Normally, if you leave a restaurant with food, that food has already been cooked. But at a growing number of hybrid restaurant-butcher shops, diners have the option of leaving not just with doggie bags, but with raw ingredients and a side of inspiration.
That’s how it works at Kensington Quarters, in Philadelphia’s Fishtown neighborhood. “As customers walk in,” said executive chef Damon Menapace, “the first thing they see is the butcher shop, with all that meat on display. They have a nice meal, hopefully try some things that they never would have thought to try, and then think to themselves, ‘I could probably do this.’ ”
Broadening customers’ dining—and cooking—horizons is a natural part of the “whole-animal” style of butchery that most of these new restaurants practice. “With something like pig trotters, it’s a way easier sell if I prepare them,” said John Blevins, co-owner of Clove & Hoof in Oakland, Calif. (using the menu-friendly name for pigs’ feet). But a customer who tries them in Mr. Blevins’s restaurant may thereafter be more inclined to buy them at his butcher’s counter to cook at home.
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