Gourmet Meats

Masterton’s Gourmet Meats is a traditional butcher shop using new tools to revive the art of butchery. It was started by Dave Gallagher and his wife Megan in December 2013. She is a hairdresser with her own home-based salon. They have two sons, 12 and 10, who have both shown a keen interest in the shop.

Dave employs two staff alongside him : Viv Te Tua who is a fellow musician and lead guitar player in their Iron Maiden tribute band (he plays bass) and who Dave describes “as a brother from another mother” and his second cousin Shiobhan Gallagher, who fronts the shop. “She upsells all the time, loves to cook and is adored by our customers.”  Both Megan and Dave’s mother Margaret help out in the shop when required.

Dave trained as a butcher, completing his apprenticeship at Longs in Masterton in 1991.  “I was fortunate to be taught by true masters of the trade, who gave me an education that no-one gets now. If you asked a supermarket butcher how to make bacon, they wouldn’t know. I am also able to call upon one of those masters to help out when we get busy.”

Dave came second at the eighth Culinary Arts Festival and was the first Apprentice Butcher of the Year in New Zealand. He has worked in both traditional butcher shops and supermarkets.

He left the trade to join the Police, where he worked for 13 years including six as the sole charge officer at Eketahuna. “Policing in NZ is about sales and selling compliance with the law. Being sole charge teaches you how to get compliance without having to resort to force and getting to where you want to go in a gentle manner. The good thing about policing is I know how to relate to people and talk to them. We get quite a few of my former customers in here which is awesome.”

Gourmet Meats is all about buying local, and supporting local food producers. It’s about using methods which are almost lost. Like other small butcher shops, it’s about keeping the art of butchery alive.

Butchers shops were almost killed by supermarkets, Dave says. “To become a butcher in a supermarket now, you don’t need the same depth of knowledge you once used to have. It is a great shame our trade almost died. Our job, and I guess passion, is to revive the art, and pass it on to future generations.”

Dave set up the butchery in Lansdowne, a part of Masterton on the main road just north of town. It’s undergoing a revival, with the locals trying to make it into more of a village feel to attract new business. “And that was the only location I could find in Masterton,” Dave says.

Apart from chickens which come from Turks chicken farm at Foxton, all the meat they buy comes from local producers. “We have some fantastic farms in the area. We support local and we are supported by locals. Ethics is a big thing for me. It was really impressed on me in the Police and it is part of my make-up. I am also very firm on animal welfare and will not purchase meat from suppliers who don’t support that. I believe we have a duty of care in what we do, to get the very best product and utilise all of the carcass without wastage. We owe it to the animal.”

“One of our most exciting products is supplied by Maungahina Stud. They are at the top of their game with animal finishing and we are fortunate to be able to offer for retail sale Speckle Park Beef – but only after we dry age it for 21 days.”

“We do a few pre-packaged lines but most of our meat is in trays in the cabinet. People can buy just one chop, but if they were in a supermarket they would have to buy three or five at once. If they want something a bit different, we will do it.”

“I had a surgeon in the other day who just wanted to watch us work. People like watching you show your skills. They also love to have a chat and pick our brains on the best way to cook something. We all feel the customer interaction is one of the most important aspects of our trade. We always tell our customers they don’t need to buy in bulk, they can just come in every day. That way you don’t need your freezer. There’s a lot of humour and entertainment. We always give each other a hard time. It was like that when I was an apprentice.”

“A highlight of our shop is that we do things properly. When I was an apprentice, I spent almost three hours a day for three years making up corned beef silversides with a single needle. Very few people in the country would have made up that many. This also comes back to that depth of knowledge that I mentioned – the only way to perfect something is to do it and keep doing it for years.”

“It’s the same with sausages. We follow the recipe we have to the gram. I am a great fan of looking at old methods of doing things such as white pudding.  It is made up of chicken and pork, eggs and milk and five spices. We don’t use offal for our white puddings.”

“A butcher shop lives and dies on the quality of three things : its mince, its smallgoods and its corned beef. Anyone can sell the primal cuts, but the value and profit is in those three items. Mince has to be lean with no water or preservatives. Corned beef has to be perfect. This shows in our shop because we struggle each week. No matter how many we do, we always sell out of corned beef, mince and sausages.”

“We are passionate about our bacon and smallgoods and know that we are the only place to get the best tasting sausages and bacon in the area. We have also made a conscious decision to mostly supply gluten-free smallgoods, and by using rice or maize flour, they actually taste better than ones made with wheat flour.”

Customers can order on-line and they deliver all around the North Island. A courier picking up a delivery at 2pm in Masterton can be delivering it by 9.30pm in Auckland. Word of mouth is huge for the business, and that now means Facebook. They are avid users of Facebook and have a website to tell their stories. “We truly value our amazing customers, they are part of our family.”

“Even though there is no such thing as a master butcher qualification, a butcher who is a master of the trade is someone who knows how to cook the things they sell, and invests in the success of the customers’ purchases until they have eaten their meal. We have a vested interest in making sure they have enjoyed their meal and come back again. What surprises our customers is that we remember what they bought and ask how things went. Invariably the response is “We have never had such an awesome meal.” “We give them the best quality meat and the best advice on how to cook it, and ask them how it was. Other businesses which sell food finish their job when the customer walks out the door. Ours finishes at the dinner table.”

“We are the link in the chain from the farmer who puts all the time and effort and care into the animal, to the consumer at the end. We have a passion for what we do and we want to make sure that everyone enjoys what we sell and comes back.”