The name Bare Bones Butcher doesn’t describe the building or the furnishings of this impressive new butcher shop situated across the street from Fifty First Kitchen & Bar at 906 51st Ave. N. in the Nations. Far from sparse, the attractive shop features an impressive design scheme and a modern ambiance. Decorated in cool tones with accent tile, it is pretty darned far from “bare bones.”
Since it opened only a couple of weeks ago, the meat cases are a little sparse, and the grocery and grab-and- go offerings are still limited, but what is there is already impressive. Owners Wesley Adams and Patrick Davidson met when they were working for Porter Road Butcher, the East Nashville shop that made butchery cool in Nashville. Like their former bosses, Adams and Davidson are committed to whole-animal butchery, so that’s where the name Bare Bones actually comes from.
PRB patrons took awhile to figure out that a side of beef contains only about 14 ribeyes, five sirloins and four filet mignons, so the specific cut you're looking may not be available when you visit a whole animal butcher. At Bare Bones, they are happy to offer alternative cuts and cooking suggestions if they happen to be out of your original choice.
The easy answer would be just to sell the popular cuts and grind the rest of the cow into hamburger, but that is not the best way to utilize the animal or to maximize revenue from a whole animal. To better take advantage of the whole cows and pigs (and soon lambs and chickens) that Bare Bones takes in from partners like Bear Creek, Bells Bend and Palmer farms, Bare Bones plans ahead to create value-added products for sale.
Currently, the shop is open Wednesday-Sunday so the team can receive animals on Monday and spend Tuesday working with their knives to break down their products. All their beef gets at least a couple of weeks of dry aging to allow the meat to develop more complex flavors and textures, so even the ground beef has an extra bit of lovely funkiness to it. Other cuts are processed into pork or beef bacon and sausages like beef hot links, bratwursts and a delicious garlic-and-fennel sausage. They do also sell bulk 80/20 ground beef and maple breakfast sausage, as well as finished products like pork ragu, beef chili (sans beans, thank you very much!) and beef stock made from the bones.
Perhaps the most interesting part of what they do at Bare Bones is actually serving a tight menu of prepared foods that you can enjoy for lunch or dinner while you shop and enjoy a cold beer from their taps. The braised greens and chili that you can buy by the quart shows up on the menu as side dishes, or in the case of the greens, as a topping on a remarkable roast pork sandwich. The ground beef is used to make a prototypical double-pattied burger topped with American cheese, pickles, onions, mustard and mayo. It stands up against just about every other burger in town, including some that cost closer to a Jackson than a Hamilton. Don’t sleep on those beef-fat-fried Yukon Gold potatoes, either. They are an excellent accompaniment to just about everything on the menu, plus you can also buy some of that lard and beef tallow to take home to up your own fryer game.
The grocery section of the shop is still growing, but it does offer some of the basics that you might need to whip up a last minute meal or to top off a burger made with Bare Bones beef. While all the employees are cross-trained to work the register, cut meat or cook in the kitchen, their true joy is wielding the knives. Ask them to trim your meat for your specific planned use, like thinly sliced roast beef for sandwiches or cubed meat for stews or stir fry. They love to do it, and trust me, they’re probably better equipped to do it than you are! If you are looking for a special cut and want to make sure that they’ll have it for you, show up on Wednesday when they first open or call them to order it in advance.
There are apparently a few similar butcher shop projects in various stages of development around town, but this latest addition is certainly a welcome one. The more the merrier!
Bare Bones Butcher
906 51st Ave N.
Nashville, TN 37209
615-730-9808
