Brooklyn Butcher Torch Cleaver Passed to New Generation
Major Market Meats, yesterday. (Tejal Rao)
In today’s Times story Brooklyn's New Culinary Movement, Edible Brooklyn (and Edible Manhattan) editor Gabrielle Langholtz is quoted comparing the borough’s burgeoning, largely independent small batch and craft food scene to the one found in “Berkeley in the 1970s.” The article describes a wave of brewers, picklers, cheesemongers, chocolate bar makers, and a genuine return to old-school butchering at locations like Marlow & Daughters, and the upcoming Prime Meats in Carroll Gardens. Frank Castronovo (of Frankies 457, and the upcoming Delightful Coffee Shop) summarizes the approach of the food movement, which involves using (for the most part) locally produced food, as the following: “Pre-industrial revolution tactics with food.”
Never mind that the interactive map accompanying the article about “new” food producers features landmarks like the Brooklyn Brewery, which opened in 1987. A lesser-noticed food story this week is the one about Brooklyn’s longest running butcher shops. The torch, in effect, is being passed this week to a new wave of meat cutters: 77-year-old butcher Jimmy Prince of Major Markets Meats on Mermaid Avenue has been working in the same shop since 1949. The shop itself has been open since 1932 and will close Saturday. Prince, who is known as a neighborhood legend/walking historical record, previously said he'd be leaving the business in part because nobody wanted to take it over. According to the Post, there were once 16 butcher shops along Mermaid Avenue in Coney Island. “What I'm most proud of,” the butcher told them earlier this week, “is that I never had to get a roll-down gate, no matter how rough the neighborhood got."
