Girl on the Block Page 14

  For my second day of work, I chose a geometric print two-piece short suit, a world away from my first white overcoat at the farm shop. I left my apartment feeling professional and stylish, but as I walked to work I discovered that the short suit was a bad idea. The shorts rode up my five-foot-eleven frame with every few steps. In the heat, I soon lost the jacket, and without it, the shorts looked awful. I bought an iced coffee on the way there and tied up my hair, but by the time I finally reached the air-conditioned offices in Shoreditch my fringe was plastered to my forehead and patches of sweat had soaked through my shirt. Will, who had come in early, took one look at me and burst out laughing. I laughed with him, wiping my sopping brow with the sleeve of the jacket. Apparently looking professional wasn’t working out so well for me.

  Will made us both coffee and we talked for a while. He told me that he had a wife and a young daughter, lived in south London, and not only did he work with Ollie and Simon, but he was running three other companies at the same time. This explained why he was always so frazzled, arriving at the office every morning with his cell phone already glued to his ear. It turned out that Will was kind, and I would quickly learn that disappointing him felt far worse than disappointing Ollie or Simon.

  We discussed our ideas for the company. Will’s goal for us was to become the leading name in the UK meat scene. The butchery had been born six years earlier as a meat delivery service and had built a loyal following and a reputation based on the high quality of the meat. Eventually they had accumulated the funds to open a physical store. I had yet to visit the shop, but Will described it as “magical, a proper, old-fashioned little place.” Profits didn’t yet justify a second storefront, but when a big department store had approached the three of them with a view to taking over the butcher’s counter in their food hall, they’d said yes, despite warnings. Will and Simon had heard from friends in the industry that this arrangement would be trouble, but they felt like it was too good an opportunity to pass up. From what I had been told, the department store took a large percentage of our profits, liked to control what was put into the counter, and was very difficult when it came to allowing us to develop our brand. A few months in, it was clear that the meat counter wasn’t even breaking even.

  As I saw it, the problem in the department store was twofold, and I shared my thoughts with Will. First, our approach was based on a “local butcher” mentality—small range, whole-carcass cutting, and British meats only. To be profitable in a big department store with a wealthy, international clientele, we would need to make a shift. The store’s customer base wanted expensive, fancy breeds of beef like Wagyu, French veal and poultry, and American steaks that were visually pleasing. Halal meat was huge, too; in the summer the store’s trade would skyrocket as Arab businessmen and their wives came over to London to escape the Middle Eastern heat. Second, people simply didn’t go to Oxford Street, one of the most famous shopping districts in the world, to buy a chicken for dinner, just as you wouldn’t go to Rodeo Drive for a pork chop.

  Will and Ollie were aware of these issues, and they had discussed changing their products. They knew that Wagyu beef in particular would be a total money spinner. Japanese Wagyu is the generic name for beef reared in Japan, with certain breeds beneath that name reared to strict guidelines to ensure that the beef produced is of a certain grade. Until they are seven months old, Wagyu cattle are kept on regular farms, before being sold at auction to so-called fattening farms. The free-range aspect goes out the window here, and for the remainder of their lives, these cattle are kept in indoor barns and fed on a diet of rice straw, along with silage (moist, stored grass) and concentrate (feed high in vitamins and nutrients) for another three years. Wagyu cattle live the ultimate pampered lifestyle and are massaged with stiff brushes to encourage blood circulation, as they spend most of their lives standing still. The resulting meat is revered and seen by many as the best steak in the world. The amount of marbling makes it almost completely white, with a texture that is soft and buttery. In Japan, Wagyu is eaten in thin slices because of how rich it is. Up until 2015, the UK, along with the rest of the world, had a ban on importing Wagyu thanks to strict Japanese breeding regulations, but as soon as this ban was lifted, the beef began pouring into London. Nowadays you can find it in many specialist butchers for up to two hundred pounds per kilo.

