Most days at no later than 5:30 a.m., in the back room of a small store in Kingsville, you can find an artist at work.

Dressed in a red, long-sleeved shirt, jeans, and sneakers, John Greene puts on a black apron and steps up to a stainless-steel table covered in white compressed Fiberglass that’s as hard as nails. He puts on plastic gloves and picks up a Victorinox knife—German and made of steel that he sharpens every single day. He pulls a large, red hunk of meat toward him and lifts his right arm. As his hand comes down with the knife, the magic begins. Slice…slice…slice…slice…slice…slice. And just like that, he cuts a sirloin tip into steaks, the knife gliding through it like butter.

Greene, 58, has been the owner of Greene’s Family Butcher Shop since 2019. He’s a dying breed, one of only a handful of small, independent butchers in the Baltimore region. But he has a dedicated following. People from surrounding areas outside Kingsville travel distances to get their meat hand-cut at Greene’s. In addition to getting the exact cut of meat they want, from the perfect roast to the slimmest pork cutlets, they can also buy things they can’t at grocery stores, like organ meat or marrow bones. All perfectly wrapped in white butcher’s paper.

While the shop is relatively new, the story of Greene’s Family Butcher Shop began decades ago, in the late 1970s when Greene—the youngest of seven children—was a 13-year-old News American paperboy. With two canvas bags full of papers, he’d ride his bicycle through the Baltimore Highlands, where he grew up. Every single day, in the middle of his route, Greene would stop at Ray’s Food Center and buy a three-pack of Tastykake cupcakes and a Yoo-hoo as a snack.

One day, in the dead of winter, the owner, Ray Ehling, said to Greene, “Why don’t you come here and work for me? You can stock shelves, sweep floors, whatever,” Greene recalls. It was warmer inside, so Greene took the job. “I still delivered newspapers, just not all week long.”

After school, Greene worked for Ehling and he began watching him cut meat. “He would always hand-cut everything. I could walk in and say, ‘Ray, I want one top-round steak,’ and he would cut that. My mother would send me to the store to get some round steak for sandwiches, and he would cut it then,” says Greene.

About six months after he had been working there, Ehling said, “You’ve been paying a lot of attention. You want to learn this, don’t you?” Greene said that he did. His brother, Jeff, who was 10 years older than Greene, had already been working for Ehling cutting meat. Ehling gave Greene a wooden knife with a six-inch blade—a boning knife—and told him to hold on to it. “We’ll start one of these days,” Ehling said to him.

Weeks passed, and Greene was wondering if Ehling would ever start teaching him. Then, that special day came—but not exactly the way he expected it.

At the time, everything came to the store in the back of Esskay trucks. One day, a hind-quarter, which weighed about 145 pounds, was being delivered. Ehling told Greene to get it.

“I’m a 13 year old, 75 pounds soaking wet. He tells me to hit the hoof and let it land on your shoulder,” Greene recalls.

That was what was supposed to happen. Instead, when Greene tried to put the hindquarter over his shoulder, he lost his balance and the enormous piece of meat flew behind him and straight down the steps to the store’s basement. Ehling picked up that boning knife and said to him, “You want to learn? Well, you’re not carrying it back up the steps. Go downstairs and take it apart.”

Greene was stunned. “He didn’t show me what to do. Just said to go downstairs and take it apart.” It was clear that Ehling wanted to see what Greene had picked up from watching, but that first time wasn’t pretty. “I hunked it, I chunked it, and I destroyed it. It all went into the dumpster,” remembers Greene. “That was my very first time cutting meat—on the basement floor of Ray’s Food Center.”

Soon after, Ehling began to actually teach him. By the time he was 16, Greene was considered a great meat cutter, but he was too young to join the meat cutters union, the Local 117. By this time, his older brother, Jeff, was working as a meat cutter at the local Pantry Pride store. His boss, the meat supervisor, was impressed with the younger Greene’s skills.

 

“I HUNKED IT, I CHUNKED IT, AND I DESTROYED IT.”

 

“He gave me a job, and hid me on the night crew in Hollinswood Shopping Center. I would work there overnight and then go to high school at Lansdowne High in the morning,” Greene says. When Pantry Pride was bought by Food-A-Rama, Greene went to work in the one then located on Eastern Avenue and Eaton Street in Highlandtown.

