Posted on 11/20/2011 10:19:12 PM PST by nickcarraway
There is nothing subtle about a 200-pound, fat-flanked steer hindquarter slung on a man's back.
The sight brings out the red-blooded Neanderthal in even the Mason-jar-wine and skinny-jeans crowd at Oakland's Eat Real Festival in September. Despite the event's civilized sponsorship partners, like Whole Foods and Prius, the spectators roar and whistle as if a gladiator had entered the Colosseum. The charge is visceral, vaguely sexual. "Kill somebody!" one man yells. Staffers hang up the leg by its heel on a hook.
"Bring on the ketchup!"
"Give us some scraps!"
The crowd sees a naked animal carcass, arguably as provocative to American eyes as porn — long-hidden away in slaughterhouses, glimpsed in delivery trucks at Mission Street markets, revealed in the latest meat scandal on TV.
Yet Oscar Yedra, leader of Team Yedra Brothers, appraises the meat with the cold eye of an anatomist. He sees a map: seams to navigate with his knife, bones to dodge,muscles to contour with the cuts he's been honing since boyhood.
Yedra is a 45-year-old Mexican national with the muscular physique of the steers he carves up. A snorting bull is tattooed on his chest. In an age when meat shows up pre-cut to the supermarket, he is a relic of a former era and another country. He is a craftsman, some say an artist. He is a butcher.
And his profession is suddenly hip. Some 300 foodies crowd before the stage to see the Flying Knives Steer Butchery Competition. Standing in back is Bill Niman, the father of the America's grass-fed meat movement, one of the first ranchers to garner celebrity name cachet. He's there to see Yedra, his head butcher for 15 years on Niman Ranch's cutting floor, and at one point, the company's highest-paid employee.
Yedra will compete against Team Butcher's Guild, a San Francisco-based collective of butchers who cut whole, grass-fed animals from local farms. No hormones or antibiotics or corporate feedlots — they believe you should eat less meat to afford quality meat. They tend to be young, sometimes tattooed. They have book deals and Twitter feeds and write about meat for GQ. Many have opened their own butcher shops, and one drives a roving meat wagon in the city.
To them, Oscar is both a distant role model and outsider, commanding unanimous respect for his skills and brawn. (Says one butcher about a picture of Yedra and his brother Miguel scowling among the other competitors in last year's East Real Fest in a New York Times photo: "They looked pretty angry.") Yedra and his meat-cutting dynasty of brothers and a nephew are the two-time defending champions of the Eat Real contest who last year led a butcher walk-out over a wage dispute with Marin Sun Farms.
Yet other butchers call them "back-room guys," cutting meat behind the scenes both literally and figuratively — not up front promoting themselves. Yedra still hasn't joined the guild, and was left out of the 2010 book Primal Cuts: Cooking with America's Best Butchers, which showcased faces of the new national movement, including six from the Bay Area. Author Marissa Guggiana said she hadn't yet heard of him.
So the next test for Oscar will be pure business: to get a cut of the movement that's caught up with his trade. Yedra dreams of opening his own company, but still works the counter of a high-end supermarket.
There's no time for those thoughts now. As the competition nears, Yedra, dressed in his white apron and coat, clenches a meat hook and gives last-minute instructions to his team. His knives wait in a plastic box attached to the chain around his waist like guns in a holster. His playbook of who will cut each and every steak lies beside the cutting boards on the table. Renato, his 27-year-old nephew with his uncle's buff physique, bounces his shoulders like a weightlifter between sets. Rian Rinn, the non-family member of the three-man team, sharpens his knife on his cylindrical steel: shing shing shing.
"I'm nervous," Yedra says. "I'm nervous now." The crowd counts down from 10. Time to cut.
Yedra doesn't care much about what kind of meat business he starts — a retail shop or a wholesale distributor — just that it would employ his family and have "Yedra" in the name. "It's my dream," he says.
