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Mette with capers, fresh herbs, smoked paprika and garlic oil, served with egg yolk and garlic-rubbed grilled bread; Photo by Ash Daniel
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Photo by Ash Daniel
Chicken liver mousse with concord grape and grilled house brioche toast
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Executive Chef and Co-owner Brittanny Anderson (Photo by Ash Daniel)
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Photo by Ash Daniel
Metzger Bar & Butchery window signage
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Photo by Ash Daniel
Its bright subway tiles and fully stocked butcher case
The Metzger Bar & Butchery raises its red brick shoulders over Union Hill, gating Richmond’s formerly notorious “Butcher Town” neighborhood. Past a display case rest wooden tables the color of acorns and white subway tiles that reach to the high ceilings. They, along with a pervasive new-restaurant smell — that elixir of fresh paint, starched fabric and scrubbed floors — give off the impression of a turn-of-the-century bathhouse. This restaurant and butchery packs a powerful punch, but its biggest hit isn’t in the dining room’s neutral palette or the utilitarian, carve-’em-up cleavers and knives hanging on the wall; it’s the seasonal ingredients coloring every plate.
Food has been called many things: love, medicine, mental fodder. It’s all that and more. Good cooks plate memories in meals, filling us up with their talent and holding onto our brains like a monkey riding a runaway horse. Metzger’s chef and co-owner, Brittanny Anderson, is more than a culinary beast who’s worked with Dan Barber at the award-winning Blue Hill at Stone Barns in New York’s Westchester County. She’s currently the meat-slinging monkey on my back that I can’t stop thinking about.
Anderson sources the best of everything but doesn’t use a menu to brag on the provenance of her ingredients. The compact, German-influenced listing mentions no partnering farms. Descriptions are brief. I wouldn’t have known that the house sausage is made by Sausage Craft, unless I’d read the restaurant’s website. As it happens, Sausage Craft co-owner Brad Hemp is a partner here, where he manages Metzger’s excellent, value-driven and largely Teutonic wine choices. Now, if the server would just give all of us a beverage list, we’d make up our minds. An aside: I wish that restaurants would do away with the tradition of electing a head of the party and only giving that person, usually the oldest man, the sole wine list. We all want one.
A carafe of Grüner Veltliner washes down pink pickled eggs and smoked-trout rillettes better than milk does cookies. Liptauer cheese spread, crafted using white cheddar, house-made buttermilk quark and smoked paprika, could be a marriage of potted and pimento cheeses, except its ricotta-like tang pushes the spread beyond respectable and into “lust-worthy” territory. Paper-thin pork schnitzel would only taste fried! fried! fried! except that the mustard painting it gets before breading enables the dish to reach past ham-handed heaviness, especially when paired with sauerkraut and Riesling.
Lucky me, I tried Anderson’s take on mette, a traditional German dish of minced, seasoned raw pork. Metzger’s mette is made with beef instead of pork and topped with a creamy, farm-fresh egg yolk flaked with salt. If I see mette on the menu again, it’ll be on our table.
The Amish chicken and untrimmed pork chop — main-course standards — couldn’t be better. Both are brined, the chicken in lemon and garlic and the pork in those plus beer, then roasted to a firm-but-friable exterior. Juices don’t run out of these meats, they dribble out until they meet the duck-fat potatoes. Metzger’s fingerling potatoes are double-cooked, hit twice with the fat and seasoned with thyme, crackling and creamy to the bite.
The only thing I’d like to change here is the music, an esoteric vintage-soul playlist. The problem isn’t the selection but how it’s received in the dining room. One song is quiet, the next loud, then jarringly tinny or fuzzy, reminding me of a cassette taping of a vinyl record. I enjoy Metzger so much that I feel guilty criticizing anything for fear you might not go. But if I don’t, you might stay home out of disbelief in a positively one-note review. And the thought of that leaves me crying the blues.
Metzger Bar & Butchery
801 N. 23rd St., 325-3147 or metzgerbarandbutchery.com
Hours: Retail hours Tuesday to Sunday, 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Dinner only Tuesday to Sunday, 5 to 11 p.m. Saturday and Sunday brunch, 11 a.m. to 3 p.m.
Prices: appetizers $3 to $15, small plates $6 to $13, large plates $14 to $19