Irish expat butcher Jack O'Shea: Big producers are 'the enemy of meat'

Jack O'Shea has butchery in his blood, growing up in an Irish family business in Tipperary that goes back eight generations to 1790. But it was here in Brussels that his own business thrived, with a first store in the EU district in 1998, before going on to become a "celebrity butcher" supplying some of London's top restaurants.

"It's not a sexy business today for young people," he says in an interview for TVBrussel. "I can't understand why because I think it's so cool."

Specialising in organic fresh meat, O'Shea compares being a butcher with the role of a surgeon: "I learned from early days the value of producing an animal stress-free and looking after him. You have to know exactly where that muscle is or you can destroy the next muscle. This is something which takes years to learn."

Speaking of his upbringing, he says: "We didn't have anything material, but the pleasure of having horses at home and cows and rifles and all the things kids really love. I was lucky but it came at a price: a workaholic father. We all had to contribute which is why I am a butcher today."

Last September, thousands of meat and dairy farmers from across Europe converged on Schuman square - just a few hundred metres from O'Shea's first Brussels store - to protest about falling prices and cost pressure from distributors and supermarket chains.

"That's why I left Ireland," O'Shea says. "My father working till midnight, making sure animals were killed properly, working like a dog to produce incredible beef for the locals. And the locals would go to Dublin on the train to gain a few euros a kilo.

"The big boys control the offer, they control the meat supply to the supermarkets. They invariably give us four choices: steak, roast joint, minced meat and stewing steak and that's basically how the whole world is buying meat now.

"They expect to have it cheap cheap cheap. The biggest meat company in Germany is a pork abbatoir that produces 50,000 pigs a week. You cannot produce quality when you're producing 50,000 animals a week. Even if you run a 24-hour regime, something dies very quickly and something is produced far too quickly at the end of the chain.

"I saw recently an abbatoir in America where the pig goes in the back door and 50 minutes later the sausage comes out the front door. That tells me that the animal has to die very quickly, in a line, where he can smell his colleague in front has just got the bullet. It's like being captured by ISIS and waiting in line for your execution. That's the enemy of meat."

Jack O'Shea now has three stores in Brussels, at Schuman, Sainte-Catherine and Uccle, and a chophouse restaurant next to the Sainte-Catherine store, as well as a London outlet in Primrose Hill.