charcuterie – Shott On Location

In a fancier setting, sliced meats like these — coppa, mortadella, nduja — would merit a fancier menu heading. Amid the candle-lit smug of your average wine-centric corner bistro, this sort of stuff is commonly called “charcuterie” and it typically arrives served on a wood plank with pickles, olives and maybe, if you’re truly lucky, a tiny shrimp fork to stab yourself with. Here at Baltimore’s Parts & Labor, a former tire depot turned butcher shop and beer hall with a big wood-burning hearth, the language is a little different. You find a lot of similar things: salami, country ham, corned beef tongue. On the menu, though, you’ll find them listed under a quainter title: “From the Salt House.” That’s because the bearded guy with the band saw behind the butcher case isn’t especially fond of the usual butcher-board terminology. “To call it ‘charcuterie’ doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to me,” says P&L’s executive chef and head butcher George Marsh. Continue reading “Meet George Marsh, the Baltimore Butcher Who Rejects the Word ‘Charcuterie’”

Sherry-spiked saucisson, Fernet Branca–spiked salami, Cynar-spiked swordfish: with so much booze in the food, it’s hard to imagine that Cure, chef Justin Severino’s quasi-quaint charcuterie spot in Pittsburgh, started out just two years ago as a bone-dry BYOB. “We had almost no money,” Severino says of his fashionably rustic-looking restaurant’s humble roots. No, Cure’s chef-owner didn’t grow up in a barn. He merely reconstructed one inside an urban retail setting, with interior walls of reclaimed wood and meat hooks for coat hangers. “We opened minimally,” he says. Surviving for so long on food sales alone is a big source of pride for Severino: “We had a year and a half to gain success without selling liquor, and restaurants don’t typically do that that easily.” Nowadays, however, the hooch is in high supply, both at the bar and in the kitchen. And the chef himself couldn’t be happier about having a properly stocked shop from which to sip and to experiment. “I like to drink adult beverages and I tend to be a bit of a snob about what those things are,” he says. Continue reading “Meet Justin Severino, Pittsburgh’s Sultan of Spiked Salami”