The Complicated Power of LaFrieda, the Biggest Name in NYC’s Meat Industry

Menus across the city bear his name, branded food stalls in airports and baseball stadiums sling his burgers, and with over 60,000 followers on Instagram, his influence reaches far beyond the local meat industry. Pat LaFrieda, the third-generation owner of Pat LaFrieda Meat Purveyors, has led the way for a new form of stardom in America’s food world: the celebrity butcher.

Since officially joining the family business in 1994, LaFrieda says he’s grown it into a $200 million empire, one that supplies meat to New York City’s top high-end restaurants, like Eleven Madison Park and Minetta Tavern, as well as more than 100 outposts of Shake Shack. He’s become a genuine food-world personality, starring in a Food Network show, releasing a cookbook, licensing his name out to burger shacks throughout the city, and sponsoring big food events with celebrity chef appearances.

This is all to say that LaFrieda has mastered far more than butchering meat. Clients and competitors alike say that he’s glamorized a historically unglamorous industry, redefining and becoming synonymous with the very idea of quality beef.

But years after LaFrieda became a household name, the meaning of “quality” has changed. Consumers are savvier about the food they put on their plates, and smaller artisanal butchers and farmers argue that the definition of a good cut of meat goes beyond what it tastes like, citing factors like the cattle’s diet or environmental impact.

Now, some say it’s time for the LaFrieda name to mean a little less — even if he was one of the first major players to convince everyday diners to care about what quality meat means.

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In the pre-LaFrieda era, wholesale meat suppliers worked strictly behind the scenes with restaurants, so the average diner didn’t have to think about what defines “quality” meat. Consumers trusted chefs to know what good meat was, says Ariane Daguin, who founded her gourmet meat and charcuterie company, D’Artagnan, 35 years ago and supplies to over 1,000 restaurants in the five boroughs, including Daniel and Per Se.

Even today, most major meat purveyors primarily target chefs and restaurants. Longstanding New Jersey-based company DeBragga supplies to some of the biggest names in the industry, including Tom Colicchio’s restaurants, Gotham Bar & Grill, and the Tao Restaurant Group, but unlike LaFrieda, its name isn’t printed on menus. CEO Marc Sarrazin says that’s because the bulk of his customers are a result of the relationships he and his father built with chefs, not diners. “At the end of the day, the restaurants are going to buy from Pat or from myself because the relationship is there,” he says. “Chefs in the industry know of our company and know who we are. The consuming public, not so much.”

It makes sense for it to be that way, Sarrazin argues, since what the chefs do with the meat often matters more than which farm it came from. “At the end of the day, anybody can buy product from the same farms,” Sarrazin says. “The key is, how do you handle it once you receive it? Our job is to make sure that when the chef gets product in his restaurant or kitchen, it’s ready to go.”

At first, LaFrieda’s company was also built on his connections with chefs. The butcher comes from a finance background, and together with business partner Marc Pastore, who had experience in nightlife promotion, he aggressively pursued relationships with some of the biggest names in town. After a day of cutting meat, he’d change into a suit to play salesman. “I would cold call and walk into restaurants I thought were busy or special, sit down with the owners, and speak to them,” LaFrieda says.

LaFrieda became more of a recognizable name in 2004, the year that Shake Shack was born in Madison Square Park. LaFrieda, his father, and Pastore already worked with a few of Danny Meyer’s fine dining restaurants when the idea for Shake Shack was born. “They felt like family,” the chain’s culinary director, Mark Rosati, says. “It was a natural fit when creating the Shake Shack burger to engage Pat.”

When Shake Shack’s cheeseburger became an immediate hit, the now-global chain largely attributed its success to the custom meat blend LaFrieda created for the restaurant, which came from a variety of whole-muscle cuts, like brisket and short rib, instead of the traditional trimmings — an element of customization that was unheard of in the butcher business, Rosati says. LaFrieda’s name was touted in virtually all of Shake Shack’s opening press, minting him as a butcher whose name diners should know.

The custom, press-generating blend “was truly innovative for its time,” says Ed Schoenfeld, founder of Chinese restaurant RedFarm. “They were and still are the leaders of that trend, and that makes them very important people in the business.”

The burger boom that followed had every chef in town seeking their own blend, and LaFrieda was the name behind several of the most hyped burgers in NYC, including the famed dry-aged black label burger at Minetta Tavern. Food blogs and writers obsessively tracked the rise of the pricier gourmet burger, attributing at least part of the trend to the high profile of LaFrieda’s boutique blends.

“That’s how we were able to grow: customization,” LaFrieda says. “Now you have a meat company that will custom-tailor one of several hundred custom burger blends for you — with whatever blend you want us to do — because you have an idea of doing something different. That’s power.”

