While I can’t take the credit, not long after I posted that Porter Road Butcher was hunting for help to run their East Nashville retail operation at 501 Gallatin Ave., co-founder Chris Carter sent me a message that they were fully staffed and ready to open up again. When we spoke prior to the plea for applicants, Carter was clearly frustrated by the state of the labor market.
“We literally can’t get people,” he bemoaned. “I don’t ever want to be an ‘industry voice,’ because I just don’t have the bandwidth for it, but it’s been almost impossible to hire somebody. We hire people for manager positions, and they don’t show up. References aren’t checking out. Finding highly skilled butchers and training them is difficult.”
That’s not to say that Porter Road doesn’t have trained butchers. In fact, they have hired and trained some of the best meat cutters that now work in other butcher shops and restaurants all over town, a fact that Carter is proud of.
“So many great people have come through here and gone on to do something on their own," he says. "I think it’s great!”
Porter Road does have about a dozen skilled butchers processing their products. They’re just in Kentucky working at the company’s plant, which is the base of their innovative online mail-order delivery service. So Carter and his partner James Peisker have decided to pivot with their retail model.
“We’ve simplified how the shop operates,” Carter explains. “When we built our first cold room to cut meat in 2011, it was 12 feet by 12 feet. Now we have this huge facility in Kentucky where we still cut meat in house; it’s just two hours away.”
Now that the shop has reopened, Porter Road will operate under a new model that depends much more on prepackaged meat shipped to the store from their processing facility. It will still be the same pasture-raised dry-aged beef that they’ve always sold, along with farm-raised pork and chicken — and Carter can tell you exactly where it came from, who raised it and how it was treated.
Visitors to the Gallatin Pike shop will encounter a new brand of customer service. Retail general manager Jeffrey Rhodes describes the new experience:
“We’re going to be more retail-focused and getting away from custom cutting," he says. "Basically, we’re taking the online model direct-to-consumer. We’ll be bringing in fresh meat cut by our butchers in Kentucky already packaged so that we can focus on the customers coming in the door and giving them a positive retail experience.”
There will still be meat in the retail case and the opportunity to trim a desired piece of meat to size, but the availability of even more cuts will be greatly improved. While some customers loved seeing a tattooed butcher wielding a scimitar breaking down a primal into steaks, more often than not, there was a danger of choice paralysis when you approached the counter and saw all those possibilities facing you from inside the case. Or even more frustrating, because Porter Road focused on whole-animal butchery, the specific cut you might have been looking for might not be available when you wanted it.
There are only so many ribeyes that can come out of a cow, and once they’re gone, you would have to wait for the next side to arrive to get one. That’s where the butchers really showed off their genius by offering potential substitutions to customers.
I’ve discovered so many interesting and delicious beef options thanks to Porter Road occasionally being out of stock of what I thought I wanted. Instead, employees would ask a series of questions to find out what I was looking to do: “Are you looking to cook indoors or outside? Do you want to grill it, smoke it, braise it? How many people are you looking to feed?”
The answers to these questions never failed to point me toward what turned out to be a superior solution to what I was hoping to cook. I discovered the joy of little-known butcher cuts that don’t usually show up in the box meat counters of grocery stores. Picanha, teres major, chuck eye, bavette, tri-tip — these have all become important parts of my cooking repertoire thanks to Porter Road.
So basically, the retail butcher shop will start the customer service process with those questions now. If your heart is set on a filet or a double-cut pork chop for dinner, the odds are better than ever that they will have some in stock thanks to regular shipments from the Kentucky facility. They’ll be the same quality as what they would have cut for you previously or what you would get through the online service, and they are packaged in airtight cryo that you can drop straight into an immersion circulator to save you a step of sous vide if that’s your “bag,” heh.
Spotted Trotter charcuterie made using Porter Road meats
Even better when compared to their mail-order business, there are no order minimums or shipping fees to pick up at the butcher shop. They’ll also offer a wide variety of some of their processed products at the store, including sausages, custom meat grind blends, jerky, charcuterie, bone broths and even bones to make your own stock. You can also expect an assortment of delicious cheeses from The Bloomy Rind.
Carter and his team are dedicated to training their staff to share their knowledge to make more informed customers.
“We want to engage customers, “says Rhodes. “We want to cut out the intimidation and point them in the right direction to cuts that work for what they want to do. We can also give cooking advice. So far, people are pretty excited about the changes!”
Carter wants to assure customers that the company remains committed to how they’ve always done business.
“We’ve never opened a box of meat in twelve years, and we can provide 100% traceability of all of our products,” he promises. “It’s frustrating because when we started out, we all could afford to live in the neighborhood and walk to work. We still want people to have a place to go to find great product.”
Another way they are striving to offer that option for customers is by expanding their wholesale distribution to grocery stores like The Turnip Truck, where shoppers can find products like Porter Road’s sausage, bacon and bone broth.
“Pushing grocery store distribution helps shoppers have access to incredible products that are better for you, so getting on those shelves is a big focus,” Carter says.
The diversification of distribution also helps Porter Road maximize their whole-animal utilization by allowing them to find places to sell their ground meat products.
“We are going to grow sustainably, not just growth for growth’s sake,” vows Carter. “It’s what makes sense. Our goal is to be 1 percent of the $1 billion meat industry while still staying focused on taking care of the farmers and doing things the right way.”
This new butcher shop model might be another important step on the way to Porter Road’s ultimate success.
Porter Road Butcher is again open at 501 Gallatin Road with new hours Tuesday-Saturday, 10 a.m. until 6 p.m.
