Ask Tanya Cauthen, Your Local Butcher

by Leah Small

Tanya Cauthen is an aerospace engineering student turned chef then butcher. In 2006 she opened the Belmont Butchery, which harkens back to older European style butcheries. The establishment is characterized by rustic charm. It smells like your grandmother’s kitchen, and you always have to talk to someone to cut what you need. “People are craving interactions with experts,” Tanya says about the shop’s traditional service in a world of pre-packaged anonymity. The butchers grind their own sausage, cut their own meats, and select many of the carcasses from local farmers. They are ready with recommendations, because chances are they have had what you’re seeking for lunch. They purvey everything for every palate, from traditional bangers to turkey with curry and coconut.

Before she was a butcher or even a chef, Tanya was a University of Virginia student whose major didn’t fit and like many young people, she did not want to move back home. While taking a hiatus from the college life, Tanya got her first start in cooking at the Garrett in Charlottesville. Tanya says her inability to “smile on command” put her in the kitchen working mostly as a prep cook instead of waitressing. Luckily, the head chef recognized her potential, calling her one of the most naturally gifted cooks he had ever seen. He happened to be the executive chef at UVA and ran the college’s apprenticeship program. Even though cooking was not a “life plan,” she ended up not going back for engineering that fall but instead enrolled in the apprenticeship program.

After passing her apprentice exam, she was sponsored by Chef Fred Geisler of the Schnitzel House in Charlottesville to cook in Switzerland. This was where she had her first opportunity to see the full break down of a carcass. She was fascinated by watching what she humorously calls “old knarled German dudes” butchering artfully. She was not as deft when allowed her first try, which was hampered by inexperience and a language barrier. “I’m sure I did it horribly, but I didn’t care,” she says about the experience, “they let me do it and that’s all that matters.”

During her first try at butchery Tanya was able to see the role of the middleman between pasture and kitchen she would one day become. The chef’s fascination with butchery is partly due to her cuisine, which she describes as “very meat driven.” She laughingly says of her palette: “Give me more, the rarer the better!”

After a year in Switzerland, Tanya spent six months backpacking through Europe, tasting and cooking along the way. She experienced local cuisines and further cultivated her belief in consuming what’s provincial and in season long before Omnivore’s Dilemma. Tanya says that the experience broadened her palette and improved her ability to identify flavors. “I was doing farm-to-table way before Americans got the trend,” she says about her practice of roving European farmers markets for fresh ingredients. This would always influence her cooking and later her practice of providing local meats at Belmont Butchery.

In 1993 Tanya brought her newly expanded palette to Richmond. On the advice of Anne Willan, founder of the LaVarrene cooking school, she took a job at the newly opened The Frog and the Redneck. However, Tanya is a self-described “restless soul” and found that the experience began to become to stifling. “What he promised me was not what I was doing,” she says.

It is this zeal for change that has fueled the multiple turns her career has taken before Belmont Butchery was even a seed of a thought. At the age of 24 Tanya started Capers Catering as co-chef, opened the Red Oake Café as executive chef, and has had many culinary stints throughout the years. When not owning her own place, she has always gravitated toward “small and funky upstarts” and has helped many small businesses onto their feet. One of these was the Richmond favorite, Three Monkeys. “He needed someone to make it happen then want to walk away,” she says about her role of cracking the whip to translate Johnny Giavos’s vision to consistent quality from the kitchen. “I would go into a job, put in my heart and soul and build it to what I consider to be an A-list place,” she says about her need for change, “but once I got it there, then what was the challenge that was left?”