Stix & Stones offers meats beyond the usual

The new Stix and Stones Butchery in Belfast city centre offers a few delicacies that you might not see in your usual High Street butcher, according to chef Kerry Roper.

The newly opened shop supplies pedigree beef to its parent business, renowned Belfast restaurant Stix & Stones, but is also open to the public.

Head chef Kerry Roper says it offers customers an authentic, sustainable, and fully traceable ‘raised to ready’ range of expertly butchered dry-aged beef.

Major considerations when designing the butchery included the sheer volume of beef used by the restaurant alone, as well as installing the dry ager.

“The butcher’s shop has opened just beside City Hall, in Wellington Place, and it includes a deli. It’s open to the public – so you can go in and buy any number of cuts, things that you probably wouldn’t find elsewhere, and we have our own dry ageing chamber,” Kerry says.

“You can put in a specific request, if you’ve got a special occasion coming up – say, a dad’s birthday or a Father’s Day situation, where you want a nice cut aged. We can dry age it in our chamber for you.

“We’ve also got a dry ager in the restaurant so it gives us a little more freedom if we want to put on specific speciality dishes or age cote de boeuf or T bones.”

The deli also stocks a range of treats including olives, tapenades and pestos by Tom & Ollie, as well as dry goods and sauces, Kerry says.

“Ideally you can go in, you can buy your steaks, you can get your pepper sauce and a couple of charcuterie boards and some other bits and pieces too, which is nice,” she says.

“It’s all state-of-the-art dry agers, brand new fixtures and fittings, with two nice long display deli fridges and then the butcher’s shop is at the back.

“It’s all open plan, so if you go there during the day, you can see our butchers working away.

“We do the likes of sausages and burgers as well – we’ve put our own take on a beef sausage, a pork sausage, and the butchers have worked with the chefs to create recipes for those types of things.”

The Butchery will offer some cuts that you might not see in your usual butcher’s, Kerry says.

“We’re dry ageing T-bones and cote de boeuf, the big cuts like that which are made for sharing or special family occasions. At any time, we’ll be ageing a certain amount of those so they’re available in abundance on special order, which is unique.”

To read the full feature in Neighbourhood Retailer magazine, click HERE.