Publican Quality Meats Beefing Things Up in Chicago

I was expecting Day 1 (Monday) at Publican Quality Meats to be busy, but not THIS busy. By 1 p.m., there were already people lining up to buy grass-fed beef from Wisconsin and homemade boudin blanc. An assortment of salumis at one case had a few guys taking rapturous nibbles from the free samples placed on top of the coolers. I had just come to check things out, and to see what Paul Kahan and his team were doing across the street from their other temple of pork, The Publican.

While Kahan deservedly gets most of the attention as the company’s chief culinary mind – guiding and steering the teams at Blackbird, Avec, Big Star and now these two protein palaces on West Fulton Market – at PQM, the man to look to is Erling Wu-Bower, a guy who is as comfortable with a boning knife as Jonathan Toews is with a hockey stick.

Bower is busy behind the counter on Day 1, filling orders, offering samples and making small talk about the farmers, ranchers and suppliers he’s using. He got particularly animated about a grass-fed cow he was getting in from near Madison, Wisconsin, the marbling for which was unlike any grass-fed product I had ever seen. Kahan told me about some of the heritage breeds he was going to be getting in, including a red wattle pig (oddly, misspelled in the case) that had some beautiful fat on it:

Then Kahan gave me a quick, impromptu tour of the basement kitchen, with the tallest ceiling I’ve ever seen for one of its kind. It helps that PQM is located in a brand new building. Near the heart of the kitchen, a giant, square table is set up for possible private dinners in the future (the dining room upstairs will hold private dinners from The Publican). There’s a giant band saw, a dough mixer – soon to be replaced – that’s helping them bake all of their own bread (yet another potential customer lost in the wake of the Pamela Fitzpatrick dismissal from Fox & Obel), and all the way in the back, an aging room with thousands of dollars of beef and pork, just shrinking a little bit each day:

The coolers are large enough to accomodate whole animals, and you can bet that the butchers at PQM will be aging their share of carcasses (perhaps a new term, “carcass aged”?)

Wu-Bower told me he’ll mess around with the usual 30-day aging on some of the beef, but he’ll also experiment with some 100-day aging. For now, Kahan says he just wants to start selling some product, since they have so much invested in the inventory. Beginning Monday, they’ll be able to start cooking as well (in addition to further curing and smoking) since they’ll start selling sandwiches in the store.

I tried a little bit of everything: picked up a half-pound of smoked sable (with a bit of roe), plus black pepper salami, some sliced, smoked turkey, and a couple of lamb-pork sausages along with a few of the white sausages – boudin blanc – that I’ve had across the street at The Publican. What a simple dinner I had that night: lightly-grilled boudin, a side of honey mustard and a knob of rabbit rillette that I placed onto some toasted slices of baguette and topped with a bit of Swedish lingonberry jam.

Don’t get me wrong, I still love the Paulina Market in Roscoe Village and Gene’s Sausage Shop in Lincoln Square, but now I have a serious butcher – offering some hard-to-find cuts from the region’s top farmers, as well as in-house cured meats – just 10 minutes from my house. Better up that dose of Lipitor.

Publican Quality Meats, 835 W. Fulton Market, (312) 445-8977