Finally, at age 18, Greene was able to take a “block test” to see if he was good enough to get into the union. During the eight-hour test, he was given a whole lamb. Union members and supervisors from Food-A-Rama watched him the entire time he was butchering, making sure that he got the right kind and number of cuts out of the lamb, and checking to see if he made as much money from the animal as he could.

Greene finished in two-and-a-half hours. “You’re done,” was all they said to him. Greene began to panic, thinking he had done something wrong. Instead, he had nailed it. And his salary immediately doubled. He spent 18 years working with the company through all its transitions. Much of that time was spent as a butcher, doing the work he loved. But the grocery-market industry was changing. For a while, Greene worked as a “fix-it” guy, someone who would supervise the grand reopening of a store, figure out why one place had problems with its meat inventory, or why another was throwing too much away. He changed companies and worked in various roles. But no longer as a butcher.

As supermarkets evolved, instead of having butchers on-site, they brought in pre-packaged cuts of meat. Greene believes this is because pre-packaged meat is produced by machines run by computer systems that are programmed to cut certain sizes, greatly reducing a business’ overhead. While more-efficient customers could no longer ask for a specific number of pounds or to have a roast—or any other kind of meat for that matter—cut smaller, or thinner, or just the way they wanted it. They had to buy what was there.

“If I had to guess, I would say that with meat, the labor cost has been cut about 75 percent,” says Greene.

Greene was working about 100 hours a week and had traded in his butcher’s apron entirely. “I was a suit-and-tie guy, believe it or not,” he says. Then one day he stopped home just after Thanksgiving. His daughter, Erica, who was about 11 at the time, looked up at him and asked, “Daddy, when’s the next time you’re going to be home?”

“I melted,” admits Greene. He told his employer that after the Christmas season he was leaving. He went to work at another grocery-store chain as the meat manager, but soon realized the job wasn’t what it was billed to be. Greene says that all the meat workers, instead of cutting meat, had to stand on the sales floor and schmooze with customers about what they were having for dinner that night, and did they want to try a nice rump roast?

“They wanted me to be a freaking salesman. That was it. I was done. I retired from the meat industry,” says Greene.

Sometimes, though, life has a way of calling you back where you belong.

While shopping in Reds, which was located in the store where Greene’s is now, Greene realized that they sold meat in addition to liquor, beer, and wine. He looked over their merchandise and said he could do better. They hired him in 2018 and Greene tied the butcher’s apron back on. When Reds closed in December that same year, people told Greene he should open his own store, which had always been his dream. He went home and talked with his wife, Dawn, but they decided that it was beyond their reach.

Fast forward to February 2019. On the weekend of their wedding anniversary, Greene and Dawn were sitting on the sofa watching a movie on the Lifetime channel, when he got the feeling he was being stared at. When Greene looked at Dawn, she was watching him and crying her eyes out.

“What’s wrong?” he asked. She had been thinking about him and his dream of opening a store. “You need to go fulfill that dream,” he remembers her saying. “Go open that store.”

Greene managed to cobble together the funds and on Mar. 1, he signed the lease to the location on Belair Road in Kingsville. For two months, Greene worked by himself to prepare the store, scrubbing every wall, floor, the cases—everything. He repainted. He built a coffee bar that people see as soon as they walk into the store. He had no suppliers yet. Didn’t even own a cash register. So he reached out to everyone he knew in the industry. The hard work paid off.

When Greene’s Family Butcher Shop opened in June 2019, Greene wanted to bring back the old-fashioned family butcher and great customer service that he had learned all those years ago working at Ray’s. Today, Greene sources his beef from Nebraska, Iowa, and Colorado, and other major cattle farms in the Midwest; his poultry from Mountaire Farms of Delmarva; his pork from fresh hog farms in Pennsylvania and North Carolina; and his lamb from Pennsylvania. He hand cuts everything from pork chops to lamb chops for his customers—whatever they want, exactly how they want it.

In March 2020, Dawn suggested that her husband begin doing a Facebook Live session every morning before the store opened. It proved to be serendipitous, as the pandemic would halt much in-person retail later that month. Greene continues the sessions to this day, offering customers views of the groceries, meats, and specials, so they see everything before they come in to shop. He ends every one by thanking his customers for their support.

