Good news for you cooks out there: A new, local and sustainable butcher shop is headed to Polk and Pacific with some serious Slow Food cred. It's called Belcampo Meat Company, and they already have a location in Larkspur that SFist named among the best butchers in the Bay Area. The new S.F. location, which will be joined also by others in Palo Alto and Southern California, will feature Belcampo's signature sustainably raised meat and game, as well as a 44-seat restaurant for lunch and dinner.

Like the Larkspur location, the menu will include stuff like beef and pork meatballs, the Belcampo Burger (grass-fed and dry-aged), pulled pork, porchetta, a French dip, and a Caribbean lamb stew, but owner Anya Fernald tells Inside Scoop that the S.F. menu will get a little more adventurous with things like squab and goat, and larger family-style entrees.

Also, the butcher shop offerings will expand, including more game birds, goat, etc., which San Franciscans tend to be more adventurous about than our neighbors to the north. Prices tend to be high, like Bi-Rite's, but those of you who eat meat should probably know by now that you should be willing to pay more for quality like this.

Fernald has been an ambitious and passionate proponent of sustainability and the food revolution in general, having led the first Slow Food Nation event in San Francisco and gone on to found the Eat Real Festival, which debuted in Oakland in 2009, and the Food Craft Institute in 2011. Belcampo is a full-scale, vertical operation that includes a free-range farm for cows, swine, sheep, goats, rabbits, and poultry at the foot of Mount Shasta, as well as their own slaughterhouse, based on designs by Temple Grandin, minutes away from the farm. And now they're expanding with their own retail outlets, having opened the first in 2012. As their company description goes:

We take care of our soil and pasture. We raise healthy, happy animals. We humanely process the meat ourselves and serve it directly to our customers. We believe that it’s possible to produce better tasting, higher quality meat in a way that’s sustainable and healthy for our customers and the land we share.

So, yes, great news for omnivores! And, I dare say, once this place opens, San Francisco might just have the greatest collection of local butcher shops, and high quality meat, of any major city, period.

[Inside Scoop]
[Eater]