchens in Cardiff and the Vale get the van before nine: dry-aged sirloin and rib, Welsh lamb, pork, our sausages and burgers, chickens, bones and stock. Same farms as the counter, cut to spec, a price list we send on request, a £150 minimum, orders by text or email by six the evening before, thirty-day accounts after three months.
Trade prices about fifteen per cent under the counter list, sent as a sheet on request.
Where it comes from
PGI Welsh Beef from two farms in the Vale of Glamorgan and one in Monmouthshire, grass-fed herds of Welsh Black and Hereford crosses, finished slowly. Huw buys by the whole animal from the same three families his father bought from, and the farm name is on the ticket.
Welsh lamb from two farms above Cowbridge, one of them Beca's family's: spring lamb from May, hogget through the winter for the people who know the difference. Legs, shoulders, racks and chops; the necks and breasts go cheap to the kitchens that use them.
Outdoor-bred pigs from a single herd in Carmarthenshire, slow-grown and fat enough to make a sausage worth eating. The belly, the loin and the shoulder on the counter; the rest cured here into the dry-cured bacon and the Christmas gammons.
Free-range chickens and ducks from a unit near Usk that we have walked round, and the bronze turkeys for Christmas from the same family. Slower-grown, bigger-breasted, with a proper skin that crisps. Jointed, spatchcocked or whole, whichever you ask.
Pick the cut, say the weight, and the order page tells you the price before you ring. In by Friday noon and the joint is cut, wrapped and under your name on Saturday morning. Delivery within four miles on Tuesday, Thursday and Friday.
