How One NYC Butcher Serves Thousands of Restaurants Every Day

We process a few 100,000 pounds

of product every night.

We have the world's largest dry age room,

supplying some of the most noteworthy restaurants

in the country.

Being Pat LaFrieda in our company

comes with a huge responsibility

in that every decision I make,

I have to take into account the future of our 276 staff

to continue this plight

that my grandfather took us on back in 1922.

My dad took me to work with him to expose me

to the cold, to the hours, to the harshness.

I am here every night overnight

to make sure the meat is right and it gets out on time.

[upbeat music]

Hey, I'm Pat LaFrieda.

This is Pat LaFrieda Meat Purveyors.

We have a few hundred thousand pounds of meat to process

and get delivered by tomorrow morning

to a few thousand restaurants.

So let's get to work.

Come on inside.

We have a few security doors to get through.

We do feed about well over a million people a week.

So food security is very important here.

Yet another one.

We're gonna head now into production.

It is 6:20 right now.

Our first trucks leave at 2:00 AM

and those are for Boston and DC.

This is where most of our beef will come in.

It's put on these racks.

This is a robot type system

in which 2000 pound pallets get picked up

and brought to the other side and vice versa

as product is finished, each of these has about 2000 pounds

of product that's already been tested.

We have a USD inspector in each facility.

So they have an office in our buildings

and they're here with with us

throughout production, throughout the night.

Every day, each of these machines

in the morning, like when we're done with production,

they get broken down to their primal parts.

Each part is inspected, sanitized, cleaned

and then put back together in anticipation

of us doing a preoperative inspection before we begin.

We're gonna go visit Elvira Kya.

She's the head of QC.

She'll be swabbing some items to make sure

that our cleaning crew did what they're supposed to do.

We'll choose different parts of the machine,

ones that we think that are hardest to sanitize

and then swab those and then put it into this machine.

And this machine will give us a reading.

Our entire value as a company that's existed

for 100 years can be lost in a second

by just not following the safety protocols.

So it's something we take very seriously.

In a USDA facility,

even the floors get power washed, the walls,

the ceilings, pathogens can live anywhere.

This is the final test

to see if on a microscopic level, are we getting down

to all of those proteins and all of those fatty acids

so that we're not working

on top of anything from the day before.

So results on this, that looks great,

which is this gave us a zero pathogen reading

for fatty acids and for protein so that they don't exist.

But why don't we close the hatch

and let them run some products through it?

[upbeat music]

This is where we program

what size we want those steaks to be.

Can you do me a favor?

Can you set this to 44 porter house and gimme 18 T bone?

All of this is customizable.

The meat business is a very repetitive business,

but restaurants each have their own spec.

So when we dry age beef like this is about 28 days

and we can feel how dry the outside is

and it gets a little darker,

that's what's drawing water from it.

By doing that, we're leaving behind a denser beef flavor

and also the water that you would normally have to cook out

during the cooking process, it's already out

so you're not steaming a steak

and you won't have that gray cafeteria look

in using the dry age process.

But what we have to do is we have to shave

that first face off.

So just the paper thin slice off of that.

And then we're gonna go into our porterhouse steaks,

which really run out to here.

T-bones are about this section

and this is New York strip steak

and that laser is going to check the circumference of it

so that we could enter in exactly how many ounces

we want each porter house to be.

Now in my dad's day, this was a dream,

like my grandfather never thought

we would ever be able to have laser cutters.

When I was a child

and I worked with my dad on every day off I had from school,

we had two drivers and our fleet consisted of two vans.

My mom did the accounting and the bookkeeping

and my dad and one or two others were the butchers.

Now we have a staff of 276,

52 trucks plus two tractor trailers

and it's a fleet of its own.

The first cut is gonna cut off the exterior dry age

and then as you see,

it's gonna cut Porterhouses the same weight.

It has just got two Porterhouse stakes within one half

of an ounce variance, which is as accurate

as our industry demands.

So a machine like this, several hundred thousand dollars,

but it gives us two things.

