Ben Forbes, owner of Forbes Meat Company, butcher extraordinaire, meat lover, and sando-maker to the stars, turned 50 on April 30th with pretty much all a man could ask for at his blossoming downtown butcher shop.
He's found a robust community of local-food purveyors who, like him, find great satisfaction with their customers when good food is sourced wisely and locally.
As his life unfolded in Tucson, he watched and learned as local chefs partnered with him, focused on exceptional meat. “I saw all this beautiful food preparation and got to see people get excited about food and that was fun for me – something that I wanted to do.”
Forbes Meat Company started seven years ago in downtown Tucson in what Ben describes as a “speakeasy” butcher shop off an alley behind a defunct brewery. Now his entire operation is prepared to move a dozen blocks south to the Five Points area sometime between the first of July and the first of September (“it’s summer in Tucson, after all...”).
As the final move begins to take shape, other exciting changes are afoot including a series of commercials in development to bring Tucson's gastro-incredibleness to the world. Josh Belheumer, Managing Partner & Creative Director of BRINK, is working in partnership with Tucson City of Gastronomy and Pima County.
Their goal is to produce excellent commercials to attract culinary tourists. These promotional plans will be used heavily by Visit Tucson and other community allies across various channels. Many of the chefs in GUT ( and gutucson.org) seemed to know each other well when Ben joined the group.
And new partnerships and advanced training flourished. "We did our first butchery class at Downtown Kitchen and Cocktails. Gary Hickey from Charro Steak & Del Rey & Flores Concepts, which is huge nationally, came in and (took) a butcher class for him personally and some of his staff.
And then Devon Sanner with The Carriage House and Downtown Kitchen + Cocktails, and Mat Cable from Fresco Pizzeria & Pastaria, did a pig-butchery class.
"Then I opened up this little shop that I was subleasing and a bunch more chefs came in to learn as well. The next thing I know, Mama Louisa and Brushfire BBQ put me on their menu!", Ben said. "I was on the menu with Charro Steak and Del Rey and the list goes on and on,” Ben exclaims. Aside from his natural humility, Ben has become a big part of Tucson's transcendent food scene.
Put another way, if the Gastronomic Union of Tucson is the “GUT’s” of the Tucson booming foodie community, Ben may well be its beating red heart.
Time to Go Big in a New Space
Plans percolated for a while as he filled more an more of the space. Stoked by chefs who put the word out that Ben was “the guy who knew how to cut up animals” Ben seized the opportunity, and risk, knowing he was at a crossroads in life.
“When my world fell apart it gave me an opportunity to regroup and be like, what do I want to do for the rest of my life? Do I want to work for Whole Foods? I've always kind of wanted to do my own thing. So that's what I did and getting to work with this community is a thrill.”
The Sunday night prior to our conversation he was in a kitchen making dinner with 10 head chefs and a handful of sous chefs. “Where in the world can you imagine 20 of the world’s top chefs in one restaurant and getting to have dinner in that place?” He told Josh, “I compare it to back in the ’60s and '70s when the Doors and Tom Petty and the Birds and all those guys were in Laurel Canyon, just young kids, all in love with music. Here we have all these people that are just in love with food. We’re all together doing our music. I feel like I am in my Laurel Canyon and just thriving with these guys around me and it's just the best period of my life.”
Chefs often reach out to him for what he calls “odd things” that Sysco and the other corporate food companies can’t deliver. “They want something local, something unique, like pork belly rib chops for 80 people. Nobody else does that. But I can, because I bring in whole pigs. That’s why chefs work with me when they want something super specialized.”
Ben has catered to the high-end tastes of Tucson gourmands as well, getting Wagyu beef from Japan and Australia as well as specials featuring Dungeness crab, oysters, or lobster rolls with caviar. On Thursday’s, he produces a select “Sando” that can range from the “Wake & Bake” (the ultimate bacon, egg & cheese with hash brown potatoes between two thick slices of Texas toast) that Willie Nelson says is one of the best meals he’s ever had.
Then come the Wagyu Burgers, the grain-finished beef burgers, grass-fed beef burgers, and his always popular jalapeño bacon cheddar burgers. “Ninety percent of our beef is locally raised,” Ben says. “We have farns in southern and in northern Arizona that we work with, and we get beef from the 4-H and the FFA kids.”
“But. locally, everybody's reaching out to me because there's nobody doing what I'm doing. Otherwise, the local ranchers are selling at farmer’s markets. I’m the only guy selling at retail in southern Arizona.” That means shoppers flock to Ben because they want to patronize their local ranchers and, to be honest, because often the meat in supermarkets is badly butchered.
That’s our observation, not Ben’s, but he commiserates, “Plus, the people behind the counter don't even know what they're packaging or selling and how to cook it or prepare it so they can help the person who is buying it. That's part of the reason people are so afraid of cooking: nobody can help them problem-solve the simplicity of how to cook what they’re selling.”
