If you don’t want to know how the sausage gets made, avert your eyes from Piece of Meat.
But if you’re the type who likes to look under the hood, who appreciates plainspoken Old World processes and an open kitchen with nothing to hide, you’ll probably feel at home here.
Piece of Meat is a new Mid-City butcher shop with a restaurant built around it, and that restaurant gives a pretty clean view into what got the chorizo and T-bone and brisket to the table.
It’s snug. You walk around butcher cases and a glass-lined curing chamber to get through the room. The heart of the operation is a burly butcher block, and it's not here for show. It's kept in ongoing use by the kitchen crew. You can watch them work as you sit down for a sandwich and a beer, for a charcuterie plate and some wine or when you pop in for cut-to-order steaks to bring home.
From a perch at the bar, it looks like a demonstration kitchen of the butcher’s craft, and that’s the point.
“We want people to see the art and craft that goes into it,” said Daniel Jackson, who runs Piece of Meat with fellow butcher Leighann Smith. “People should know this doesn’t happen by magic or in a factory. It’s real people working with real meat.”
The display cases, open kitchen and dining bar are all components of Piece of Meat is a new butcher shop and eatery.
Advocate staff photo by Ian McNultyThe aim is to showcase the quality of meat from local, small-ag producers and the craft of old school butchery. A key supplier here is Home Place Pastures, a north Mississippi livestock farm with many local restaurant clients.
“We want to show people what meat is supposed to taste like when it’s produced the right way, and our way to do that is to combine a lot of different ideas in one place,” said Smith.
Piece of Meat opened over the weekend along a busy patch of Bienville Street just off Bayou St. John. Smith and Jackson both worked together at Cochon Butcher, the Link Restaurant Group’s downtown meat market/eatery. They developed Piece of Meat in partnership with the owners of Bayou Wine Garden and Bayou Beer Garden, a pair of related bars just next door. As their own cured meat production hits pace, they’ll supply the bars’ menus too.
Piece of Meat is a new butcher shop and eatery on Bienville Street in Mid-City
Advocate staff photo by Ian McNultyThe butcher case at Piece of Meat takes an international approach, ranging through Italian salumi, French terrines and Cajun andouille and boudin.
On the menu, there are sandwiches filled with smoked brisket, thick-cut corned beef or whole sausage. There’s a steak of the day and smoked St. Louis-style ribs, boudin egg rolls stuffed with pepper jack cheese and charcuterie plates. There’s farro salad and tomato and watermelon salad, and a roasted vegetable sandwich dubbed “no animals were harmed in the making of this sandwich.”
There’s a sense of humor at play, which starts with the cheeky name (underscored by a steel-forged logo of a fishnet-clad leg dangling a steak from its high heel). Look for clever touches like the light fixtures made from vintage meat grinders.
This corner address has seen a succession of short-lived joints through the years. It has been thoroughly renovated, with an interior lined with white tile and finished with old timbers. Picnic benches under awnings edge the exterior, and they provide most of the seating beyond the butcher counter dining bar.
Piece of Meat stocks some specialty deli items beyond the butcher case, like cheeses and sauces. It has a full bar.
3301 Bienville St. 504-372-2289
Mon., Tue.,Thu. (closed Wed.) 10 a.m.-8 p.m.; Fri.,Sat. 10 a.m.-9 p.m.; Sun. 10 a.m.-4 p.m.
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