At 84, family meat market going strong
The Daily Mail
Jan. 14, 2009

Paul DiStefano says the secret to the success of his meat market, which this year celebrates its 84th year, is personal service.

“We love our customers,” he said.

One wall in the front room of DiStefano’s Meat Market shows its long history in the area. The wall is covered by photographs of the DiStefano family, their friends and customers, overlapping each other to fit. Mary Stuart Masterson, who came to town while filming “The Cake Eaters,” poses next to Paul in one.

“It’s great,” DiStefano said of the wall. “People come in and see their cousin.”

DiStefano says his market is the last of its kind in Greene County.

DiStefano and his two employees, Cathy Backis and Thomas Kravovich, who have nearly seventy years of experience between them, generally cut meats to order.

They have been known to invite customers into the back room, where the cutting is done, to select their own pieces. Such a personal selection of food is generally not allowed in chain grocery stores, DiStefano said.

DiStefano said the was shop moved from its original location, one space most recently occupied by the MuddyCup on Main Street, in Catskill, in the 1950’s because there was no parking available to customers, and few people walked by. The market occupied space on Cairo’s Main Street until the 1990s, when it relocated to its current location off Route 23B, in Cairo, right at the intersection of Route 23. The newest location is conducive to walk-in business, he said.

DiStefano said that first-time customers come into the store every week. They say they saw the market from the road and decided to stop in, DiStefano said. But, by DiStefano’s estimate, 90 percent of his customers have been familiar faces in the shop for years.

Paul DiStefano’s father, Savario, known as Sam, came to the area from Sicily, where he first started working as a butcher. Sam continued his trade in Brooklyn before he set up shop in Catskill in 1926.

DiStefano still uses Sam’s recipes for Italian sausage and says that he has always measured its components by sight.

“We never weigh a thing,” he said.

DiStafano still uses a cleaver and two wood chopping blocks, which have been worn away from so many cleansing scrapings and washings that their legs need to be placed on blocks to make their surfaces the right hight. Wood shavings cover the cutting room’s floor. He uses a hand-operated meat stuffer to fill casings, which works by turning a crank on its side.

“It’s not the fastest process in the world,” he said.

But it works.

DiStefano’s hands move quickly and effortlessly when he twists the long sausage tubes into links.

He said he was never formally taught to cut meat, but learned the shapes of bones and cuts of meat by watching his Sam bone out. Now, meat arrives to the market already off the bone. Sam also slaughtered animals, work DiStefano has always avoided.

DiStefano said that although he sells a couple hundred pounds of meat a week, roughly 10 percent of his business comes from farmers ask him to prepare their livestock. DiStefano estimates that he custom cuts about 30 deer for hunters for year, however, that number has gone down over the last few years. He also cuts meat for several restaurants in the area.

He said the hardest cut to prepare is a veal cutlet, because the finished product has to be so thin, but working with pork and beef in considerably easier. Most of the beef he sells comes from Canada, which is generally leaner than domestic beef, DiStefano said.

DiStefano has also ordered and prepared elk, boar and alligator meat for customers with a taste for such exotic animals.

Cathy Backis, who had been serving customers while DiStefano worked with and discussed the meat, said she had one goal for DiStefano’s Meat Market this year.

“To make it to 2010,” she said.