"If someone with the skill set he has couldn't make a go of it, there's something really wrong," says Taylor Boetticher, a butcher who opened the Fatted Calf Charcuterie in Hayes Valley last year. Back when he was learning, Boetticher took a tutorial on cutting from Yedra on Niman Ranch's cutting floor. While the teacher continues to work for others, the one-time apprentice is at the helm of two butcher shops that embody the butcher new wave.
At the weekly "Pork Happy Hour" at the Fell Street shop on a recent Wednesday, the renowned "Dave the Butcher" Budworth was slicing away at a pig shoulder while discussing the provenance of prosciutto with a fan.
A butcher groupie? How else would you describe this retired guy in a "Field of Dreams" T-shirt? He's shown up to see Dave cut at the last seven happy hours, each time taking home a $25 slab of pork to test out the skills he had picked up from Dave's $90 meat-cutting class in the Ferry Building. After Dave cautions against wrapping pork in waxed freezer paper, the admirer says in a hushed voice, "Just hearing that stuff is priceless."
Of course, you used to be able to ask your corner butcher, a neighborhood fixture until the 1960s, when the consolidating meat industry moved animals onto corporate feedlots. Butchery moved to the slaughterhouse, where workers each made one cut on hundreds of carcasses a day on a fast-moving dis-assembly line. With notable holdouts like Drewes Bros. Meats in Noe Valley, the neighborhood butcher died out, and the art of whole-animal butchery was lost. "Most butchers in America, the only knife they use is a box-cutter," announced Anya Fernald, CEO of Belcampo Farms, while emceeing the Eat Real contest.
Budworth learned the craft the old-school way, 25 years working in a few surviving butcher shops in Santa Cruz and Oakland. But then, in the last couple of years, his job started becoming a thing. Respected chefs who'd been cutting down whole animals in their kitchens started opening butcher shops. (Boetticher; Tia Harrison at Avedano's Holly Park Market; Aaron Rocchino at Berkeley's The Local Butcher Shop.) People started asking how to become a butcher. Dave realized he had to jump on the "fleischgeist" — a term coined by Meatpaper, a San Francisco-based magazine launched in 2007 — or lose out. "I'm a butcher. That's the only thing in my life I can claim. I'm not going to let some chef take it away."
Budworth started to market "Dave the Butcher" from his meat website, and picked up teaching and demo gigs. He's looking for an agent to do a book or TV. Last year, he became a charter member of the Butcher's Guild, a collective of artisanal butchers nationwide who pay $175 to $375 and sign an oath to work with grass-fed whole animals from local farms. In return, they get a network — 50 members since May.
That's critical, since there are few places to formally learn butchery, meaning many of the new school are self-taught, says Guggiana, a co-founder of the guild. "There's a lot of holes in everyone's education, and there's just the desire to connect to share ideas and commiserate and bond." The guild plans to open a butcher training program in the Bay Area in 2012.
Unlike Dave, some butchers resist the new movement. "It feels cliquish to me," says David Samiljan, the self-styled "cranky New Yorker" owner of Baron's Meat & Poultry in Alameda. He refused to join the guild, but if pressed, he admits he shares their beliefs about good meat and is jealous of their press coverage. "I'm never going to be one of these tattooed, unshaven schmucks you see in a magazine. I'm never going to be butcher chic. I'm a butcher. Cut your fucking meat and shut up!
"You want to talk to a real butcher, you talk to Oscar," he continues. "He's a better butcher than all of them combined, I promiseyou that."
When Yedra started, "rock-star butcher" would have sounded like the name of a punk band. Yedra's dad handed him a knife to cut the meat off a beef bone when he was 7 years old. It was the family's trade, and in 1970s Mexico City, Yedra helped in his father's butcher shop after school. "My dad taught us how to hold the knife, how to clean the bone," Yedra says, his hands carving the air before him. He and his four brothers would go with his father to the slaughterhouse at 3 a.m. to pick the best carcasses, and Yedra was hooked. "I'm like, wow, my dad has big arms," he says, chuckling. "When you're a kid, you try to be like your dad. That was one of the things I liked."
