For me, Carnivore Inc., located at 1042 Pleasant Street (708-660-1100, https://www.carnivoreoakpark.com), is a butcher shop, a small-town grocery store, and a fun place to shop. Their website describes them as a “quaint market selling high-end meat & seafood, plus sandwiches, lunch plates & gourmet ingredients.”
Before they opened Carnivore in 2014, co-owners Brad Knaub and Erik Williams had been cooks and chefs for decades. Both lived near Oak Park and had many conversations where they dreamed of “building a shop that was focused on sustainable, local and natural products.” They thought this would fit in well with the Oak Park community’s shared values.
Erik told me, “I also wanted to make the world a better place for my son and have access to food that was fit to feed him, ideally without dependence on a global food web, abusive business practices, and destructive industrial farming.”
Every time I go into Carnivore, I feel a vibe of friendly fun. It reminds me of Pike Place Fish Co. in Seattle where the workers playfully toss fish to each other before they sell it to customers. And while I’ve never seen the butchers at Carnivore toss chicken legs or slabs of ribs to each other, there is an air of camaraderie there. When I shared the “fish story” with Brad, he told me that when they hire people at Carnivore, they are not necessarily looking for a butcher skill set, but “affable people who can involve the customers.”
I recently watched a series on Netflix called You Are What You Eat, which showed filthy, crowded conditions for cows and pigs and have been thinking about where the meat and poultry I routinely eat come from.
Brad said Carnivore buys directly “from small, family-owned and -operated farms. This keeps money in domestic agriculture and ensures accountability in expectations and practices. It’s also the tastiest meat. Many of the heirloom breeds were developed when people grew livestock for flavor and quality, rather than yield and profitability.”
Currently, there are nine people working at Carnivore, including owners, managers, clerks, dishwashers, and cooks. The shop is in an area of Oak Park that has a dense population. Five high-rise apartments have been built within walking distance since Carnivore opened 10 years ago.
Sadly, many businesses closed during COVID, but Carnivore thrived. They limited the number of customers who could be in the store and put up plastic barriers in front of the meat counters. Brad told me he helped many customers, who had never taken Home Ec in school and had rarely cooked before, to learn tricks in planning and preparing their meats.
I have personally benefitted from Carnivore’s teaching and sharing. One time I asked about the ingredients in one of the prepared soups I wanted to serve for a guest with food sensitivities, and the Carnivore staff took out a loose-leaf notebook with stained recipes to show me the ingredients.
I love their prepared gazpacho, a cold soup of blended vegetables that I first tasted when I was studying in Spain. When I went to Carnivore several weeks after buying their gazpacho and found there was none in the cooler, the staff got the recipe book out and let me take a screenshot. I made the soup by myself one time but, honestly, the Carnivore version was much better.
When I asked how business is now, Erik told me “We were absolutely inundated from 2020 until August 2022, when suddenly commodity prices essentially doubled and subsequently brought small-farm prices up about 45%. Since that pricing surge, we’ve seen a steady decline in day-to-day business. Our sales actually doubled in 2020, but now have come back down 50% to 2019 levels.
“The refrain in food service today is: our operating costs have nearly doubled. It is a troubling and challenging time to be in business. We’re just holding on and looking at this year as an opportunity to really streamline some of the things we learned when we were bonkers busy.”
Carnivore plans to schedule a tour of the farms in Fairbury, Illinois, where much of their meat comes from. A list and description of the farmers they partner with, and other information is available on their website.
Joy Aaronson is an Oak Park resident who previously contributed to Chicago Parent and wrote the Kids’ World column for the former Logan Square Free Press.
Photo Caption: Brad Knaub, Joy Aaronson, Erik Williams at Carnivore