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On a dreary January morning, Lobel´s Prime Meats on New York's Upper East Side is visited by the housekeeper of a regular customer. She tells Mark Lobel that her employer is arriving home from Europe on the Concorde that evening and wants a steak dinner. The housekeeper doesn´t know what kind, only that ´´it has to be tender.`` This would suggest a filet mignon. However, Mark Lobel knows his customers: The jet-setter usually buys the more flavorful, but somewhat chewier, sirloin strip steak. Before you can say angiogram, Lobel comes up with the perfect solution, a porterhouse steak containing both the filet and the sirloin. The fact that the 1-pound-plus steak costs just under $40 is of no consequence. This is Lobel´s, arguably America´s most prestigious and most expensive meat market. No wonder Lobel´s client roster reads like a who´s who. Ralph Lauren and Calvin Klein like Lobel´s spring lamb chops. Henry Kissinger favors porterhouse steaks; Jerry Seinfeld orders N.Y. strip steaks; Michael J. Fox gets a special cut for his pepper steaks; Faye Dunaway savors pork loins with a thick layer of fat; Steven Spielberg goes for rotisserie chicken and potato pancakes. In addition to regular orders of hanger steaks, beef ribs and 2 1/2-inch-thick rib steaks, David Letterman, every Thursday on his late-night show, offers a $300 gift box of Lobel´s meat to a member of the audience who can correctly guess a particular cut of beef. Nathan Lobel couldn´t have envisioned such celebrity status when he began the family business in Austria in the 1840s. Nor could his grandson Morris, who emigrated to the United States in 1911, eventually opening a kosher butcher shop on New York´s Upper West Side. In 1954, Morris and his wife, Etta, made two decisions that put Lobel´s on course to its current place in the hearts and arteries of New York´s meat lovers. They took over a storefront on Madison Avenue on the Upper East Side, and made it a nonkosher butcher shop at the insistence of their landlord, who told them, ´´There are no Jews on the Upper East Side.`` One problem: The Lobels didn´t know how to merchandise nonkosher meats. ´´For the first two years, our customers taught us,´´ says Stanley Lobel, company president, who learned the business from (and along with) his father, Morris, as did his older brothers, Leon and Nathan. ´´For example, we didn´t know how to age meat because you can´t age kosher meat.´´ But Morris Lobel knew top-grade meat and, from keeping a kosher establishment, cleanliness. Both qualities remain hallmarks of Lobel´s. From the beginning, Lobel´s set standards for quality few could match. Unfortunately, they were also standards few customers could afford. ´´Their meat is fabulous, fabulous. But I can´t bring myself to spend that kind of money,´´ says Dorothy Hamilton, owner of the French Culinary Institute in New York. Despite such comments, Lobel´s refused to lower prices or standards. ´´For every 100 steers I look at, I choose two or three,´´ Stanley Lobel says. ´´Wholesalers charge me 8 to 10 percent more. But I´m happy to pay.´´ Not only does Lobel´s buy solely USDA prime, which comprises less than 2 percent of all beef, but it also takes the top end of prime. ´´Brutal,´´ is how Lobel´s selection process is described by Bob Lattieri of Fort Meat in Brooklyn, N.Y., which has been selling beef to Lobel´s for about 10 years. Lobel´s insistence on the best of prime has become more significant since the U.S. Department of Agriculture began broadening the definition of prime a few decades ago. Prime now includes some beef previously graded choice, the second highest grade. But choosing the best meat doesn´t end there. Stanley Lobel points to a particular shell roast inside Lobel´s closet-sized aging room, which is visible from the street. ´´See this one? It´s OK for most people. But the marbling isn´t as fine as the others. So we won´t cut it up for sirloin strip steaks [also called shell steaks]. Instead, we´ll bone it, roll it up and sell it as a shell roast,´´ he says. ´´The Lobels are meat scientists,´´ says Anne Rosensweig, whose Lobster Club restaurant is just around the corner. ´´Others care like the Lobels, but the Lobels have been doing it for so long they´re more knowledgeable than anyone else.´´ Lobel´s steaks are unparalleled. The sirloin strip steak ($21.98 per pound on the bone, $32.98 per pound boneless and trimmed) is more tender and fattier (in the best sense of the word) than any steak I´ve eaten. It also has a more pungent aroma that makes it stand out from steaks that haven´t been dry aged or dry aged as painstakingly (Lobel´s ages its steaks four to six weeks). The porterhouse ($28.98 per pound) is sensational. For price/flavor value, you can´t beat the hanger steak at $18.95. And there isn´t a better hamburger on earth than the Wyoming burger ($11 per pound), a 1 pound behemoth made from special young steer. Despite Lobel´s reputation for beef, chicken represents about 30 percent of sales. Lobel´s chickens are fed a vegetarian diet free of hormones and antibiotics. ´´I pay five times more than the average wholesaler,´´ Stanley Lobel says. ´´That´s why we charge $3.49 a pound.´´ Lobel´s chicken has that old-fashioned flavor that most people have forgotten (or never knew), I thought, as I picked on remnants from the carcass over the kitchen sink. For seven years, Lobel´s has bought spring lamb from Australia to have a year-round supply of true spring lamb, which are no more than eight or nine weeks old. The result is a smaller rack ($32.98 per pound) with meat so delicate and buttery you can cut it with a swizzle stick. Veal is purchased with equal scrupulousness, coming from formula-fed animals that are not penned up. ´´This is how you tell good, young veal,´´ Stanley Lobel says, showing me a fist-sized rib chop ($29.98 per pound) with pink meat, milky white fat and a whitish bone that has a streak of red running through it. The double-cut pork chop ($14.98 per pound) of fine-grained young meat comes out moist and sweet. The chicken and veal (you'd never guess) meatballs are astonishingly close to the quality of my mother's. Service is just as important at Lobel´s. Despite its tony neighborhood, there isn't a hint of intimidation at Lobel´s. ´´We don´t forget where we came from,´´ Stanley Lobel says. The Lobels also have a sense of family that is obvious and extends to longtime employees King Speller (30 years) and Ray Sweet (23 years). Clad in blue-striped shirts and long white aprons, they cut and trim contentedly in a surprisingly modest shop. Wood-paneled, with moose and deer heads on the wall and a light sprinkling of sawdust on the floor, the store is about as big as the Chrysler Imperial Morris Lobel used to drive to make pickups from the meatpacking district. Mark Lobel came into the firm 13 years ago and works alongside his brother David, who joined almost two years ago after a seven-year stint as a litigation attorney. Evan, Leon´s son, is vice president of the firm now that Leon is in semiretirement. (Nathan died in 1970, three years after his father.) About 95 percent of orders are taken over the phone, with a Lobel almost always answering. But soon the phone will give way to the Internet; Lobel´s plans to go nationwide when it acquires a company that can package the meat on a greater scale. Lobel's has also become a pretty prolific author. The first book, MEAT, sold over a million copies. Currently, the fifth book, Prime Time, The Lobel´s Guide to Grilled Meats , has been well-received by critics. ´´You´ll dream about the barbecued prime rib,´´ says Stanley Lobel, age 63. ´´ Well, after a certain age you will.´´ Sam Gugino, Wine Spectator´s Tastes columnist, is the author of Cooking to Beat the Clock . LOBEL´S PRIME MEATS 1096 Madison Ave., New York, (212) 737-1372 (for local deliveries), 877-783-4512 (toll-free for mail order); www.lobels.com |