At 45, Yedra has built up his arms with a routine of 225-pound bench-presses to keep him in shape to handle hulking hunks of meat. The physically demanding work is the reason his nephew, Renato, would prefer to return to Mexico and study accounting or "some line of work that isn't so hard on you."
While the butcher resurgence glorifies an old-fashioned, hands-on craft, to the Yedras, it's a tough, blue-collar job. Oscar and his brothers saved money from their Bay Area butcher jobs to wire to their youngest brother in Mexico for law school, and Oscar hopes his own 10-year-old son will become a doctor or lawyer. Butchery "is something our family has done for a long time," Renato says, "but any logical person would want to better oneself."
Oscar never wanted to do anything else. On weekends, the teenage Yedra would wait on customers at his dad's mobile stand in Mexico City's tony neighborhoods. Oscar was a natural with a knife, using what he calls "the amazing skill" to indulge the señoras' request to cut a kilo of beef into 30 carne asadas by hand. Yedra rebuffed his parents' desire that he go to college and opened his own butcher stand. "They were so mad with me: 'You don't know what you're doing! You're gonna work your whole life!'"
In the late '80s, his older brother Juan was rushed to the hospital with serious burns from a car crash. Oscar sold his market permits to help pay the hospital rehabilitation bills and headed to San Francisco in 1991 to get a job to wire money home. He would meet up with his older brother Miguel, vacationing here at the time of the accident, who had then ditched architecture school for a gig at Golden Gate Meat Company's SOMA cutting floor.
Oscar accompanied Miguel to the Golden Gate holiday party, where they wound up seated at a table with a rancher who'd been leasing floor space at the plant to break grass-fed animals from his Bolinas ranch: Bill Niman.
With Niman's nephew translating, Oscar told Niman he was already getting restless to return to Mexico after failing to find work in his first days in San Francisco. A few days later, Niman offered Oscar a job.
The supervisor of Niman Ranch's four-man cutting crew started Yedra on the grinder, the least skilled work in a butcher's day. "It wasn't my thing," Yedra says. "I wanted to cut meat because that's what I do." But then, an order came in from Zuni Cafe: some 20 pounds of flat iron steaks. The butcher must slice tough tissue off the top and bottom of the steak, and then extract an unsightly vein that runs across without damaging the surrounding meat.
"I saw how much they were leaving on the skin and thought, wow, I can do better." Yedra asked to try, and cleanly plucked the vein out.
"He gave the whole order to me," Yedrasays. Within a year, he was promoted to supervisor — a twentysomething Mexican immigrant at the front of the fastest-growing company in the sustainably raised meat movement.
Miguel wrote out translations of the muscles and meat cuts from Spanish, and Oscar studied his first English words.
Today, the culinary scene's praise of Yedra begins to sound like the blurbs on a book cover.
"Hands-down the best knife artist I've ever seen. The man's a genius with a boning knife," says Samiljan of Baron's Meat.
"I'm in awe of his skill. He and his brothers, his whole family. I wish I could clone them," says Marsha McBride, owner of Berkeley's Cafe Rouge.
Yedra says he likes the compliments, but he's loath to brag about himself. Instead, his reflections on his work tend to come out as statements of fact. "I pretty much know where the division is of every muscle. When other people break, they have to look for them." Or, "I haven't met another guy who has the speed that I have to break the whole carcass."
As it grew, Niman Ranch opened its own processing plant in Oakland in 2000, with Oscar overseeing a 40-degree cutting floor of eventually around 25 butchers, including, at various times, three of his brothers and his nephew, Renato.
Starting at 5 a.m. each day, the crew was cutting beef primals, and lamb and pork carcasses, including the shelf-ready pork cuts for Trader Joe's West Coast stores. They also filled custom orders for restaurant clients like Chez Panisse, Zuni Cafe, Oliveto, Cactus Taquerias, and a growing list in Santa Fe, Chapel Hill, N.C., and Birmingham, Ala. — flown out fresh on icy gel-packs by FedEx. "The Niman customers were persnickety to say the least," says Samiljan, who worked for a short time under Yedra. Oscar would cut the most precise orders himself.
