From Pork To Plate: Learn To Butcher, Then Eat Your Meat

PROSPECT HEIGHTS, BROOKLYN — If you wish your small Brooklyn kitchen had a meat hook, this is the moment you’ve been waiting for.

Leland Eating & Drinking House and Prospect Butcher Co. are collaborating to host a hog butchery class followed by a six-course snout to tail pork dinner, the Brooklyn businesses announced.

Participants who sign up for both events will first learn about where their pork comes from — and how it’s cut — then sit down to a hog feast where they can pig out on braised pork belly, pork milanese with anchovy aioli, Testa Terrine and crispy pig’s ears.

The goal is part education and part celebration of the fruitful hog.

The events are being hosted at Leland Baking House and will be taught by the master butchers from Prospect Butchering Co. on Sept. 27. The butchery class is $75 and the six-course meal is $100 per person.

Randi Lee, Leland’s owner, said the idea was to teach diners about the process of how the meat gets to the plate. “The intention is that: this is what it looks like when it first comes in,” he said, “and then, six courses of every part of we break down.”

To feed that many people, for which Leland has planned multiple seatings, the pork won’t be the exact pieces cut during the butchery class, but all the meals will be derived solely from those cuts.

Lee says many people don’t realize the true utility of the simple pig, and the class aims to teach the wide spectrum of cuts that can be found inside a hog. “We use it in almost every one of our services between brunch, and finally our dinner,” he said, “it’s such a versatile animal.”

By having so many cuts of hog in one meal, Lee hopes it will help grow appreciation for the pig.

“When you taste pork, usually it's one sort of form: it's a chop or it's bacon or a belly or a shoulder,” Lee explained, but in reality, “there's a bunch of different kinds of textures of what you can get off of one dish. So it's gonna be really fun.”

“If you're a vegetarian, it's probably not the best dinner to go to,” Lee warned.

Leland Eating & Drinking House opened in December of 2020 on Dean Street and Underhill Avenue in Prospect Heights, and while opening a restaurant during a pandemic wasn’t easy, the lockdown inspired Lee to host these types of events.

He even wants to recruit his “cool” fishmonger, who Lee said just brought in a fresh 67-pound bigeye tuna from Montauk earlier that day.

“I think that what we saw during the pandemic was that a lot of people took on a new hobby,” Lee said, “and people are looking for experiences now, so we definitely want to do more of these.”

That’s good news, since while Lee spoke with Patch this afternoon, the butchery class and dinner both sold out.

But if you are interested in the dinner (maybe hog anatomy isn’t your idea of a hobby), Lee says that they will make bar seating available early next week.