  In an effort to find a more ethical middle ground, Will and Ollie had looked into British-produced Wagyu beef and had discovered some being reared out west on the Welsh border. Unlike its Japanese counterpart, it was free-range, so would fit in with Simon’s ethical standards. This Welsh Wagyu was nothing like the original—once you let the cattle move around, that marbling simply disperses—but the beef was good, and more important, it was of Wagyu descent. They began selling it at 120 pounds per kilo. This helped profits, but items that might have made even more money, like French veal and halal meat, were what Simon had spent his career labeling “unethical,” and so were off limits.

  Will told me that Ollie and Simon were constantly butting heads over issues like these. The two just didn’t see eye to eye, which explained the frostiness between them when we’d first met. Ollie’s priority was growing the business, making money, and branching out, but Simon’s interests lay elsewhere with the various restaurants he developed menus for, his recently released cookbook, and his own reputation.

  Will talked excitedly about his own ideas for expanding the business. He wanted to open a hot food outlet next door to the north London shop, run butchery classes on the weekends, and increase the offering of branded rubs, sauces, and merchandise. He also told me about a food festival in the East Docklands of London every September that all three of them were instrumental in putting together. Famous chefs from across the globe would travel for the event, with four thousand people attending over two days. These were chefs I’d seen on television and had read about in Sophie’s newspaper haul, cooking for eager, drunk foodies who’d bought tickets at forty pounds apiece. Will promised that I’d get to work the event this year, and by work he meant get horrifically drunk and get paid for it. As the lead sponsors, we would be providing all the meat to be cooked.

  “There’s a lot of scope for you here,” he said, and he was right.

  Following our conversation, I set off for the shop. By the time I left the office I had missed the midmorning shade and the summer heat was at its highest. Typically, the best way to north London was by bus, but wanting to avoid being packed into close quarters with fifty other dripping passengers, I decided to walk, pulling my shorts down again every couple of steps, my jacket off and folded awkwardly in front of me.

  The shop itself was on a corner with plenty of traffic by car but very little on foot. I almost missed it the first time I walked by, as it was dwarfed by an office building and nestled next door to a cycle path and a secondhand shop—the kind that sold vintage Chanel for hundreds of pounds. It was, as described, completely beautiful, in a Victorian-era building with what looked like original tiles, large wooden-framed windows, and beautiful hanging baskets with ivy that cascaded down over the front steps. It was without a doubt the best-looking butcher shop I’d ever seen. Will, Ollie, and Simon were going for the charming vintage vibe, and they had achieved it perfectly.

  Inside the shop was just as wonderful: two small, old-fashioned open-topped counters and plush red cuts of meat resting on white marble. There were no customers inside, only a single butcher, stout and middle-aged, pushing meat through a band saw on the countertop at the back. Along the back wall, there was a rail hung with butchers’ hooks and cleavers and black-and-white photographs above an ornate marble sink. To the right was a small office where, above a bookcase crammed with fraying covers, a man bent over a desk scribbling something on paper and clicking a mouse violently.

  This shop was unlike the others I’d experienced. The Ginger Pig’s shops were modern and lacking any real character aside from the meat inside the cases—likewise with the farm shop and its stainless-steel
equipment and curved glass. By contrast, the north London store was authentic, like stepping back in time fifty years.

  The butcher behind the counter was named Sean. He was expecting me, as I’d called ahead to tell them I was coming. He didn’t look at me directly, but kept working and nodded slightly out of politeness when I introduced myself. He was busy, I was to understand, cutting quickly and giving only grunting answers to my questions. His face, though, was friendly and there was a gentle familiarity to his cockney accent. He spoke of Ollie with respect, yet still managed to swear five times in a sentence.

  I looked over the meat in the counter. Whereas the Ginger Pig’s beef was aged, this meat seemed even more so. They’d even dared to leave a trace of blackened crust around the bone on the cuts, removing only a little off the outside so that the hue of the beef itself was deepest red. The tickets in the counter were handwritten, with the breed of the cattle marked in someone’s best handwriting. Each perfect steak sat on the cool, white marble, with a small red puddle beneath it.