Yedra recalls McBride, then the head of charcuterie at Zuni, sending him a cake after he cut her a particularly uniform set of pork chops. But Yedra has always preferred beef — a 700-pound beast with more room for a butcher's creativity — and he introduced the company to "velvet" steak, a cut he'd learned from his father. The cut turns a tender part from the animal's heel usually ground up for hamburger into a $16-a-pound steak.
Yedra was Niman's top earner. "They are like the mutual admiration society," says Yedra's wife, Elisa Magidoff, a funny, laid-back Californian who manages a daycare. ("Oscar cooked me steak every day for a year to win me over," she says. "It worked," Yedra retorts.) When Yedra's parents were denied a tourist visa to attend his wedding, Mike McConnell, a former owner of Niman Ranch, says he called a contact in Sen. Barbara Boxer's office to intervene. Oscar's parents got their visa, and feasted with the rest of the guests at the reception on — what else? — Niman Ranch steak.
Despite the company's progressive ethos of treating animals and employees right, Niman Ranch wasn't immune to the dictates of capitalism. Operating at a loss in 2006, the company brought on new investors and management team, who decided to close the Oakland butcher shop and lay off the 35 employees. The company moved distribution in the Bay Area to Del Monte Meat Company (no relation to the canned-fruit behemoth).
"That's when the company went from overgrown mom-and-pop to larger company, with less of a family feeling, but still viable," says McConnell.
For Bill Niman, losing Yedra and the butchers was a strike against the new management, whom he disagreed with on a range of issues. "It was an emotional time," Niman says. "I was going through hell." Eventually, Niman quit, and was even banned by the company from using his own name commercially.
Yedra used the break as an opportunity. He started his own venture, Oscar Yedra & Brothers Meat Company, employing three family members to break beef from Creekstone Farms on Golden Gate's SOMA cutting floor. Golden Gate's head, Jim Offenbach, let him use the space for free and sold him the primals he needed for a smidge over cost. Yedra bought a van to deliver the meat to customers, like McBride's Cafe Rouge.
But after a couple weeks, Yedra folded the company. He refuses to talk about the reasons, but others in the tight-knit industry say he was threatened legally by Niman Ranch. (The company's current CEO, Jeff Swain, denies this.) "He got scared," says Offenbach. Yedra's dream went on hold, he sold the van, and the brothers scattered, once again working for someone else.
While he won't talk about shutting down the company, Yedra still has aspirations in the Bay Area's meat industry. As Samiljan says, "Oscar's a smart guy; he knows how to keep his mouth shut."
Yedra says he likes his current position at the high-end Canyon Market in Glen Park, and in financial terms, "I do okay." Some in the butcher scene think he may be held back by his accent or being an immigrant; Yedra responds, "Absolutely not. I don't feel any obstacles." In Mexico, he opened his own company in his late teens, but here, he says he needs to save up for a loan. Meat is certainly an expensive business: Marsha McBride says she just breaks even on her Cafe Rouge meat market, but props it up with the adjoining restaurant, adding, "You compete with Trader Joe's and Costco and the big boys." Starting a cutting floor is even more complicated — finding a building up to USDA standards, heavy machinery, NIMBY neighbors. Offenbach from Golden Gate estimates the up-front costs add up to "$2.5 million to do it right."
"There's more to it than just being a good butcher," says Samiljan, who financed his Baron's Meat shop by mortgaging his house. Yet Ryan Farr at 4505 Meats says you don't need a fancy investor; he grew his business from peddling chicharones prepared in his home kitchen at Elixir. "We did not start this business with a large sum of capital; we started it with pigskins," he says.
After shuttering his own business, Yedra was swooped up by the Point Reyes Station butcher shop of Marin Sun Farms, the fast-growing company headed by grass-fed movement star David Evans. This led to another experience Yedra doesn't discuss.
