NZ Farm the Basis for Winning London Butchery

Nothing tastes better than grass-fed beef and lamb, as anyone raised on a New Zealand farm can tell you. But for those poor souls who flew the coop in search of a different life overseas, finding decent cuts at the local supermarket can be a fruitless odyssey.

But the paucity of premium-cut meat in London has presented Kiwi entrepreneurs Guy and Erin Gibson with a Wagyu-lined commercial opportunity. They, with School of Artisan Food alumni Struan Robertson and Guy’s brother Tom Gibson as general manager have established boutique butchery, Provenance, in hipster-suburb, Notting Hill – and the reaction from the locals is ringing the tills.

Entertainment magazine TimeOut has profiled the new butchery and charcuterie in its pages as the buzz builds about a business that is rewriting the rules about what a butcher’s shop should be.

The Gibsons are the children of farmers and were raised on free-range, grass-fed beef, lamb and venison, and outdoor-reared pork and poultry. Their experience buying meat from Sainsbury, Tesco, Asda and Waitrose brought into sharp relief the childhood memory of how meat should taste, look and feel.

Their Antipodean provenance explains, says TimeOut, the grass-fed Wagyu beef from New Zealand “that are flying out the doors in barbecue weather”.

Of course, given present meteorological conditions, their slow-maturing free range cockerals, three bird roasts and oven ready game are providing Londoners plenty of comfort during the winter months.

It also helps that the Gibsons have visited and vetted every supplier, people that they know personally.

They have also introduced the classic savoury pie to the capital, cooked fresh on the premises daily. As TimeOut says, “give it a look”.