People walking by Frank Prisinzano’s Sauce may have noticed something new going on: Adam Tiberio is working on Tiberio Custom Meats, a sustainable butcher shop and retail store located inside the restaurant.
When Tiberio’s shop opens in a couple weeks, it will join the Essex Street Market’s Heritage Meats in offering the neighborhood sustainable beef, pork, and chicken from small, independent farmers. Tiberio’s offers 100 percent grass-fed, pasture-raised, grain-finished beef from farms in Vermont and New York, while his pork hails from Vermont’s Heritage Grazers. Eventually, he wants to introduce game birds and cooked meats like roast beef and porchetta to his lineup.
Tiberio partnered with Prisinzano after consulting on Sauce’s menu, which is centered around whole animal. “He’s very integral in my project,” Tiberio says of the chef. “We have really good working synergy.” The shop, which is a separate business, is accessed through the restaurant, where diners can watch the butchers in the cutting room, which is partitioned behind large glass windows. Downstairs, there’s a fabrication room reached by its own staircase — “you can’t get 200-pound pieces of meat down small kitchen stairs,” Tiberio says.
Tiberio wants to increase his business by doing a meat CSA through the shop which, as it happens, is a stepping stone to his larger goal of opening a USDA-approved meat processing facility in the city. When he does, it will be a larger version of his current one-man processing operation that he runs out of a Vermont slaughterhouse, and will specialize in custom cuts of meat. And although he has no idea when the plant will open, Tiberio knows where he wants it to be: the South Street Seaport’s now-defunct Fulton Fish Market. “It’s such a historic building,” he says. “I think it’s worth waiting a little while for. I’m totally cool with waiting.”
Tiberio Custom Meats; 78 Rivington St. at Allen St.; no phone yet