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Rare-Breed Meats in New York Restaurants
From the archives: October 01, 2009
If you think a pork chop is just a pork chop, a steak, just a steak, you haven’t been dining at the right restaurants. These days, the pedigree of your chop is as important as the terroir of your wine, and we’ve uncovered five restaurants serving some of the rarest of the rare breeds. Lucky for you, they are also some of the tastiest. (Photo: Heritage Foods USA)
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Vinegar Hill House
Read Reviews72 Hudson Ave., Brooklyn, NY 11201 (map)
Though justly famous for its chicken, this out of the way Brooklyn eatery serves a truly stupendous pork chop, thanks to the Red Wattle hogs raised at Sorrel Farm in Kansas. Red Wattle meat has been called earthy, vegetal and herbaceous, but what it really is, is porky: It tastes like pig and makes commodity chops seem like tofu in comparison.
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Fatty Crab
Read Reviews
643 Hudson St, New York, NY 10014 (map)
The difference between commodity and heritage animals is never more obvious than with chicken. The former have engorged breasts, diminished flavor and live horrific lives, whereas heritage animals, like the Cornish chicken served at Fatty Crab, have dark, firm meat that's almost like steak. Get it soon, though, as Cornish chickens are only available for a few months out of the year.
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Union Square Cafe
Read Reviews21 E 16th St, New York, NY 10003 (map)
Like its celebrated sister Gramercy Tavern, the Union Square Cafe is committed to using small farm produce, which is one reason why the place reaches all the way out to the Ozark Mountains in southern Missouri, where Newman Farms produces its Berkshire pork for USC's roasts and chops. Unlike the Red Wattle, the Berkshire breed doesn't have an especially powerful taste; rather, this is a big pig bred for its luscious, fatty meat and round, buttery flavor.
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Il Buco
Read Reviews47 Bond St, New York, NY 10012 (map)
Under chef Ignacio Mattos, this lovely rustic Italian restaurant has really embraced the aesthetic of crudely magnificent meat. When you take a bite, you can almost feel the sun on your face and the snorts of the wild boars on the hill. Mattos gets his pork from Virginia pig farmer Bev Eggleston, whose Ossabaw hogs are the same breed as the legendary Iberico or "black foot" pigs of Spain. Particularly in fall, when the animals gorge on acorns and apples for the last months of their lives, this pork has a forest-like taste; a kind of woody, nutty, intense richness that needs nothing but good olive oil, garlic and a hot wood fire to bring out its best.
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Fette Sau
Read Reviews
354 Metropolitan Ave, Brooklyn, NY 11211 (map)
Fette Sau is a thinking man's barbecue. They make things nobody else makes, using meat nobody else uses. Case in point: the Piedmontese beef tongue pastrami and smoked cheeks, which are served semi-regularly. The Piedmontese beef animal is native to Italy and is typically much leaner than the British beef behemoths we're used to eating in America. But it has a delicate, grassy taste that takes to smoke very well, becoming even more pronounced in variety cuts like tongue. This is one piece of beef barbecue you'll never get in Texas!