  Sean explained each of the cuts to me as though I were a novice, in spite of the email I’d sent around to the staff introducing myself and explaining my background. Clearly, he hadn’t read it.

  “I know,” I said, when he explained about the dry-aging process. “I’ve worked in butchery for a while.”

  “How long?” he asked.

  “Eight years almost.”

  His mouth turned downward and he nodded approvingly. I knew that he wouldn’t believe me until he saw evidence. He cut quickly and accurately, was clean and fast, and he really knew what he was doing. When I asked for a 250-gram steak, he cut it at 252.

  On the way out, product in hand, I texted Ollie a photograph of the paper bag that held the first steak I was to try from them. He replied almost instantly.

  First steak?

  Yup, rib eye, bought it from Sean.

  Nice . . . Bought??

  Yeah, wasn’t sure if I needed to pay.

  OK, next time on the house. Enjoy.

  It was a Dexter rib eye, aged fifty-five days. It was small, as Dexter cattle are, the eye of meat only four or five inches wide and the small clump of fat in the middle branching out into an intense, delicious yellow marbling. The smell of it was enough to make me drool—that cheesiness of anything over four weeks, with a slight stickiness on the outside that let me know this was going to be good. I pushed my thumb down into it when I finally got it home. Tim Wilson, in one of his books, had taught me that the mark of a good steak was that you could push a finger into the meat and it wouldn’t spring back toward you. Not only did the outline of my thumb stay in the Dexter rib eye for a moment, but it was still there as I salted it in the pan.

  It was way too hot for steak, but I didn’t care. I broke the rib eye apart, muscle by muscle, until the creamy lump of fat in the center was free from any meat. Picking it up with the prongs of my fork, I ate it whole, an explosion of nutty, creamy, buttery fat spilling from my tongue to my lips and around my teeth. I’m still unsure whether I’ve had a better steak to this day.

  This time I did make an effort with the sides. Creamed wild garlic mushrooms, beef-dripping chips, and a quick salsa verde—truly the best accompaniment to any steak, any time of year. I make mine with capers, parsley, garlic, anchovies, olive oil, and Dijon mustard in equal amounts, blitzed together in a food processor. But once again my appetite got the better of me and I found that I’d finished the steak before even touching the other bits.

  I was convinced that this was it: this job would be the making of me. The shop was the absolute pinnacle of what I’d seen in butchery. And despite the team’s quirks, everything about what they did impressed me, from Simon’s well-regarded cookbooks to the steak I’d bought that day. This was a job with real responsibility, and I was going to be part of a managerial team making real decisions. Gone were the days of taking abuse behind a counter. I was a marketing manager now, and my opinion mattered.

  A few days later, I visited the meat counter at Oxford Street. Will’s words about the problems there echoed in my head, and I was determined to find a solution. Ollie had asked me if I’d be willing to work there a few Saturdays a month, just to even out their numbers and to “put a fresh pair of eyes to it,” as he’d said, and I’d agreed. The Oxford Street counter itself was huge, about the size of the one in the farm shop, pushed against the very back wall of the food hall behind the delicatessen, cheese counter, and organic health stall. The seafood counter was next to us, with a fresh and stunning array of whole fish, octopus, and squid. Our counter in comparison looked as though it hadn’t been cleaned in days. The counter itself was far too big for our purposes—instead of containing an enticing assortment of meat piled high, the cuts were spread out to fill the space, with some limp kale placed pathetically between each cut for garnish. The American beef was by far the best-looking product in the case, next to a half-hearted barbecue display with some blackened burgers and dried-out kebabs. All of the meat—the beef, the pork, the lamb, the chicken—looked as though it was bordering on its sell-by date. If I had been a customer, there was no way that I would have bought anything there.