Number one, safety.

The second thing is it increases

our efficiency by 6%.

6% in our business is huge, but we have these band saws

and some of my staff prefer

and feel safer using a band saw.

If you see the color gloves that they're wearing,

this green, if the eye of that machine

sees that green color within one inch of it,

it stops immediately using a pneumatic brake

in 0.02 seconds.

So the most we've ever had here is an injury

that maybe would've cost someone their hand

or at least a few fingers down to one stitch.

These machines are about 10 times more

than what a regular bandsaw cost.

So they're about 150,000 each.

But one of the best investments we've ever made.

[upbeat music]

One of the greatest things that happen to my industry

are the use of cell phone pictures.

I just got a picture of one of the machines

is not filling burgers correctly.

We call that a tongue.

So the meat is getting overworked

and over pushed into its form

to the point where some of it's coming out.

So if that was a seven ounce burger,

it's gonna weigh eight ounces.

That's gotta be a round burger

and we have to get to the bottom of it.

[machines whirring]

Isaac, can you show me that tongue?

Too much pressure is pushing through

is one of the possibilities,

but it looks like as we went on,

it kind of corrected itself.

We have five other QCs,

but the QCs are really down

to the operators, like they bring it to my attention.

Otherwise we would find out 10,000 pounds later

that we have a problem that now it's too late to fix.

So fixing it at this point is perfect.

[Speaker] In the way.

Did you slow it down, 20 strokes per minute.

You going too fast cause it's Thursday night,

the meat can only fill so quickly.

It's Thursday night, it's busy.

They know it's busy and it looks like

they had set the machine too quickly

so it's really pushing that meat in.

This man is responsible,

I mean for some of the greatest burgers

in New York City like Red Hook Tavern,

if he doesn't make Red Hook, we're in trouble.

In all, we have about 200,000 pounds of burger meat

that we will grind tonight.

At the head of all of this, the person who choreographs

what blends we're working on it and when is Willie

and he is up top, I always check in with him.

He'll gimme a really happy thumbs up

if everything's going well or he'll stop me

and we'll have a conversation about what's not going right.

Where it all starts is up here.

[upbeat music]

Yo, everything going good?

Good, very good.

Man is a genius.

He'll get those first initial labels

and he'll get counts of everything

that he needs to make and then he'll dictate.

Okay, you guys over there on this blend,

you guys over here on this blend,

he is putting the initial grinds through.

Those grinds are going up this conveyor

and it gets sprayed with a parasitic acid,

which is an intervention that the USDA prefers

and that retards the growth of any pathogen

that may be on the product.

He will then mix depending on what's coming out

of each combo bin, what he dictates to each side.

So we see nice big pieces of fat, nice big pieces

of protein, and then it's gotta get mixed.

That's what the next stage does.

And they go up to that conveyor.

That cross conveyor will then separate it

into one of four machines there

or one of four machines on that side.

We make about two to 250 different blends of meat

and those blends could be different cuts of meat

and different types of meat.

Like for instance, Shake Shack uses only ABF.

That's no growth hormones, that's no antibiotics.

They are the largest consumer,

the largest purchaser of ABF product in the world.

This is one of like 25 check-ins

I'll do with Willie tonight.

Right now everything's okay.

I need to check in with Eduardo Mattillo,

he's one of my senior butchers

and we've had some issues in the last few nights.

So most notably hanger stakes.

[upbeat music]

How you doing?

Do you have any hanger steak over here today?

Yeah.

So you back to tomahawks?

[Speaker 2] Yeah.

Hanger steaks, which is the butcher's cut,

is a very important cut for our restaurant groups.

One restaurant group in particular is Stephen Starr.

He owns about 25 different restaurants.

Most of them use hangar steak.

It's one of his favorite cuts,

but he likes it cut a certain way.

So I wanna make sure Manny's doing it the right way.

So a hanger steak,

it's not symmetrical.

So you'll have 2/3 of the muscle

on one side and then 1/3 on the other.

There are two ways to serve a hanger steak.

