Grocery Store Vs. Butcher Meats: Is There A Difference?

The modern grocery store is a temple of convenience — a one-stop shop teeming with an enormous (some would say unnatural) variety of options. Need vegetables? There's a whole aisle of just about every veggie for your kitchen. How about cheese? Even the smaller grocery stores will have at least a decent selection, to say nothing of the upscale options. (Just be careful at Aldi — there was a cheese recall there not too long ago.) And if you want meat, there are whole shelves of it: cuts of beef, chicken, pork, lamb, and more. But if you want the absolute best meat you can find, you'll have to do what your ancestors did in the pre-supermarket era and go to your local butcher.

Just ask Lee Garman, the head chef of the Indigenous American restaurant Owamni in Minneapolis who spoke exclusively with The Takeout. After serving nine years in the Army, Garman went to culinary school in Los Angeles before working in various establishments, including Trejos Tacos and the Cannabis Cafe. In addition to cooking, he is also an avid hunter and fisher. This is, in short, a man who knows his way around food in general and meat in particular — so when he tells you the butcher is better than the grocery store, you ought to listen.

"I always prefer butcher shops," Lee Garman told The Takeout in an exclusive interview. "Grocery stores focus on so many other things besides good quality proteins." We mentioned the variety grocery stores offer in the intro, and it's certainly a good thing. But it does mean you won't find true specialists that will help you get the good stuff and answer specific questions that may be above the paygrade of whatever grocery store employee is wandering the aisles. (If you do go to a grocery store, though, a culinary director has advice on how to buy your steaks there.) 

On the other hand, Garman noted that butchers "focus only on high quality proteins." "They will almost always have more knowledge about meat and have most of the answers to your questions," he told us. Not only that, but he said "you can also ask butcher shops for specialized cuts of meat or hard to get items." You might not be able to find a prime rib, for instance, at the grocery store, but a butcher will probably be able to help. They can even help with cooking knowledge, such as the 3-3-2-2 method of searing steak.

What should you look for in a good butcher, then? According to Garman, it's important that "they have multiple types of animals," but also that they "have multiple cuts of each animal." That's a sign that the butchers have a well-rounded knowledge of their craft, as well as skill with a knife.