St. Louis, MOButcher

St. Louis Magazine's butcher-shop guide starts with the owner: a Culinary Institute of America graduate who came up in fine dining, which the guide says shows in everything the Maplewood shop does. The counter runs a full assortment of whole-animal butchery, but the guide is clear about what to ask for, calling the cut-to-order pork chops the thing that made the place legendary. Order those, thick, and let the counter cut them in front of you.

Sauce named Trip Straub one of eleven people who changed the way St. Louis eats, and his interview explains what the meat case is for: the family market carries USDA Prime, keeps buying it as Prime gets harder to obtain, and will not carry USDA Select at all. Straub told the magazine that customers say they only go to Straub's when they buy steaks. Order a steak cut at the counter, and ask which grade you are buying, the question he says shoppers should put to every store.

St. Louis Magazine's butcher-shop guide calls G&W the city's unequivocal place for traditional Bavarian sausage, and more than a butcher shop. The reason is continuity: the guide says the shop still works exactly as founders Helmut and Henry Wanniger did in the 1960s, which is exactly how their father, a German sausage meister, worked in Bavaria. Order the traditional Bavarian sausages, and the guide notes a free Busch beer while you wait.

Most people know Kenrick's for catering, per St. Louis Magazine's butcher-shop guide, which credits it with making roast beef, green beans and mostaccioli the standard post-wedding spread on the south side. The guide's point is that the meat counter came first: founder Herb Kenrick started by selling cuts off a small truck around south St. Louis. Order from that counter at the Weber Road shop, which the guide describes as an essential mom-and-pop butcher.

St. Louis Magazine's butcher-shop guide grants that this Chesterfield market next door to Annie Gunn's is more than a butcher, calling it one of the metro's leading gourmet grocers, with prepared foods, pies, cheeses, spices and sauces. Two things to order by name: the maple-glazed smoked shrimp, which the guide calls world-class, and pork from the meat counter, which the guide says is known around the country. The guide calls those cuts some of the best in the region.