Rain peppers the shop window as Matt Pinner admires steak. “That’s one of the best I’ve seen,” he says, examining the marbled cross-sections of two fillets laid out on a wide wooden counter. I’ve come to watch Pinner, a butcher of about a decade, disassemble a cow. Or, more specifically, take a “roasting”— from where the ribs meet the shoulder and along the spine to the rump — and turn it into steak.
Ahead of my visit to Parson’s Nose, in Fulham, west London, a newsroom colleague with an unexpected background in butchery offers some practical advice: when you hit the cartilage, push through. As it happens, my role is mercifully observational. Pinner slices, saws and hacks as needed, while I prod and ask inane questions. Pinner has short, dark hair, a cheeky smile and the kind of sturdy build you’d expect from a butcher. “Put it this way: I don’t pay for a gym membership,” he replies when I ask how much strength is required.
Butchery isn’t what I thought it would be. For starters, and I wish I could put this more intelligently, everything smells more of meat than I could ever have imagined. I’d also assumed it was basically a process of excavation: see carcass, identify steaks, cut them out. Like a game of Operation but with less dexterity and more muscle. It’s more like sculpture. To paraphrase Michelangelo, Pinner’s task is to cut away everything that isn’t steak. Like a sculptor, he bestows his own interpretation on what can be removed. His cuts have familiar names: fillets, rumps, tri-tips, sirloin. After he debones and trims the section around the central spine, a rib-eye emerges, pristine and emoji-like.