Ben’s flattened flank steak with layers of prosciutto and provolone cheese wrapped around fresh springy asparagus, like many ready-to-cook meals, comes with cooking instructions. Whatever the customer is after, what Ben lays out before them has an artistry about it. There’s no other way to put this; when Ben puts out a charcuterie plate with salami he’s cured himself and formed into rosettes, it’s a thing of beauty.
Even his chimichurri pork sausage is gorgeous. And, it’s intentional. Ben explains, “I think that may be one of the reasons I’ve been kicked up the ladder."
"I’ll give you an example. I went to New Orleans once to have a Sazerac cocktail. Now, New Orleans was where they invented the Sazerac, so I walk into one of the most famous bars and watch a guy create a Sazerac with absolutely no attention to detail whatsoever. He literally just poured everything together, squished it around, and handed it to me. I watched him do it 100 times. All the ingredients were the exact same that I would have used, but because there was no composition to it, it was nothing special. It's just like being a composer – the music has to be in sync; there has to be a harmony to it. I think food has a harmony of ingredients to it and if you put in too much of the G with the E and you carry that note too long, it’s not right.”
“What I’ve come to learn and appreciate is that in everything we do, we want the layers to match properly." Even for a simple cheeseburger. We always ask ourselves, 'should the tomato go here or here? Should the lettuce go here or here and why is that? Do we want the crunch?'
"On my team, we all just talk about what we're going to do and how we're going to do it. Butchering is the same exact thing. When I throw a side of meat, whether it's a pig or a sheep, or a beef, on my butcher block, I don't approach it by rote – cut here, cut here and you’re done. I look at it and I say, what if I did this and what if I did that? And yes, it's still going to be a brisket or a steak, but because we started looking at all of the little details, we’re discovering other steaks and pulling a tasty chuck roast. If you peel certain layers out, you might find a more tender piece and a different way to approach it. So that, to me, is what matters. It's looking at what you're going to do and what are the best steps to take to make the end result the best that it could possibly be.”
Finally, wanting to know everything about meat led Ben into animal husbandry. He has seven cows, five of them young so they won’t be ready for another two and a half years. “I'm just learning about feed and what makes animals happy and how to take care of them, just to know what it’s all about. I’m not a rancher, I’m a butcher. But, he added "I've raised probably 30 hogs, and seen some die randomly in the heat. I've seen sheep get eaten by wild coyotes. I've learned what it costs to raise an animal and how to raise them right.”
He's also still refining his curing techniques for salamis and prosciutto, Italian braciola, and simple, age-old Swiss curing methods using salt and spices and letting meat hang and cure. He wants to experiment with the many takes on American barbecue. “All that barbecue because, again, it's food and it's fun and people love it and it's going to bring people together.”
A Dream Takes Form
Rather than working out of a speakeasy little butcher shop with a little three-door freezer like today, his new butcher shop will thrill his regulars. "You’ll open the door and say, ‘wow, look at this place. Everything is right there in front of you.’ We’ll have rails with sides of beef the way they had in the old days. We’ll have butcher counters right there. We’ll also have a 20-foot kitchen line with a bar so we can do prepared foods.”
There will be a “restaurant aspect” to the place, but it won’t be a restaurant per se. There will be a patio where people can eat and he’ll have wine and beer. They’ll do dinner on probably a Friday, Saturday, or Sunday night with a Prix Fixe menu for up to 20 people. And, up on the rooftop, there will be special events where diners can see a whole 360-degree view of Tucson laid out before them. “I can’t wait; it will be fantastic.”
But then, he reflects, “Every day is my birthday and every day is Father's Day. Every day is a celebration when you get to do what you want to do every day. It's kind of nice.” If you ever get a chance to take one of Ben’s whole beef butchery classes for the masses, we recommend you sign up.
In January, Ben had around 40 people, all anxious to learn where their food comes from. “We’ll do it a lot more, maybe once a month, and cooking classes too. When we move, Forbes Meat Company won’t be a butcher shop or a restaurant. It’s our home. I want it to be a place where people can come and just hang out like, ‘Hey, we're just going to go over to Ben's.’ We will have people that are our customers that will be cooking on our line, preparing a meal that their family has made. It won’t be just us doing a world tour. It will be people that have become my friends coming in and sharing the kitchen and I'm excited about that. So that's what's important to me. It’s not a business. It's our home.... That's what I want in that space.”
Follow Ben Forbes Meat on Facebook for the real skinny on what’s cooking. And check out Josh Belheumer’s take on Tucson’s gastronomy scene in the story following.
"When I throw a side of meat, whether it's a pig or a sheep, or a beef, on my butcher block, I don't approach it by rote – cut here, cut here and you’re done. I look at it and I say, what if...?"