ron savenor
To me it’s all about passion. That passion is what I saw in my dad, Jack, and I had to take
s a v e n o r ’ s m a r k e t, m a
a stab at it myself. I’m selling the best stuff money can buy and people just love you for it. What’s better than that? What’s better than being liked? I learned all the fine skills from my dad. He was very charismatic, and he was a worker bee, like me. If I left some meat on the bones, my dad would throw it on the scale and he’d go, That’s a dollar twenty you’re throwing away. And now I do that to my staff.
Ron’s resume reads like a Ken doll catalog: race-car driver, gymnast, pro skateboarder, and butcher. He is about as relaxed as a tightrope. But the storyline here is generations of continuity. From Lithuanian immigrants running a franchise grocery store, to the 1960s pomaded sheen of the Julia Child boom, to the “Crazy Ronnie” years of wholesale success and farm-sourced meats, the family has remained happily entrenched in small business ownership.
In the early sixties Julia Child started shopping here. She and my dad just kind of clicked. She loved meat and butchering and she’d go in the cooler and he’d show her this or that piece of meat and she’d say, Oh, isn’t that gorgeous. She lived right up the street. And then, boom, 1967, she was on the cover of Time magazine and she mentions Savenor’s. And our weekly meat sales went from 5,000 to 15,000 pounds a week. The people who come in the store are fascinating. I mean we get the president of Harvard, Schlessinger, Erich Segal, Kennedys, Senator Kerry, Robin Cook the author. For the book Toxin, I took him out to see what meat processing was. And in his book he thanks me for “overcoming a particular barrier” in his research. I was laughing like a bastard inside. It just goes to show you the sky’s the limit. I’m third generation, so I was supposed to ruin it, right? I almost did lose the business. The place burned down from an electrical fire in March of ’92. It’s funny because I say I’ll never forget that day and every year my wife reminds me that I’ve forgotten that day. Through great business advice from a family friend, Louis Kane, founder of Au Bon Pain, we moved to Charles Street in Beacon Hill, which is the single wealthiest square mile in Boston. Because of demand, we reopened the store at the original Cambridge location in 2005. We are also the premier meat wholesaler in the Boston area and supply to some of Boston’s finest restaurants. I’m natural at this because it’s easy. I have great products to work with and customers who appreciate them. Honestly though I feel like the old-fashioned butcher is a dying breed. You can’t just get a pallet of sirloins and say, Okay, cut these. That’s not a butcher, that’s just someone with a knife. Every steak that goes out of here is like a work of art. That’s our company's signature. I’m a self-proclaimed master butcher who passes my skills on to my staff. I’m only as good as my staff.
“In the early sixties Julia Child started shopping here. She and my dad just kind of clicked.”
255