The Butcher and Grocer: Meat with a Mission
Tony Tanner, the 49-year-old founder and owner of The Butcher and Grocer, is a proud lifelong East Sider, having lived in Columbus, Pataskala and Eastmoor, but “never on a road that didn’t intersect with East Broad.”
After an initial phone interview, we have connected at his shop. Tony is six feet tall, broad-shouldered, bearded and affable. Former high school athlete? “Wrestler,” he confirms.
After growing up in a politically engaged family, Tony took a sociology degree at Ohio University and spent the next 11 years immersed in local and state politics and government, jobs that included serving with State Auditor Dave Yost. He even met wife Kristi, a Governor Voinovich staffer, while working on the re-election campaign.
Then, on election night of 2014, Tony’s life changed. A close friend died of a rare cancer that he believed was linked to his diet. “Once he died, I started doing my own research about health and food and food processing.”
“The marketing of meat in particular was not what I would call always honest,” Tony says. With a reformer’s zeal, Tony decided that if he couldn’t find a butcher shop that sold the kind of local, farm-raised meat that he wanted to buy, then he would open one.
Kristi’s response— “Are you out of your *** mind?”—might have daunted a less-determined man, but Tony pressed on.
Left: Everything in the meat case comes from Ohio farmers. Right: Butchers work on site at the Grandview store.
A neighborhood feel
In the meantime, he began his quest to find local farmers who raised their meat the way his research told him was healthiest: “pasture-raised, non-GMO fed, and antibiotic and hormone free.”
After more than a year of sourcing Ohio meats and foods, Tony opened The Butcher and Grocer with two butchers on July 5, 2016, in Grandview Heights, in a quaint row of stores “with a neighborhood feel.” On board as his producers were one beef farmer, two pork farmers, one chicken farmer and as many Ohio-made products as he could find.
(Spoiler alert: Tony now has six beef, seven pork and three poultry farmers, which guarantees him a steady supply of meats.)
He is unstinting in his praise of the farmers he works with. “They’re the hardest-working people I know,” he says. “They put their entire lives into farming,”
Local customers flocked to the new store; those from further afield urged him to open a shop in their own neighborhoods. My youngest son, Justin, formerly a grill cook at Worthington Inn, raved to me about Tony’s meats: “the best in town!”
The wholesale side of Tony’s business grew quickly as farmers continued to contact him about selling their meat. To further showcase the shop’s meats, he purchased a neighboring restaurant when it closed and reopened it as Cleaver.
The ultimate accolade came in November 2020, when a Food & Wine magazine article named The Butcher and Grocer one of the “Best 100 Butcher Shops and Meat Markets in America,” illustrated by a photo of the shop’s morcilla (Spanish blood sausage) links in the shape of a heart.
“It was so exciting,” Tony says. “It still is. We’re just a little butcher shop trying to provide Central Ohio with the best beef, lamb, pork and chicken you can get.”
Top: Tony Tanner at his new wholesale facility, TB&G Meats. Bottom Left: Customers face a wide variety of sausage choices. Bottom Right: The small shop allows few staff and customers at a time during the pandemic.
Pandemic times
The business was flourishing and ready to expand when the pandemic struck. As the owner of an essential business, Tony counts himself lucky.
“The biggest obstacle is that the shop is small,” allowing only two staff and four customers in the front of the store at one time. But, Tony says, “The customers have been so accommodating. Sometimes there’s a line of people standing outside.”
That’s the plus side of the ledger. On the minus side, the wholesale business has plummeted from 30 clients to eight. And like the rest of the restaurant industry, Cleaver struggles.
Tony laments the difficulty of running a business when the rules keep changing. And he is “disappointed in everybody in Washington for not putting relief where it needed to be, especially with service workers, who are pretty much out of work. It’s sad.”
Inside story
Outside the shop, a few customers, well-bundled against the cold, wait their turn beneath an old-timey wooden sign displaying a butcher’s cleaver. Inside, a gleaming 12-foot-long meat counter beckons, replete with roasts, chops, steaks and cutlets.
Tony gestures. “Everything in the meat case is from Ohio. The tasso and mortadella and capicola are made in-house. So is the terrine. The meat is ground fresh every day.”
I stare at and later purchase from an enormous sausage display: lemon prosciutto, Mexican sweet corn, triple jalapeño and black bean, green chorizo, cheesy Texas toast, carbonara, rice pipian, sweet Italian, hot Italian, honey breakfast, blueberry breakfast, spicy annatto.
Sausage maker Nathan Killen’s hashtag is #sausagescientist. I would add #sausageartist and #sausagewizard.
Cheeses, largely from Ohio, are displayed in a case at the back. Shrimp and salmon were originally purchased to help restaurants that needed to dispose of their inventory in the first lockdown, but have since become a fixture for customer convenience.
The very back of the store is the butchers’ domain. Tony employs both butchers and butchers-in-training. “It’s nice to know we’re expanding the footprint of trade butchers by training new, homegrown ones here.”
Grandview resident Jeff Schleeter, choosing his order at the meat counter, agrees. “It’s like going to an old-school butcher,” he says. “Their meat is fresh, I know it’s good and it’s cut to order. And it’s all local Ohio.”
In the meat locker, I see whole lamb carcasses dangling amidst shelves crowded with pork and beef. “Chicken is the only thing that comes in frozen,” Tony tells me. “That’s because they’re all raised from May to October. We get about 1,200 chickens at a time.”
Opposite the meat counter are pastas, sauces, spice rubs, crackers, pickles from Ohio, Columbus and Southern Ohio craft beer and wine from all over, which customer Kellen Shields describes herself as “obsessed with.”
“The wine selection is incredible,” she says, but it was the “unique flavor” of the sausages that first won her heart, as well as the “customer service” and “amazing people.”
The original shop soon will be joined two more.
The future is now
Not one to wait on a pandemic to expand his business, Tony is in the midst of opening a 4,000-square-foot wholesale facility in a former brewery on James Road, near Port Columbus, to be called TB&G Meats.
Four butchers will break down whole animals there, then distribute smaller cuts to their butcher shops. “Our sausage production will be there, too, to keep everything consistent. And we’ll have an indoor smokehouse to smoke large cuts of meats like hams.”
Still in the planning stage are two new Butcher and Grocer shops, one to be in Shawnee Hills in the Dublin-Powell area and the other slated for The Trolley District, the new development near Franklin Park.
When asked how he first knew that The Butcher and Grocer was a success, Tony laughs ruefully. “I’m pretty serious about this. We’re only five years in. We’ve had success, but we haven’t reached our potential. I see every new day as a day to get better, to grow.”
The Butcher and Grocer
1089 W. 1st Ave., Grandview Heights
614-372-5376
Check thebutcherandgrocer.com for hours.
Cleaver restaurant
1097 W. 1st Ave., Grandview Heights
614-914-8507
Check hours at cleavergrandview.com.
