To open a new butcher shop headlining prime-beef stars on the order of Kobe, Charolais and grass-fed is tricky enough business, especially without claim to family tradition (say, Stoltzfus, Giunta or Ochs) or prime location (center court Reading market, say, or appended to Di Bruno Bros., 18th and Chestnut).
In fact, the very conjunction of "new" and "butcher shop" has a mildly worrisome ring; you want to buy your meat from a guy with a pedigree, roots, a track record, deep meat history.
So one approaches chef Derek Davis' new prime meat market in a charmless Ardmore strip mall (in a former Quiznos sub shop) with a mixture of admiration for his bravado and a certain show-me skepticism: Is this place (the band saw still on order, the beef piled helter-skelter in the cases) for real?
There's an improvisational quality, wire shelves loaded with gourmet sauces, a few crates of apples, a side of produce, crab meat and organic poultry, pre-frozen Natural Acres grass-fed steaks (from Millersburg, Pa.) thawed and iron-rich-red in their packages.
But it is the prime stuff (only two percent of beef is graded USDA Prime), frankly, that's Main Line Prime's meat and potatoes - the $29-a-pound, dry-aged Charolais steak, for instance, that Davis once served to great acclaim at his Kansas City Prime steakhouse in Manayunk. (He closed it four years ago.)
This is trophy meat. Maserati meat. Bragging-rights meat, testosterone fairly wafting from the cases. I'm in the door just minutes before Davis shares the story of competing sales teams that would hold an annual feed at Kansas City Prime - the winners chowing down on authentic Japanese (not American-raised) Kobe steaks with twice the marbling grade (12) of even prime sirloin, the losers relegated to humble-pie plates of baked beans.
That same white-fat Kobe is in the case now, $199.99 a pound. "For the man who has everything," Davis says with a smile.
He is beefy in countenance, vaguely louche in demeanor, his dark hair flowing in Louis XIV locks. Once he bestrode Manayunk, indeed, like a fresh prince, his fiefdom including, besides the late Kansas City Prime, Sonoma (now reflagged as Derek's), Arroyo Grille (closed), and Fish on Main (closed), where in 1999 he skewed the menu toward seafood, he said, to mirror his own evolving taste for fish.