As the company expanded, the company moved its meat-breaking into the F. Uri & Co. processing plant in the Dogpatch neighborhood. Yedra once again recruited family to the six-man butcher crew, says his brother, Miguel. Miguel says he and Oscar earned $31 an hour, and the shop handled a massive work load — breaking 25 beef, 25 lamb, 25 goat, and 20 pork carcasses a week.
Even as they won the first two Eat Real butcher contests for Marin Sun Farms, the brothers became frustrated with a new director of operations who arrived in 2010, Miguel says. According to Miguel, the manager wasn't experienced in the meat industry, and they once had to trash some 100 pounds of lamb and goat that had gone bad while waiting to be sold. The last straw came last November, when the company denied them a $1-an-hour raise, Miguel says.
Evans says that the lower-earning butchers received a bigger raise than the high-earning ones like the Yedras to "reduce the disparity among employees. " On Nov. 10, the Yedras requested a meeting with Evans and the workers at the processing plant.
Oscar won't talk about the company, but Miguel says Evans told them he'd opened a new butcher shop in Oakland, and couldn't afford giving them more money. "We're breaking our backs everyday for him to get those things — that shop and ranch. And he doesn't think about us," Miguel says. "They pay us for what they got. I'm not going to say I'm the best, but I know how to do my job. If you want quality, you got to pay."
After the meeting, nine butchers and drivers, including four Yedras, walked out.
"These were very skilled and highly proud people," says former Niman Ranch co-owner McConnell of the Yedras. Word got around the industry fast. "They're their own union," says Marissa Guggiana of the Butcher's Guild. "They took matters into their own hands. When you're working together like that, it's like working in a kitchen, and teams get really tight and really work hard."
Evans says all but the Yedras and one other employee returned to work the next day, once Evans explained to them why the lowest earners were getting a bigger raise. Marin Sun Farms "prides itself on promoting the welfare and aspirations of all its employees, not just its 'stars' but its up-and-coming butchers still learning the trade," Evans wrote in an e-mail. "MSF gained greatly from the know-how of the Yedras, have the highest regard for that family as butchers, and wish them the best in the pursuit of their future endeavors."
The Yedras scattered again, some signing on with the butcher's union, Renato ending up at Golden Gate's SOMA plant, and Oscar eventually getting his current job as head butcher at Canyon Market. Every other week he also cuts meat for Bill Niman, who now raises heritage turkeys and cattle with his new venture, B.N. Ranch.
When chasing a dream, it helps to be recognized, and Yedra is making little advances. Next year, Guggiana will be releasing the second edition of Primal Cuts, and she says Yedra will make the cut. Being what Dave the Butcher calls "the team to beat" at the Eat Real butcher contest with 300 spectators helps, too.
After the crowd counts down to zero, Team Yedra Brothers hits the hindquarter like a NASCAR pit crew. To break beef into the large cuts known as "primals," a butcher must exploit the natural divisions between major muscle groups. Oscar saws the flank steak off the side using his foot-long steak knife like a violin bow. Three strokes back and forth, it comes loose, and Oscar lays it on the cutting board before Rinn, who wiggles his boning knife between the meat and the thick slab of fat.
Next, Oscar crouches down and hugs the lower-hanging drop loin like a football tackle while Renato saws it off from the leg above Oscar's head. Oscar pirouettes the 50-pound hunk onto the table before his nephew, who cleaves the seams. Oscar then cuts the sirloin tip and top round, and hauls them to his own board. All this takes three minutes.
Speed was eliminated this year as a criterion for judging. Yedra hypothesizes it's because they've easily slayed in that category the past two years. "Speed was our weapon.... Last year they had a guy, very good, from New York, and we still won," he says, with a mischievous chuckle. Yet fast work still impresses, and the Yedras look like they're on sped-up video. As cameramen circle like vultures, Oscar and Renato assume a wide, industrial stance, bent over at a nearly right angle over the tables, face down to the meat. Sweat breaks out on Yedra's face, despite the autumn chill. "Last year I yelled out, 'My husband is so sexy when he cuts meat!'" Magidoff later says.
