Marin Sun Farms' BLT
Tuesday, October 5, 2010
John Birdsall Marin Sun Farms' BLT with house-cured bacon, $7.50.
Open since June, Marin Sun Farms' Oakland meat counter rehabs the notion of the butcher shop for an age that likes its strip steaks to come with a narrative. These days we like to picture where our meat animals were raised, flash of soft brown eyes in fields of green pasture you could imagine picnicking in, if it weren't for all the hoofs on the ground. The fact that the meat's all as expensive as the beautifully barded and tailored cuts on display in your average Paris boucherie, well, it only adds to the narrative.
Weekends the Oakland shop sells premade sandwiches. Saturdays it's porchetta ($9), thin slices of roast pork impregnated with garlic, stacked up on a big soft bun. (The best part: frizzled bits of skin like edible shards of amber glass, contributing roughly the same effect as crunched-up Ruffles on a baloney sandwich.) Sundays are freestyle, sandwich-wise. One day it was roast beef, and last week, a fantastic BLT ($7.50), jerky-thick planks of house-cured bacon with good tomatoes and red-leaf butter lettuce on slices of Semifreddi's white, slathered with pure narrative.
John Birdsall
Marin Sun Farms Rockridge Market Hall Butcher Shop: 5655 College (at Shafter), Oakland, 510-601-8997.
Email to Friend
Write to Editor
Print Article
