ben dyer
As someone who owns a butcher shop I probably shouldn’t be saying this, but
l a u r e l h u r s t m a r k e t, o r
people need to eat less meat. You need to eat a higher-quality product. And I know it’s expensive, I know it’s hard. But eat less, eat better, and make it a special thing. I was born a vegetarian. My parents have been vegetarians since the 1970s. They eat fish, so I don’t know if it’s a health thing or a “fish don’t have feelings” thing. But I rationalize it that if I am going to be playing with meat, at least I’m working with the best quality and working closely with the farmers. As much as people despise the whole
Ben Dyer owns Laurelhurst Market in Portland, which actually is not a market at all. It is a restaurant and a butcher shop. A restaurant where you can point to a diagram of beef primals and call out your steak order. And a butcher shop where you can pick up pickled sausages and house-made pâté. Ben initially seems quiet and reserved, and then feats of boldness unexpectedly tumble from his mouth. I like this, when people get more interesting the longer you talk to them. His contradictions aren’t confusing at all, they just make you want to hear more.
Food Network/celebrity chef thing, it has had a huge impact on the way that America thinks about food. Food is cool again, which is great because for a long time, meat was just something red, on a foam tray, wrapped in plastic. There was a real disconnect between what people were eating and where the food was coming from. I love how not only chefs have become celebrities but so have farmers. When we have special dinners at the restaurant, we bring in the farmers and everyone wants to talk to them; they’re treated like stars. That’s a great by product of the way the whole food movement has changed over the years. I don’t really consider myself a very artistic person but the closest I come to doing art is preparing food. It appeals to every sense—taste, smell, look, and even sometimes sound, depending. I love that. I got into charcuterie when I was working as a cook. My feeling was, anything that somebody had done before, I didn’t see any reason why I couldn’t do it myself. So when the opportunity to buy Viande Meats came up, it just seemed like it would be a lot of fun. We started smoking all of our own sausages, making all of our deli meats from scratch, brining and smoking hams, curing and smoking pastrami. Really, I’m just drawing on all those things that I loved to cook with before and producing them now myself. Eventually, we missed cooking for people every night. You’re definitely one step removed when you’re selling raw meat that someone is going to take home and cook. We started doing these dinners around the city in odd places. It was all very word of mouth and sort of underground. Next thing we knew we were catering. We were working really closely with local farmers, using whatever produce came in that week. We’re kind of purists, we don’t believe in fusion food. I think that’s just crap. I don’t really feel like I need to reinvent anything. Classic food is classic for a reason, I love it for that. At the end of 2008, I sold Viande to my employees, and a few months later we opened Laurelhurst Market. I still think of myself more as a guy who just owns a butcher shop, I guess by default that kind of makes me a butcher. I mean, I break down whole animals and cut meat all day, so I guess I am.
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