Greene has some challenges, as all businesses do. One is paying his overhead.

“Your bills are going to keep coming, even if people don’t,” he says.

So he keeps giving people what they want—including products from other local small businesses. Greene’s carries products from Jeppi Nut, Todd’s DIRT (dry rubs and marinades), Berger Cookies, Fisher’s Popcorn, J.O. Spices, South Mountain Creamery, Log Cabin Candy, as well as produce from Lohr’s Orchard in Churchville, Zeke’s Coffee, and Woodlea Bakery items, among others. He recently added honey from a local beekeeper—and sold out of it immediately.

But meat is his passion. As for his personal favorite cut, Greene says, “I’m a sirloin steak eater, and that will never change. I love loin meat. It’s got a great flavor and a little chew to it.” That’s one reason he takes special orders—he wants all customers to get what they want, too.

He can also stand behind the provenance of his meats. Greene says that large packing houses that supply pre-packaged meats can kill 5,000 head of cattle a day. Particularly when buying pre-packaged ground beef, one could be eating meat from many different animals. At Greene’s he cuts one animal at a time.

“I don’t ever combine them,” he explains. “The flavor’s going to be different; the fat content will be different.”

He removes the cartilage from ground meats, too, resulting in a taste that’s far superior to anything you can find in the typical grocery aisle. Customers can tell the difference. Regular customer Dawn Borowy comes from Joppa to buy meat for her family.

“If you go to the grocery store and buy any kind of roast, you have to take what they have. You can’t always get what you want,” she explains. “I can go to Greene’s and buy a one-pound filet and have it cut into quarters. Sometimes you spend a little more, but other times you don’t. For example, if the whole filet is $29.99, the four pieces are just $7.50 each. You can’t buy a filet mignon for that price in the grocery store.”

Borowy also shops there because she likes that the meat is bright red, as opposed to pink, as it is in many grocery stores. “You’re not going to get the same quality of meat in a grocery that you get at Greene’s. It’s fresh meat without preservatives,” she says. “And I can get exactly what I want.”

 

“‘YOU NEED TO GO FULFILL THAT DREAM,’ HE REMEMBERS HER SAYING. ‘GO OPEN THAT STORE.’”

 

 

Jane Dorsey is a family friend who has known Greene for more than 30 years. “[Customers] want an excellent product, and they want excellent customer service. You’re going to find both here. He takes pride in what he does,” she says. “This is his dream, and it’s finally come true.”

Besides taking you back in time with fresh meat wrapped in white butcher paper, Greene does something else that small corner stores used to do. Every adult who comes in gets a free cup of coffee, and every child gets a treat.

“They don’t want to be in here with mom or dad. They want to be outside playing,” he says. “But they see Mr. John, and they get a pack of cookies or a candy bar.”

This personal touch keeps people coming back. And people appreciate that Greene’s is a family affair. Out of the seven kids in his blended family with wife Dawn, two of them—Josh and Gavin—work full-time at the store. While Gavin eventually wants to work for the Maryland State Police, Josh, who has learned to become a butcher like his dad, can see himself taking over the business one day.

While the number of butchers has shrunk, Greene is not going anywhere for quite some time.

“There’s none of me left. I was taught by dinosaurs, and all [those] dinosaurs are dead,” he says. “Now, I’m the dinosaur.”

Parts & Labor, Spike and Amy Gjerde’s meat-focused restaurant/butchery in Remington will sell its last locally sourced lamb chop this week.

The five-year-old restaurant will officially close after dinner service on August 5.

While the space opened to critical acclaim, the unique practice of purchasing whole animals from local farmers presented challenges in profitability. The staff learned of the news late last week.

While plans are still unfolding, there will be events and celebrations up to the last dinner service this Sunday.

“We might continue to keep the bar open a few days a week through the closing of the restaurant,” says managing partner Corey Polyoka.

As he weighs why the concept didn’t work, sitting in a booth at one of the restaurant’s final lunch shifts on a Saturday afternoon, Gjerde is in a deeply reflective mood.