One is to cut them really long like this.

That's really not what Stephen wants.

He wants shorter, wider pieces

that all look very homogenous.

As you can see here,

it's got a piece of sinew that separates these two muscles

and that's the first thing that needs to be removed.

What I like to do first is to clear the outside

so that I can see what I'm looking at.

I'm gonna take this silver skin off.

This goes back three generations.

This is something that my grandfather taught me how to cut.

So when I was 10, I stood on a milk crate with my dad

to my left and my grandfather to my right.

And I was only trusted in splitting and tying inside rounds

and then slowly progressed towards things

that took a little bit more skill, like this piece

of fat here, we wanna get this off

without taking off too much protein.

'Cause the more protein you take off,

the less the yield is, the more expensive it costs.

This particular client, Stephen,

at his point in his life, he doesn't need to call me

to ask me about specific cuts and what would be best.

But that's the type of operator he is.

And I really have respect for restaurant owners

that are still in the trenches,

asking the important questions

to determine what's best for their restaurants.

So what I'm doing now is take this

and because this silver skin goes through the center

of these two muscles, you can see the septum right here.

I need to cut right on top of that.

So almost shaving.

You could see that silver skin, it takes years

to be able to to develop a feel for where does that end

and where does that begin.

So as I cut down, I want to cut right up against that

'cause that part has to come out.

That part is just too tough.

Find it again and then I'm going to use that

as a handle and then I'm gonna remove it.

Now I'll have my two pieces of edible hanger steak.

Where this would be not a bad steak,

but you see how it's very long.

He doesn't think that's very appetizing.

So in the way that it's shaped, if this is 11 ounces,

I know I can only get one eight ounce portion out of that.

So from one side I'll take about three ounces off

and that's gonna be my one eight ounce portion.

And then with this side, I'm able to cut two more.

So I'm able to get three portions out of this

with very little trim.

So that will increase my yield.

Now I need to take my gross weight

and figure out what did it cost me

and then what is it I'm able to sell,

which is one and a half pounds out of something

that started at about three.

You know the yield is about 50%.

So if it costs me $5, I have to charge 10.

And that kind of math is something

that we do all night long.

I'm constantly asking my team for gross and nets

because that's how we know,

it's one thing to like cut it to spec,

but you have to cut it efficiently

so that it's affordable for the customer.

So right now beef prices are higher than they've ever been.

So the amount of cattle right now

are as low as they were in 1971.

Anytime that happens, customers ask

for a second look at an economy cut.

This is not a very tender piece of meat.

It was called a butcher steak

because it wasn't easy to sell.

So the butchers wound up taking it home.

So growing up, this is something

that like my dad would've brought home.

By the end of the night we will have a few thousand pounds

of trim and we have a rendering company

that will come pick it up from us

and some of those companies will turn it into dog food

or something else that's even humanly edible.

But it's nothing that we have use for here.

As Manny finishes up on hangers, I would love to go around

and see the other two combos that came in

for our newest beef line, which is the PLF prime.

[upbeat music]

It's hand selected,

it's supposed to be the top 10% of marbling.

This would be the first time ever looking at it.

So let's see what it looks like.

We'll take photos now of the eye

and see how much marbling this has

compared to prime that we have

in any of these other tables.

In beef, we purchase about five million pounds a week.

It's a lot of product and we pay for it within seven days.

So everything behind these walls, over $10 million

worth of beef in here, all of that is paid for.

All of the risk is on me.

I mean, I see some really good pieces here, like this.

This is what we're looking for.

This is where the USDA determines whether it's select choice

or prime, prime being the highest grade,

choice being underneath that

and select being underneath that.

It's not only intramuscular fat,

it also has to do with cartilage.

If cartilage has turned into bone,

it's an older animal, it would not qualify.

So the meat has to be around 22 to 24 months of age.

We're putting them on the table right now

because we wanna take a look at them side by side

so we could see what exactly it is.

I could tell you right now, this marbling.

This is all abundant.

This is what they would call abundant.

I don't see any, as we would say,

dogs in here that barely made it to prime.

