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Yard Bull Meats offers butcher shop staples plus seasonal sausages, smoked meats and sublime seafood at its Roanoke brick-and-mortar.
Courtesy of Yard Bull Meats
Tyler Thomas, Owner & Butcher at Yard Bull Meats.
Before it opened its brick-and-mortar, Yard Bull Meats was popping up all over town. Perhaps you noticed the packages of beautiful bacon and fat steaks lining the coolers at Crystal Spring Grocery, or maybe you’ve sampled the superlative pastrami sandwich at Cardinal Bicycle & Café. If you’ve attended a recent pop-up at Golden Cactus Brewing, you might know that Yard Bull Meats is responsible for the smoked pulled pork and meatballs that top Eatza Pizza’s creative pies, or the ham and pulled pork piled on Food Hut’s Cuban sandwich. Now, at its South Roanoke shop, Yard Bull Meats can display its full range, showcasing old-world butchery techniques infused with culinary flair to offer fresh cuts, deli meats, seasonal sausages and smoked meats and fish.
Yard Bull Meats is co-owned by chef Tyler Thomas, who is also the executive chef at River & Rail, and Elliott Orwick, a certified butcher who honed his skills at Hickory Nut Gap Farm in Asheville. Thomas, who originally hails from Charlottesville, first developed a passion for whole animal butchery at JM Stock Provisions. He’s been trying to open a butcher shop since he moved to Roanoke six years ago; Orwick came on board when he moved to the area, about four years ago. It’s been a long road to opening but coming up with a business name was challenging too.
Courtesy of Yard Bull Meats
Elliott Orwick holding a Flinstone-style piece of Buffalo Creek Beef.
Yard bull is a riff on ‘yard bird’, a Southern term for chicken that’s inspired many restaurant and butcher shop names. Yard bull is still farm-centric, and when paired with ‘meats,’ conjures butchery, but yard bull is also the name given to the authority figure in a railyard who knocks hobos off trains. It’s a subtle nod to Roanoke’s rail city roots, but it underscores Yard Bull Meats’ mission to support the community, from the farmers and partners they work with to the customers they serve.
“Roanoke’s got all the foundations for a food community. We’ve seen so many people move to the area that are awesome and want to support a community like this,” Thomas says. “One of the main goals is to grow community. Roanoke is primed and ready for it.”
Thomas and Orwick see old-world butchery, one of their business’s defining principles, as a practice of community too. Broadly, they define old-world butchery as taking local products and serving them to local people. More specifically, old-world butchery is the craft of breaking down whole animal carcasses and utilizing each part to its fullest potential with very little waste (which makes financial sense, too).
“Old-world butchery hopefully evokes when [people] would’ve gone to a local butcher with their grandparents and seeing the process of breaking down whole animals and buying custom deli meats by the pound,” Orwick says. “We’re trying to bring that back into fold, in addition to working with local farms and purchasing humanely raised animals that we’re proud to sell.”
In the shop’s largest display case, you’ll find several different cuts of poultry, lamb, pork, and beef, including popular cuts such as rib eyes and tenderloins, and plenty of sausage. Between them, Thomas and Orwick have around 60 sausage recipes, so you’ll find staples such as hot and sweet Italian sausage, seasonal spins (like spring-ready ramp) and creative riffs like a Big Mac-inspired number Thomas learned to make at JM Stock Provisions. On the display’s top shelf, you’ll find deli meats alongside many smoked items. “We’re planning on doing roast beef, pit beef, pastrami, city ham, Tasso ham, bologna, salami cotto, pulled pork, smoked sausage, pâté and bacon. A lot of those things will get the kiss of smoke on ‘em,” Orwick says.
“All practices of making sausage, curing items, making deli meat—it’s bringing all the value out of the animal possible,” Thomas explains. “There’s a lot of love that goes into local animals. It’s a shame if we don’t finish it the way we are supposed to.”
Courtesy of Yard Bull Meats
Beef short ribs from Buffalo Creek Beef.
But an old-world inspired butcher shop also needs to be able to educate modern consumers. Often, butchers are left with overlooked cuts or ones that consumers are unfamiliar with, so showing customers these different options and giving them the cooking knowledge is important. For example, a Denver cut is comparable to a New York strip steak but not as expensive, especially if your butcher tenderizes it first and divulges their cooking tips.
“All you have to do is and walk in and say ‘Hey, what am I cooking for dinner?’” Thomas says. “We’ll start by asking ‘Do you like lean or fatty cuts?’ From there, ‘Are you going to use the grill or put this in a Dutch oven?’ We can walk you through and get you down to what you want to cook and what’s perfect for that application.”
The interior design at Yard Bull Meats evokes an old-school butcher shop feel, too. It’s outfitted with subway tiles and quarter-drawn oak floors that match the custom-built walk-in refrigerator door, which offers a window to peep at dry-aging steaks. Behind the case at the butcher block, shoppers can watch Orwick breaking down whole beef and pork and cutting them into primal cuts. Down a long hallway is a giant meat grinder and a glimpse of the kitchen where the team makes stocks, deli meats and sausages.
In addition to the large, meat-centric display case, there’s a smaller display case to showcase seafood, including local trout as well as sustainably sourced wild striped bass, yellowfin tuna, oysters and wild-caught salmon. Thomas hopes to flex his culinary creativity by produced plenty of smoked fish, and experimenting with dry aging it, such as curing tuna loin into pastrami.
From the refrigerator you can stock up on things you need to cook with or to accompany meats, including local dairy, top-notch butters, and lard; sauces, marinades and mustards; and pickles destined for charcuterie boards. The freezer, Thomas says, “is for things that you don’t know you need but need to have in your pantry: oxtail, chicken feet, soup bones, frozen stocks and broths. And staples like breakfast sausage, you always need to have in the freezer for Sunday morning.”
Yard Bull Meats will also offer their in-demand butchery classes and dinners, something the owners started at River & Rail but now have the capacity to host in the new space. “Typically, Elliott does most of the cutting while I do most of the talking,” Thomas says. “Something I’ve done 500 times or more, and same for him, seems slightly mundane or run of the mill. But it’s really rewarding at the end when they’ve hung on to every word you’ve said and asked the right questions. There’s a thirst for knowledge.”
There’s also clearly still a demand for meat, despite plant-based food trends dominating national headlines. Before they officially opened, Yard Bull Meats received requests for things like liverwurst and headcheese; they have the capacity to source specialty items too, say, a bone-in standing rib roast for the holidays. With Roanoke’s status as a burgeoning food community, there’s an appetite for farm-to-table food, too, which Thomas believes extends to meat as well. “We know the farmer that raised it, we’ve been to these farms, we know the delivery driver by name, we know every person who’s touched it. There’s more effort and it drives up cost, but we’re transparent because we’re not taking shortcuts.”
The story above is from our September/October 2022 issue. For more stories, subscribe today or view our FREE digital edition. Thank you for supporting local journalism!