About The Flying Butcher

Craig Muccini and Brian Nassif ran restaurant kitchens long before they ran The Flying Butcher (open since [OPENING YEAR — please confirm]), and the shop still runs on kitchen instincts: cuts are trimmed the way a cook wants them, the prepared-foods case is composed like a menu, and everything on the shelves — from the cheese counter to the beer cooler — got tasted before it earned a spot. You don't have to take our word for any of that. It's all in the case.

Craig's road to the butcher counter ran through the dining room. After studying culinary arts at Johnson & Wales University in Providence, he ran banquets at the Ipswich Country Club, overseeing upscale weddings and white-glove events. That job taught him that great food is only half of a great meal — service is just as important. From there he spent nearly ten years running a 75-seat Italian restaurant with his brother and then started a catering company of his own, until a job at a butcher shop drew him into the meat business for good. The better hours helped, but mostly he liked finally being out front with the people he was feeding. As he puts it, "I always loved meat."

These days Craig oversees just about everything at The Flying Butcher, from ordering and hiring to training the staff and choosing what goes on the shelves. Nothing gets stocked until he and Brian have tasted it and are sure they'd use it themselves. "We want to be more of a specialty market," he explains, "where you're going to get things that you're not going to see many other places." Local makers get a warm welcome, too, because Craig often buys into the story behind a brand as much as the product itself. Still, what he's proudest of is the crew. He's the one who gets a team of very different personalities looking out for each other ("I'm kind of the gel here," he says), and he never gets tired of hearing parents say they want The Flying Butcher to be their kid's first job. Dozens of those kids have worked behind the counter, and he's proud to see them move on to careers of their own. His idea of hospitality is in the small things: holding the door, folding the wrap just so, and remembering how your family is doing. "I want people to feel like they're walking into someplace that feels like home," he says. "We do this because we want to, not because we have to."

Craig grew up in an Italian household where the family sat down to dinner every single night, no matter how busy life got, and he still cooks with that in mind. At home he handles all the meat, moving between a kamado grill, a pellet grill, and a gas grill, and he leans on the sous vide, braising, and classic French sauces he learned in culinary school. His favorite is a bone-in ribeye, seared and finished over indirect heat as a steak or cooked low and reverse-seared as a roast. He cooks by a simple rule: "If you know how to season food properly, it's not needed to be done at the table." In spring and summer, his free time goes to the garden, where eight raised beds hold heirloom tomatoes, eggplant, herbs, and peppers of every heat level, surrounded by berry patches and fig, peach, plum, and Asian pear trees. When he gets home from the shop, he walks in the back door, and "the first thing I do is grab a fig," then picks a few raspberries on his way inside.

Brian started cooking in high school and never really stopped. He took every culinary program his school offered, worked as chef intern in its student-run restaurant, and caught the eye of a guest chef who hired him into his first real kitchen the summer before senior year. By graduation he had worked every station and had a sous chef job waiting for him. Over the next several years he worked in kitchens around Massachusetts. "I worked my way from prep cook to executive chef," he says, and along the way he also ran operations for a commercial bakery that turned out millions of pies a year. In 2010 he joined the culinary team of a butcher shop chain, where he first trained alongside Craig, and in 2014 he came to The Flying Butcher. The change was about quality of life as much as the work itself. "When you're grinding in the restaurant industry and you're trying to make something of yourself," he says, "you sacrifice friends and family."

At the shop, Brian handles quality control, recipe development, and all of the meat buying. He also runs the kitchen, where the prepared foods, soups, sauces, sandwich fixings, and smoked meats are all made from scratch. Most of The Flying Butcher's spice line is his creation, down to the label artwork. Between training staff, tracking down answers to customers' more unusual requests, and keeping the building in working order, he wears, in his words, "many hats, from fixing toilets to making a 48-hour demi-glace." The habit he brought with him from restaurants is mise en place, the French kitchen rule of everything in its place. "That burned into my head forever," he says, and it's why the shop stays clean and organized and why anything out of place "kind of makes me itch." He applies the same standard to everything the shop sells: "I don't want to sell it if I don't want to bring it home. If it's not good enough for my family, it's definitely not good enough for here." The Phantom Gourmet features and Best Of wins mean a lot to him, but the relationships mean more. "We don't just sell meat and beer. We want to know our customers," he says. Over the years he's seen regulars become friends and watched "toddlers grow up to become employees."

"My family is obviously everything to me," Brian says. His wife of 19 years does most of the everyday cooking at home. She picked up plenty from him and has gone well beyond it, all while teaching, working in administration, and directing a dance studio. Brian takes over the grill for birthdays and holidays, when the centerpiece might be a big roast or a pile of ribs. His favorite cut is prime sirloin, and wings are the one thing he never tires of: "Dry, wet, rubbed, sauced, fried, grilled, baked. I don't care. I can eat wings daily." Time off goes to his two sons, whether that's cornhole in the backyard, throwing a football, fishing, walking trails, or cooking together in the kitchen.

• Best of the 603 — Best Place to Buy Meat, multi-year winner
• Best of Souhegan — Best Butcher Shop, multi-year winner
• The Phantom Gourmet — featured regularly on the show
• WMUR — featured coverage

The proof isn't on this page — it's behind the glass. Stop in any day at our shop in the Lowe's plaza on Route 101A in Amherst, and our meat experts will walk you through the case, answer the cooking questions, and send you home with exactly what your table needs.