UPPER EAST SIDE — Fleishers Craft Butchery officially opens on Friday, but celebrated a soft opening Wednesday afternoon.
First thing through the door, customers will see meat hanging on hooks and butchers cutting slabs of beef, pork and lamb in what seems to be an old school butcher shop.
But the butchery, which is headquartered in Red Hook and has a retail location in Park Slope, is doing something different in the age of centralized and processed meats — it knows exactly where its animals come from, how they were raised and use every part possible.
The company announced in March that it will be opening its first Manhattan location at 1325 Third Ave., near East 76th Street.
"About 95 percent of all meat is produced on a feed lot. It's the scary stuff you read about and see in documentaries," said Ryan Fibiger, Fleishers' CEO. "We really weigh every little input that goes into the final product."
The company partners with small, family-owned farms and also owns some farmland in New York, where livestock roams green fields and isn't pumped full of antibiotics and other medications, Fibiger said.
Fleishers uses J&D Farms in Eaton, New York, which is "the model pig farm" that raises pigs on a pasture, Fibiger said.
"Most people don’t know where the packages of meat they buy at the grocery stores came from, how the animals were raised, if it was given any drugs... we flip that on its head and do sourcing at farms we have relationships with or have ownership in. We know how the animals are raised, treated and slaughtered."
Fleishers also makes sure to use every possible bit of the animal, to be sustainable both for business and for ethical reasons.
Since the animal gave its life to be consumed, the responsibility is on Fleishers to use as much of it as possible, Fibiger said.
Bones get made into stock, fats are used for cooking and organ meat is sold or made into dog food, he said.
The shop will sell spices, sauces, dairy products and other items from the farms it partners with, too, and its prices will rival that of Whole Foods.
The painstaking care that goes into the cuts is worth the expense, Fibiger said.
The store itself will mimic butcher shops of yesteryear with subway tiles, clear cases displaying meats, and a butcher block on a table within view of customers.
"It is the way we want to do it," Fibiger said about the chopping block. "It’s turned people off who haven’t seen that in a long time. Our idea is to be transparent and we want our stores to reflect that."
Fibiger said the Upper East Side store will be the first of several new locations the company is planning for Manhattan.
The butchery is open from 10 a.m. to 9 p.m. Mondays through Fridays and from 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. on weekends.
See our live tour of the shop:
