We’re opening up a third location–this time, a butcher shop on Grand Ave in St. Paul. Our Cheesemonger-In-Chief will be chronicling the adventure here on the blog. Look for our shop in June!
Of course, our new butcher shop will have sandwiches. Of course! It's one of our favorite things to champion at the Cheese Shops. But because the Meat Shop is just a 5-minute walk from our cheese shop on Grand Ave, we knew the Meat Shop sandwiches would have to be their own thing--a brand new army of lunchtime goodies.
I love a great sandwich, but I'm consistently frustrated by the choices here in the Twin Cities. I never seem to find exactly what I'm craving. So when we started messing around with the sandwich menu for the Meat Shop, my first inclination was towards the killer pastrami sandwich I've been dreaming of. It’s a bit of an obsession and really difficult to get right. But I figured a new butcher shop would be the perfect excuse to give it a shot!
Our team members are big fans of composed sandwiches, as opposed to the Subway-like choose-your-own-adventure style. On a composed sandwich, each ingredient is purposeful and doesn't compete with the rest of its friends in between the bread. We've been working for months now on a set of composed sandwiches--including that fabled pastrami--that will wow our Meat Shop patrons.
As of this blog post, we are still working on the pastrami. And if it isn’t exactly right by the time we open, then we’ll just have to open without it. But that's because recipe testing for every aspect of this new business has been exhaustive. Recipe testing is a funny thing because it's like working in a vacuum. We know what we think is delicious and we just have to hope that our customers will enjoy what we come up with. In the past, our team has obsessed over a detail at one of our shops for hours, only to realize that the idea wasn’t quite right in the first place. To combat this, I’ve eaten countless iterations of sandwiches, cookies, spice rubs, marinades, and more. Tough work, I know. And this testing doesn’t even include the 15 different NY Strips our team has consumed from every meat counter in town. But I'm hoping this attention to detail will equal a menu that satisfies some of the other latent sandwich cravings floating around the Twin Cities and keep our customers coming back for a sandwich they can count on.
Want a preview of the menu? See it here >>
--Benjamin Roberts, Cheesemonger-In-Chief