060213 North Jersey Pork Stores Are Carry-Overs From Europe

NorthJersey.com - When a teenaged Bob Benkendorf took a job as a cleaning boy at Farm View Pork Store in Pompton Lakes, all he expected was to make some money for college. He ended up getting a lot more than just college money: He found a profession.

He worked his way up from cleaning floors to cutting meat and, after leaving for a few years to study meat cutting and cleaning at Utah State University, Benkendorf returned to New Jersey and to the same store. Nine years ago, he bought it.

"It's not what you call a turnkey business," he said. "This is something that you learn after many years. You learn it through apprenticeship."

The same story echoes throughout the pork stores in northern New Jersey, where young men started at the bottom, then slowly gained more responsibility until they were able to buy the stores from their former bosses. In Benkendorf's case, it took another six years after he'd bought the store to convince the former owner to retire.

"Old butchers never retire," Benkendorf said." They just slow down a bit."

But butchers are retiring. The business is a "dying art," as Karl Unger of the Haledon Pork Store describes it, but it's also an integral part of the North Jersey food scene -- a holdover from an earlier time when Italian and Eastern European immigrants arrived in droves. Though New Jersey can't lay claim to having the most pork stores -- that honor goes to New York, with more than 70 pork stores compared to New Jersey, where there are about two dozen -- yet they're familiar sights along the turnpikes and parkways that crisscross the state.

They're so important that when David Chase, the creator of that quintessential Jersey show "The Sopranos," needed a place where the Sopranos would meet regularly, he created a fictional pork store, Satriale's for those scenes.

Despite the name, pork stores sell more than pork. According to Benkendorf, a pork store in Western Europe is a butcher shop that fabricates its own homemade products and provisions, like sausages, cold cuts, hams and hot dogs. Many of these products contain pork, but most pork stores also sell beef, lamb and poultry.

"Some people come in and are surprised that I sell beef. By the same token, I have people come in and ask if I sell pork," Benkendorf said. "Pork is our middle name, but we handle a full array of meats."

Customers might find homemade sopressata or mortadella at an Italian pork store, or kielbasa and Westphalian ham at a German one. In the past two decades, many also have expanded to include deli menus with soups, sandwiches and prepared salads. A&S Pork Store in West Paterson, for example, sells an array of Italian salads and cooked vegetables, while The Meating Place in Haskell sells pierogi, soups and rice pudding.

But the bulk of the profits come from the meat, which arrives from other parts of the country -- beef generally from the Midwest or West and pork from farms in Pennsylvania. It is cut, often on request, for the customer. The pork store owner can advise cuts of meat for certain dishes or suggest ways to prepare a dish. It's this attention that keeps customers returning, even if it means an extra stop while food shopping.

"I think it is the personal touch that brings people, along with I think we're serving a better quality. The meat is definitely better quality than the local supermarket," Unger said.

Unger knows most of his regular customers by name. Some come every week, others once a month, still others only for holidays. He learned the trade from his father, a Hungarian immigrant who, in turn, learned by working at a butcher shop in Paterson. The elder Unger was working as a shoeshine boy when he heard of an opening for a washer at a renowned butcher shop. On his first day on the job, he ate 16 German bratwursts.

"He was a skinny guy, and they all laughed, but they liked him," Unger said. "He worked there for 18 years. That's where he learned how to make everything."

His father worked at two other stores before opening his own place, the Haledon Pork Store. Unger grew up in the business, helping out his dad after school and on weekends, eventually taking over the store.

Apprenticeship, despite its rarity in today's workplace, is still the primary way of learning the trade in the butcher business, which is taught through a years-long process.

"Today's society doesn't raise young people who do this," Benkendorf said. "We shape our kids to make the most amount of money with the least amount of work, and this is labor intensive."

At most meat-cutting programs, students are taught to become "sawjockeys," as Benkendorf calls them, because they use saws instead of the traditional knives to divide retail cuts of meat. The meat is cut at a central location before being shipped to retail supermarkets.

Supermarkets lure many shoppers away from the more traditional pork stores or butcher shops, with their discounts and the added convenience of being able to buy everything in the same place. But, Benkendorf said, there will always be a demand for the quality of meat and personal attention found at a store like his.

"You have to establish a customer base and prove to them that it's worth the extra stop," he said. "You have to make sure that the product that goes out the door serves the customer well."

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