Soon, restaurants saw an upside to putting LaFrieda’s name on their menus for more than just custom-blended burgers. Chef Dominick Pepe of French brasserie and steakhouse Boucherie adds the Pat LaFrieda name next to several cuts of steak: He says diners respond positively to seeing the meat brand on his menu, the same way they recognize the water brand Pellegrino at his Italian restaurants. “People feel comfortable when they know what they’re getting,” Pepe says.

The meteoric rise of the LaFrieda brand is something that didn’t go unnoticed by competitors like DeBragga. Sarrazin, its CEO, says his team is growing the ecommerce business and expanding his company’s presence on platforms like Instagram — a bid to market the company name directly to consumers, just like LaFrieda.

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But over the last decade, New York diners have grown increasingly curious about where their food comes from, and the more LaFrieda’s name is plastered all over the place, the more complicated the brand’s once-unanimous reputation as the city’s meat purveyor of choice has become.

That’s due in part to the now widely championed idea that the highest-quality meat comes from sustainability-minded small-scale producers — particularly ones that work with small farms to ensure animals roam freely and are raised without antibiotics — and not mass-market suppliers like LaFrieda, who sources meat from more than 100 farms across the country, mainly in the Midwest.

Aside from major environmental concerns associated with beef consumption, many in the meat industry say free-roaming and antibiotic-free cattle naturally produce more flavorful meat, including D’Artagnan’s Daguin, who works with several farms and ranchers. “At the end of the day, sustainability goes hand in hand with small farmers, and small farmers mean good products,” she says.

Some meat industry experts also argue that grass-fed beef is a more ethical choice because it’s better for both the environment and diners’ health, though those claims are complicated. All cattle in America starts out feeding on grass, though most big commercial farms pivot to a grain diet before sending their cows to a slaughterhouse.

Advocates of grass-fed beef say that grain-fed cattle are more likely to suffer in inhumane conditions like overcrowded feeding pens, which can lead to disease, requiring the extensive use of antibiotics. They also argue that purely grass-fed beef — or “grass-finished” beef — can offset methane and other greenhouse gases associated with raising cattle, in a process called regenerative agriculture. Studies show that although grass-fed cows emit more gas than grain-finished ones due to longer lives and higher-fiber diets, they can ultimately have a lower carbon footprint if the farms manage the way that cattle grazes to let vegetation regrow, which lets the land “act as a carbon sink.”

It’s an admittedly long — and growing — list of words for consumers to memorize: grass-fed, antibiotic-free, free-range, cruelty-free, organic, natural, and so on. These labels are meant to suggest a healthier, environmentally friendly alternative to mass-market meat, but they’re not all regulated by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration; the definition of “natural” depends on who’s saying it. Truly knowing the practices behind the meat requires constant vigilance about individual butchers and meat suppliers.

As complex as it can be to differentiate, the bottom line is that anybody who cares about the way the meat for their burgers was raised shouldn’t buy from restaurants that source from the normal beef supply chain, including wholesale suppliers like LaFrieda, argues Jacob Dickson, owner of Dickson’s Farmstand Meats in Chelsea Market. He believes that sourcing locally is one of the only ways to have complete transparency about how cattle are raised, but the bulk of NYC restaurants rely on companies that raise beef on countless farms hundreds of miles away. Dickson’s only works with small family farms upstate, with a goal of keeping the distance between the farm and Chelsea Market under 400 miles.

Marketing, he says, has played a big role in why so many people correlate beef from a big supplier like LaFrieda with quality. “They were one of the first wholesalers in the New York market that marketed themselves directly to the end customer,” he says. “But that being said, the product itself is not that unique.”

LaFrieda has his defenders: Many of the butcher’s clients say they judge his work by how flavorful a cut of steak is, including factors like fattiness and dry aging, as well as how consistent the product is on a weekly basis. Pepe of Boucherie says LaFrieda’s steaks were a clear winner in a blind taste test. Veteran restaurateur Stratis Morfogen, who owns Brooklyn Chop House and has been working with LaFrieda since 2009, says he’s gone through a number of butchers, but none match LaFrieda.

Though many of the city’s top butchers offer beef with similar marbleization — the ratio of fat to lean meat — Morfogen says LaFrieda maintains an edge in the way he dry-ages his meat, a process that takes several weeks to months to boost flavor and tenderness. “No one has mastered it better than Pat,” Morfogen says.

LaFrieda is aware of the scrutiny of the meat industry and the increased demand for ethical meat. He’s skeptical of the grass-fed beef movement and the sustainability claims around it, thinking much of it is driven by “retail marketing,” he says.

Still, LaFrieda tries to supply any kind of beef — or beef substitute — that restaurants request. The company sources animals in several categories, including grass-fed beef; “all-natural” beef, raised without antibiotics or growth hormones; and organic beef that’s fed organic grain and raised on land that’s been certified organic. He also sells commodity beef, or the kind that falls under none of the qualifications above, as well as plant-based products like the Impossible Burger.

