artdirector@sfreporter.com
Food
Gabe Archuletta surveys soon-to-be charcuterie.
As everyone in my life is probably tired of me mentioning, I don’t eat meat (although I did eat a hot dog a couple weeks ago), but I’m still fascinated by the world of the local butcher. It’s an old-school job for one, which is pretty interesting. More importantly, it’s like an antidote to the impacts of factory farming on climate change, the environment at large and even just health in general. I do believe everyone should eat less meat, and given the emissions of factory farms and the water needed to satiate the American meat obsession, we’re looking at major shifts in our lifetime. It seems one of the only ways to responsibly and sustainably work around that and consume like an omnivore is to frequent one’s local butcher.
In Santa Fe, that’s traditionally been easier said than done. Previously, we had a little shop in the Solana Center that didn’t last, but we also faced an intense period of time wherein, when it came to meat, folks could hit up grocery stores (with a shoutout to Kaune’s for its excellent butchery practices and selection) or nothing.
Today, Santa Feans can pop by two dedicated butcher shops, including the recently opened Beck & Bulow, but today we’ll be focused on the Dr. Field Goods Butcher and Deli (2860 Cerrillos Road, 474-6081; 10 am-5 pm Tuesday-Saturday; 471-0043) because of its head butcher, Gabe Archuletta. Not only is Archuletta both a real-life punk rock hero who has played drums with bands like Colossal Swan Dive and Knowital, he’s trained up in the carnivorous arts like woah after culinary school at the French Culinary Institute in New York City and years in restaurants after that.
SFR: How long have you done butchery and how’d you get into it?
Gabe Archuletta: After graduation from culinary school, I worked at various restaurants through the years, and I managed to pick up a lot of experience working in kitchens. So a restaurant I worked at in Brooklyn had a butcher shop and was very protein-heavy and using its own products for its menu, which was cool. That was called Marlow and Sons Diner, and the butcher shop was called Marlow and Daughters. But really, I just kind of fell into it. Butchery and kitchens fit my music lifestyle. I could play shows late, after work, and if we went on the road there was always a kitchen job available when I came back. Food kind of found me, I didn’t really find it. Same with the butchery, too.
As far as Field Goods goes, how’d you get in over there?
I’ve known [owner/chef] Josh [Gerwin] since junior high, but I hadn’t seen him until I worked at the restaurant. There was another butcher shop in town slated to open and I was going to be one of the main butchers, but I was waiting and waiting to hear back and didn’t, so I finally took the job over at Field Goods. It’s been eight years, and mainly my time is spent in the butcher shop, maintaining the proteins for the restaurant. We have the restaurant in Albuquerque, too, and I do wholesale stuff in town here as well—Radish & Rye, and I’ve done Café Pasqual’s in the past and right now I’m doing the Black Bird [Saloon] out in Cerrillos.
Having been at Field Goods since it opened, were people happy to have the option in Santa Fe?
We do have a lot of consistent customers who come in and have been coming in from the beginning, and it’s probably the only place they get their meats from. They know where it comes from. The way this process happens is way different than a grocery store. First off, we do whole animals. We get them from a farmer, locally sourced—it’s sustainable agriculture. We pick them up ourselves, I butcher them in-house from head to tail. Most grocery stores, pretty much all big box ones, are getting meat sent in boxes and they cut them on a bandsaw. I think it takes a bit more knowledge to do this…the anatomy and the muscles, how all that works; what’s better suited for different applications rather than only having popular cuts. Having the chef background, I can tell people the proper ways to utilize things and cook things. Since we do the whole animal, we get variety.
With plant-based items becoming such a big deal, have you seen any notable shifts in the industry?
Not so much. There are always going to be meat eaters. I know plant-based is pretty popular right now, but I know it’s not the best stuff, either. It’s a lot of processing to achieve that….There’s some nasty stuff that goes into it.
Is the idea of sustainability and ecological impact on your mind?
That’s our whole philosophy. We’re always going to use locally sourced agriculture, and number one is with the animals we get. We have a source for all our beef and pork—our two highest-selling proteins. We do others as well, but mainly beef and pork, and we source it from ranches around New Mexico. We’ll get some stuff from Colorado and Texas, but not really farther than that.
What do you wish people knew when it comes to butchers and butcher shops?
We try to be as consistent as possible even if we don’t have every single thing. We’re just not one of those places where we have the volume to provide 10 pounds of ostrich sphincters or something, and it’s not a store where it’s, like, a Boar’s Head counter and you can walk in and get two pounds of salami—it takes time. It’s small batch and limited quantities. You can tell the time that’s taken to make something by hand.