The restaurant’s closing, “was a long time coming” Gjerde says. “Of course restaurants come and go and open and close and that’s part of life, but at its heart, Parts & Labor was a deep dive into the economics of local meat.”

While Woodberry Kitchen—which relies almost entirely on locally sourced ingredients—raised awareness of local sourcing and helped educate consumers, Parts & Labor presented new challenges and took the concept to another level.

It was the first restaurant in the state to practice whole animal seam butchery, attempting to use every part of the animal product in production.

“We took what we understood about local beef and lamb and goat and poultry and scaled it so that we could continue upon the work that we were doing at Woodberry,” explains Gjerde. “I knew that if we were going to do anything else in the city and serve meat, we needed to do it on our terms with thoughtful local producers.”

While Gjerde knew that there would be hurdles, the goal turned out to be a little too lofty, with many factors working against a local outfit. Food costs were higher and the public was exposed to cuts or types of meat—like coulotte steak (cut from the sirloin cap) or organ meats—that they might not otherwise know.

“Our collective understanding and expectation of what meat costs and how it gets to us has been formed by industrial meat production in this country,” says Gjerde. “That means that we have everything from dollar burgers at fast-food joints to beef and pork in supermarkets, and everything in between. When you take out the efficiencies of mass industrial processing operations and bring that back to the local level, you are at a tremendous disadvantage based on what people expect.”

Polyoka says that not pursuing USDA approval was also a factor that contributed to their demise. “We developed butcher’s cuts that were out of pure need to get as much value out of the whole carcass as possible,” he says. “[Because we lacked USDA approval], we could only sell meat in our own retail shop or to restaurants that we are connected with—we couldn’t push it into different channels.”

Gjerde cites statistics he has written in his phone, saying he is proud of the fact that value was returned to growers. “We put almost $4,000,000 back into the economy, and $2.5 million was beef, pork, lamb, goat, chicken, and duck—almost all of it from Maryland.”

As the restaurant changed menus and concepts in an effort to be more profitable, six or so months ago, Gjerde, Polyoka, and butcher George Marsh had to face the inevitable reality that it was likely time to close.

“We probably held on a lot longer than most people would have,” says Gjerde, who still owns six other spots, including A Rake’s Progress in D.C., as well as a successful canning operation. “We realized we were having trouble paying the growers—and that’s not why we are here. We were in major arrears, but at this point it’s a break-even scenario.”

While the news saddened staff, Gjerde and Polyoka wanted to be thoughtful about the closing.

“For me, in a few of the restaurants I worked in as a young cook or pastry chef, I found out that they were closing because when I got there, the doors were padlocked shut—and that was all the notice that I ever got that the restaurant was closing,” says Gjerde, who won the James Beard Award for Best Chef: Mid Atlantic in 2015.

“I didn’t want that for this place or for these people or for our guests. Some of the families who come to this shop are my favorite people. They know that they could have paid less elsewhere but they wouldn’t get the quality of the meat that we’re doing anywhere else—connecting with these people has made it worth it.”

But Gjerde remains resolute. “We are not done with this,” he says. “But when we do it again—it’s not if but when—it will be with all of the knowledge and a much deeper understanding of how this actually works. We wouldn’t make the mistake of not having USDA again. And my biggest mistake is that I confused processing space with restaurant space—and those are two very different things.”

With the closing of the space, Gjerde is still sounding the alarm that, as consumers, we should consider the sourcing of everything we eat, especially meat.

“The reasons we thought it was important to do Parts & Labor are still out there—if anything they are more urgent,” he says. “Commodity meat production in this culture and all the environmental and social impacts and even the health issues that come from having this unending supply of cheap meat is a problem. Parts & Labor was what I thought was a rational response to what was wrong about the way we eat meat in this country.”

And while the restaurant enters its final week, the duo is far from giving up on the concept.

“I had high hopes for what Parts & Labor could do immediately for the local food systems,” says Gjerde. “But we’re not done.”