And though the meat industry is rife with factory farms that have come under fire for crowded, inhumane conditions and overuse of antibiotics, he says the farms he works with don’t take part in that. “We have our own finishing and raising protocols that growers must adhere to, and they have to be part of our acceptance plan,” he says, adding that his beef is fed grain that “tastes like cornflakes.”

LaFrieda also considers his work sustainable because no part of the cow goes to waste, he says: The blood is sold to the medical industry, the hide to leather purveyors in China, and the meat and bones to the consumer industry, something that’s possible with bigger meat companies like his. “Beef happens to be the most efficient food system that our country has,” he says.

The consumer who prefers grass-fed meat can’t assume that a restaurant serving LaFrieda abides by the same ethos, though. Most restaurants that serve the company’s beef don’t buy the grass-fed or organic beef; only about 5 percent of his clients purchase either, he says. About half of his sales are of all-natural beef, the kind without antibiotics or hormones, but that’s generally priced 15 percent higher than commodity beef. Restaurants that can’t afford the premium opt for the latter, and all of them — whether a Michelin-starred restaurant or an airport vendor, whether serving antibiotic-free beef or commodity — can say that they serve the beef from the coveted LaFrieda brand.

It’s one of the pitfalls of having a name that’s become too big: The brand can get diluted, and what it stands for becomes more difficult to control. Though the butcher says he’ll never open his own steakhouse, today his name can be found on burger concepts at JFK and LaGuardia airports, the Citi Field baseball stadium, and the Pennsy food hall in Midtown. It’s risky to license his name out: In many cases, a concessions operator runs the day to day, making quality control tough to manage, LaFrieda says.

Such a problem came up at the end of 2019, when Eater critic Robert Sietsema named the Chicago dog from a Custom Burgers by Pat LaFrieda at JFK one of his worst dishes of the year. LaFrieda reached out to Eater to clarify that he doesn’t supply hot dogs to the restaurant and didn’t know that his name was advertised so prominently on the vendor, whose signage implied that everything from the burger to the chicken sandwich was endorsed by him.

“He definitely went from having a really great reputation to kind of a ubiquitous reputation,” says Brent Young, co-owner of artisanal butcher shop the Meat Hook in Williamsburg. The modern-day consumer is savvier when it comes to quality, Young argues; there’s enough “bad Pat LaFrieda product out there” that they know not to expect his stadium burger to be the same as the one at Minetta Tavern, he says.

And the reality is that it’s impossible for a mass-market meat brand to meet the same sustainability and humane standards as an artisanal butcher or boutique meat supplier, Young and his business partner, Ben Turley, say; they stick to farms that use regenerative agriculture.

Their preferred grass-feeding process takes more time and money, and in its current state, the local farm industry can’t meet the volume required by restaurants, they say. The Meat Hook currently supplies ground beef to their restaurant at Threes Brewing, as well as a couple of restaurants in Williamsburg, but it mostly sells to consumers from its shop.

“Ethical meat can’t responsibly function the way commercial meat does,” Turley says. “It’s not built to be able to sustain those numbers.”

It’s an issue Anya Fernald aims to tackle with Belcampo Meat Co., her northern California-based farm and butchery. She owns nearly 50,000 acres of farmland, where she raises grass-fed cows, free-range chickens, and other animals “the way they should be raised,” as she says. She controls her own supply chain, from the farm to the processing facility, and uses the meat for her own Belcampo restaurant chain. Her eventual goal is to make organic meat available at a much larger scale by selling it directly to shoppers in grocery stores across the United States.

To grow her business, she plans to start a certified partner program, essentially helping small farmers become more sustainable, then purchasing and marketing their products on their behalf. In an industry where there’s little regulation around true sustainability metrics, Fernald is trying to brand her company as a go-to source for ethically raised meat — kind of the way that LaFrieda marketed burger blends more than a decade ago. “My goal is to revolutionize meat, right? I want to change the system,” she says. “Working directly with consumers is a faster route for me to focus on.”

While LaFrieda’s explosive growth as a brand may have caused more murkiness around what quality means in meat, Fernald sees his success as a positive for the industry overall. Awareness around any meat brand means consumers are starting to think about where their food comes from, Fernald says, and that curiosity is one of the big reasons she chose New York for her newest restaurant outpost. And Morfogen says that customers sometimes ask him who he’s using as his butcher, a question no one posed 20 years ago — something he thinks LaFrieda’s rise contributed to.

A desire for more information can only help with better practices across the board, Fernald says. “We need more identity in meat, not less,” she says. “We need more people claiming it and building a brand around it. That’s decommodifying this product.”

Carla Vianna is a freelance writer and travel blogger based in New York City.

Disclosure: Eater has a video series, Prime Time, hosted by Ben Turley and Brent Young of the Meat Hook.