A kitchen attached to a craft butchery elicits thoughts of guiltless indulgence. Here’s a chance to eat clean, humanely raised meat, creatures that ambled through local pastures, instead of huddled and harassed in factories and feed lots.
Fleishers Craft Kitchen is the culinary expression of an ethos and a business created by the merger of the 4-year-old Saugatuck Craft Butchery in Westport with Fleishers Grass-fed and Organic Meats, a leader in traditional whole-animal butchery using local, pasture-raised meat and poultry. Fleichers has shops in Greenwich, Park Slope and Kingston, N.Y. (Greenwich has a Kitchen Counter serving sandwiches and burgers.)
Fleishers Craft Kitchen has a clean, bare, industrial-chic look with gray walls, white subway tiles and sturdy butcher-block tables supported by metal piping. A covered porch with heating lamps adds extra seating to the narrow dining room and counter facing the open kitchen.
The menus for lunch, brunch and dinner are focused. At dinner: whole roasted chicken, lamb braised or burgered, pork (ribs or chop) and steak. Prices range from $22 to $28 and MP for the steak. Nothing offal. The appetizer of crispy pig once offered pig ear and fried skin, but the market didn’t embrace the ear. Chicarrones with smoked paprika remain on the menu.
Steak frites at lunch ($18), ribeye cut from the tender muscles that run along the top of the ribs, was served as a polite, boneless, almost lady-like rectangle of beef, topped with a round of herb butter. A cap of fat added flavor. The meat had little marbling, but was well seasoned, and though lacking a sear, was cooked rare as requested. The frites were homemade, thin, flat and short. My dining companion was bummed out by the pile of “potato nubbins” too short to dip into ketchup.
The Craft Burger was composed of excellent, flavorful, aged ground beef. The soft sesame seed bun sogged from juices released from the burger. The flavors were enjoyable, with the sweet, saltiness of bacon jam and freshness of baby black kale. An onion ring on the burger added crisp crunch, followed by a hand-to-mouth struggle with a tough outer ring of onion.
Apple & Fennel salad ($12) brightened young kale with strips of juicy sweet, tart, crisp apples tossed in bacon vinaigrette and sprinkled with rich pistachio nuts. The salad is large, good for sharing, one of the best kale salads around.
Fleishers is starting a “Butchers Meat Brewers” dinner series, craft brewers pouring special beers and Fleisher’s butchers “serving meaty dishes with cuts from our own cases.” The bi-weekly series runs through March 9. Reservations are required.
Fleishers Craft Kitchen, 580 Riverside Ave., Westport, is open Monday through Friday, 10 a.m. to 3 p.m.; Saturday and Sunday, 9 a.m. to 3 p.m.; for dinner, Tuesday through Saturday, 5:30 to 10 p.m. Information: 203-226-6328 and fleishers.com.