Much as he helped revitalize the Woodberry area of Hampden with Woodberry Kitchen, Spike Gjerde has transformed a blighted block of Remington into gastronomic gold with his latest farm-to-fork venture Parts & Labor. From inside this former car- and tire-repair shop, Gjerde has created a menu of cured meats, pork chops, and sausages cooked on an open hearth built of reclaimed Baltimore City cobblestones. It’s clear from the concept that the James Beard award finalist has a thing for the past. His idea—unfussy preparations all employing an element of open fire—harkens back to simpler times, but he’s put his own unmistakable Spike spin on it, continuing his commitment to engage with the agricultural economy of the Chesapeake region. (Even the
utensils—coming from Liberty in Sherrill, NY, the only U.S. manufacturer of stainless-steel flatware—have a local-as-possible provenance here.)

The front of the space features a nostalgic butcher shop with a wide selection of locally sourced meats such as pork from Whistle Pig Hollow and beef from Liberty Delight Farms. To further the feel, shelves are stocked with Gjerde’s house-made pickled and canned goods and handmade beeswax candles.

All of this, of course, is a preamble to the homey, hipster dining space with an equal amount of high-top communal tables and private booths. So when our hostess asks if we’d like to sit at a community table, we feel slightly misanthropic saying, “No.” Still, we are ushered past the heat of the hearth and settle into our private booth with a great view of the bustling bar area showcasing 20 brews on tap (from stouts to India pale ales) and a so-called growler station where they sell craft beer, lots of it local, to go.

It’s clear from the concept that the James Beard award finalist has a thing for the past.

Meat is the mainstay of the menu here, and butchering is practiced as high art. That’s not surprising when you consider that George Marsh, Gjerde’s head butcher is, in fact, a former art student. These days, he practices his craft in the form of whole-animal butchery, utilizing every part of the animal, which means there are cuts of meat represented here that you won’t find on other area menus.

While dry-aged cuts, including bottom blade (shoulder) and cattleman’s (beef knuckle), as well as organ meats (pig tail and blood sausage) and cured meats (garlic salami), are showcased, it’s a true testament to the kitchen’s deft touch that even vegetarians are flocking to Parts & Labor for seasonal salads and vegetable sides.

With the help of our server Nate (total Best-of contender), who helped guide us through unfamiliar fare, we started with a round of appetizers. We could have made a meal of the creamy cave-aged blue cheese paired with sour-cherry jam and a baguette made in Woodberry’s oven. The spicy cheese snack—in which grated cheddar and house-made cream cheese play off pickled onions and fish peppers—was equally flavorful, and the kale salad tossed with beets, strawberries, and house-made apple dressing was spring personified on a plate.

Even the meat entrees—served sliced—are meant for sharing, which adds to the communal vibe. Though the inventive sandwiches tempted us—a pork chop on a pretzel bun sounded promising, for example—we stuck with a robustly flavorful culotte steak and a buttery tri-tip. Both dishes were accompanied by an assertive herb-onion relish that gave great kick to the mellower meat. For even more palate punching, a bottle of house-made “Snake Oil” (fish pepper, cider, and sea salt) was served on the side.

The most adventurous among us ordered the Pride & Joy, a medley of pork skirt and kidney, strewn with fish peppers, toasted garlic, and cilantro with lettuce for wrapping. The plate—clean in no time—spoke for itself.

As every side arrived—grilled or griddled on the hearth—we proclaimed each one our favorite. In the final analysis, however, the griddled potatoes, crisp-crusted and screamingly hot from the grill, as well as stewed wood-ash hominy flecked with Anaheim peppers and tomatoes, were the clear winners.

Though the meal could have been heavy, we took the tapas approach, saving space for dessert. The quality and consistency of most everything we ate carried through to the final finish. The real dessert dazzler was a strawberry-rhubarb pie, offering lip-puckering tartness balanced by a blanket of sweet crumble.

By meal’s end, as every one of the 84 seats in the house was taken, our only lament was that a 7 p.m. reservation in a private booth was not going to be easy to score again. Next time around, we vowed, we’re willing to commune with everyone else.

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PARTS & LABOR 2600 N. Howard St., Baltimore, 443-873-8887.
HOURS Dinner: Sun.-Thurs., 5-10 p.m. Fri.-Sat., 5-11 p.m. 
CUISINE Farm-to-table with an emphasis on hearth-cooked meat.
PRICE Appetizers: $2-14; entrees: $9-25; desserts: $4-8.
ATMOSPHERE Farm chic in a rehabbed automotive shop.