Oscar ties flat hunks of sirloin tip into conical roasts with string like a fisherman, and the two others plunk their finished steaks onto the front table, where Oscar arranges them like a supermarket display.
After 25 minutes, the emcee asks Rinn, "Are you ready to dominate the competition yet again?" Rinn shoots back, "I think we already did." Cheers and boos follow.
After 34 minutes, Team Yedra Brothers has turned the 200-pound hindquarter into market-ready cuts spreading over an entire folding table, with hardly any waste: baseball steaks, osso buco, roasts, thin carne asada from Oscar's own hand lying over each other like napkins. Yedra sets the tomahawk steak's 2-foot rib bone vertical to dramatically arc over the display. He blots his brow with his shirt sleeve, grins, and inspects the work.
A few minutes later, Team Dave the Butcher presents a full table of traditional steaks — solid work, but, to an outsider's view, lacking Yedra's surgical precision. Team Butcher's Guild, led by New York-based Adam Tiberio, finishes last, having taken the time to chop handmade steakburger patties, skewer Brazilian picanha, and twist flank-steak pinwheels with cheese, all topped with rosemary sprigs and basil leaves.
"I think we have some serious competitionthis year," the emcee says.
The judges make their rounds, two hovering longest at Yedra's table. Oscar points out all the steaks, adding the tomahawk will sell at $29. "Plus you're selling all the bone," says one judge. "Exactly," Oscar responds.
The judges confer. One, a retail butcher shop owner from Oregon, would later say they were impressed by the Butcher's Guild's creativity and presentation, but also by the Yedras' knife work, and how they filled out the entire table with their cuts. It simply looked like more meat.
The winner is...
"The Yedra Brothers!" Oscar and Renato shoot their fists in the air. Magidoff runs up and plants a big smooch on her husband's lips. "My fan," Oscar says, drawing laughs. The team is handed bottles of gin and plastic trophies with a steer standing on top. Spectators ask to pose with the team for pictures — rock-star butchers for a day.
At a barbecue after the contest, the Eat Real staffers and the other teams bite into some of the chimichurri-smothered contest steaks and share their post-contest analysis with this reporter: The Butcher's Guild was more innovative. The Yedras did the same cuts they'd done for the last two years. Maybe it's time to officially retire them from the contest.
Yet Yedra wasn't around to hear the scuttlebutt. He would clock in at 7 the next morning at Canyon Market, place his contest trophy above the glass display, and get to work.
So ghey.
Filthy anti-progressive elitist capitalist pig! Occupy Meat Case! Free hamburgers for the masses!
[snip] Yedra is a 45-year-old Mexican national with the muscular physique of the steers he carves up. A snorting bull is tattooed on his chest. In an age when meat shows up pre-cut to the supermarket, he is a relic of a former era and another country. He is a craftsman, some say an artist. He is a butcher. [/snip]Great, now I'm hungry.
only he'll never get an NEA grant.
“a San Francisco-based collective of butchers who cut whole, grass-fed animals from local farms. No hormones or antibiotics or corporate feedlots — they believe you should eat less meat to afford quality meat. “
Every piece of grass fed beef I’ve ever eaten pales in comparison to the taste of corn fed Anus.
I have a hunch that that particular typo will go down in FR infamy...
I have a hunch that that particular typo will go down in FR infamy...
Oh crap. This one is gonna hurt.
carve up peta
You might as well sit out the next couple of days. You will have a lot of responses to that gem!
LOL...but your real point is correct. Grass-fed beef just doesn’t measure up to corn-fed beef. It’s not even a contest.
So glad you agree.
You’re putting the corn in the wrong end.
Don't bet on it...he could get a grant for a "performance artist installation" whacking slicing his meat in a gallery.
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