  I’d been introduced to the manager, David, via email, and he seemed friendly. The previous manager had been sacked recently, after a rather unfortunate yet comical incident involving a famous actor. The ex-manager in question, let’s call him Jimmy, was reportedly obsessed with celebrities and social media. For him the fancy department store was a playground, and if by chance he detected someone famous wandering the food hall on their day off, he would scurry to the back of the butchery, grab his meat cleaver, and run after them insisting that they pose with him for a selfie holding the cleaver itself (which was double ended). This was for the most part well-received, but there was one instance, shortly before I came on board, that proved his downfall. After spotting a well-known British thespian in the food court, Jimmy ran out after him shouting. The actor clearly didn’t want to be recognized, having had enough of people demanding he repeat his famous line about blowing “the bloody doors off!” But Jimmy couldn’t take a hint and chased the actor around the food hall with the cleaver until he finally gave in. The picture is somewhere on social media, and it is wonderful: the dread in the actor’s eyes, Jimmy’s toothless grin, and the cleaver in between them. A week later Jimmy received a formal warning from the department store’s management, and soon after was no longer one of our employees.

  David recognized me straightaway and ushered me back behind the counter, through the plastic divider, and into the back room. He was alone, yet he failed to keep any eye on the counter for potential customers, with his full attention on me. He walked me through the counter describing the products, though I couldn’t believe that this man had let any of it get put in. When I questioned him on the shelf life of several cuts on the brink of rotting, he immediately brushed it off as a “delivery problem.” He also described a frustrating and complicated hierarchy within the department store. We had to answer to the floor managers, who would in turn answer to the department managers, who would then answer to someone else, and so on and so forth. In addition, to do something as simple as go to the toilet, food hall staff had to cross to the other side of the store and then go down two floors to the staff entrance. The entrance was manned by security guards and anti-theft detectors, and you were searched on the way in and on the way out. No coats, no bags, no phones were to be taken to the shop floor, and you couldn’t enter or exit the store through the customer-facing doors at any time, or else security would follow you out to drag you back in or take down your name and ID number.

  In the half hour I spent speaking with David, not one customer even came close to the counter, never mind buying anything from us. When he took me downstairs to tour the basement fridges, each one, with huge industrial-size fans sounding like a jet engine and shelving units lining the walls, was almost empty. There was no pork to break down, no lamb, only some foreribs aging in the cold and stacks and sta
cks of USDA beef in vacuum-packed bags. This explained the lack of fresh meat in the counter. There was one delivery a week of pork and lamb, with a top up by one of Ollie’s drivers from the wholesale company every Monday morning.

  David noted my reaction. “It’s pretty clear that we’re an afterthought. It’s all just to get the name out there. Online and the shop get the good stuff.”

  I hated working there with a passion. I hated the lack of fresh meat. I hated the way that the few snobby customers who approached the counter spoke to me differently after hearing my Northern accent. I hated being under the constant watchful eye of the floor manager, who was perhaps the most detestable man I’d ever met and who liked to bully the people below him when he was on shift. I hated looking like crap next to the beauties who worked at the perfume and makeup counters and in Dior and Chanel and Tom Ford. But what I hated most was that when I came in for a late shift, David had always left me a list as long as my arm of things that needed to be done, things that he should have done himself hours before. And when I came in for a morning shift, the counter had always been left in such a disgusting disarray that I had to trim almost everything, rearrange the display from start to finish, and often break down whole lambs and pigs—prep that should have been done days earlier. I learned quickly that nice David could be not-so-nice. He was manipulative and bad-mouthed his colleagues behind their backs. I discovered that he wasn’t a butcher at all, but someone who used to sell televisions and who had fancied a career change. He acted as though he was overworked, yet barely did anything, and spent much of his time trying to suck up to Ollie. Ollie, I soon found out, hated him.

  The only staff who ever spoke to me, despite numerous conversational attempts, were the fishmongers in the stall next to mine. We would sometimes go for drinks after work or share a sandwich in the back room instead of trekking to the staff room to eat. I appreciated them, each one young-ish with a childish humor and a kindness that could have only come from a decent upbringing with younger sisters. Their constant jokes and ability to understand when I needed cover to run to the toilet was the only thing that kept me going.