I wanna label this PLF prime on the labels.

So we keep keep it separate, different shelves.

We tag the lot number, the gross weight

and the date that it goes in there.

Now all of the PLF prime is labeled.

We're gonna now bring it into the dry age room.

And it is the largest dry aged beef room in the world,

holding 15,000 primals.

Each primal is about 25 pounds.

There's no hook that's ever pierced them

so that they don't get this bacteria channel

that goes through them.

And the whole idea here is to control the humidity

and the wind circulation

and the temperature with the idea

of when we shut the lights off in here,

UV lights come on and it kills any pathogen

and we're able to dry age beef up to,

we did as far as one year,

but the more we dry age it, the more water we're extracting.

And what happens is it leaves a denser beef flavor

and something that's a lot more tender.

So this goes all the way

and was designed for these to be tracks for the machine

to be able to get to the other side, make a U-turn

and then come back,

like here we'll have tomahawks, short loins.

Here's a good example of something

that's about 30 to 40 days where we started

to see the protein gets retracted,

but the fat and the bone will not

because there's no water for that to lose.

And it's losing water at the right speed

so that it gets that real earthy beef flavor.

Each piece is about three quarters of a square foot

and that's one of the ways we measure it

as to how many we can get in here.

What we're gonna do is keep these separate,

dry age them for 45 to 60 days and then try them

and see exactly how much better they taste,

how much more tender they are.

I'm in here every day checking the meat

that we're receiving, around this room,

we have about five different sensors

that go right to our cell phones.

So if there's a deviation in the settings of the room,

that's the humidity, the temperature,

the wind circulation, it will tell us right away.

We were rated for one unit to be able

to control the humidity, we bought two

because you just cannot risk this much product

in hopes that that machinery's going to work.

That's what we use the drone for.

So we're gonna go take a ride on the drone

because the weather's warm out.

We need to make sure that all of our units

on the rooftops, they're all operational.

[upbeat music]

As the temperature gets warmer,

this is a crucial tool that we use to make sure

that our refrigeration units are all working operationally.

We use a thermal drone to do so.

So we'll take a look at it, I'll print the report out

and then provide it to our service provider in the daytime.

So right now, in order to generate cold,

we need to generate heat.

So the white signature of the thermal is heat.

So each of those units is working.

If one wasn't working, it would be darker.

And I do see one right here that's dark.

I see two that are dark.

What I think is happening

is because the door's open right now,

these freezer units are filling the refrigeration room

with enough cold air that they don't need

to turn on like a thermostat, it doesn't need to turn on.

I'm still going to send this report in

because this one here, the fans are not moving.

That means it's off completely.

'Cause what happens when you have redundant systems

is that when one goes down, the other ones pick up for it

and then you don't know

that you're on a redundant system.

When the redundant system goes,

that's usually when people find out and it's too late.

We were talking about 32 different systems.

From this facility, I can check the units here

and then I can fly the few hundred yards over

and check the units there.

As soon as the temperature in any of our facility

goes above 40 degrees, the USDA has all the right

to withdraw our inspection, which means to close us.

What's at stake here is the amount

of meat that we would lose.

So with over one million pounds of product

in each facility, we're now talking

about, you know, $30 million.

Okay, so we're done here.

We've done our last task for the day,

which is to check our units,

but as you can see, our trucks are loading up.

Our first trucks to Boston and DC have to leave.

We have 52 trucks.

It's a large fleet and it's a lot to manage.

We had to buy different properties

around this area just to park them.

We sell meat and we sell a service.

That service is to deliver.

Our trucks are half of our business.

To protect our drivers,

we have cameras that are in the back of the cab

so they can see if someone opens the door,

which has happened.

Meat is legal tender,

and right now meat is trading higher

than it ever has in history.

It's about 2:00 AM, we have to now load all of that meat

that we've just cut and packed all night long.

So time for me to get going

and time for all of you to get going,

but appreciate you taking a good look into what we do.

Thank you all for coming.

[upbeat music]