If you’ve ever stared at the butcher counter like it was a final exam you didn’t study for, this one’s for you. In this episode, I sit down with Mark and Brian Lobel, legendary New York butchers, father and son, and sixth-generation meat experts. They’ve turned their family craft into a masterclass on meat and share their Five Rules for how to Never Be Afraid of Cooking Meat Again. From doling out advice at their iconic Lobel’s butcher shop on Madison Avenue to teaching people how to pick the right cut, the Lobels don’t just sell meat, they teach you how to respect it.
Learning how to pick and prepare meat is one of those quiet turning points in your cooking life. It’s where confidence meets instinct. You start to understand what you’re buying, how it feels, how it cooks, and what happens when you give it time and care. Even after years in the kitchen, there’s always something new to learn, some little tip or trick that changes everything. That’s what I love about talking with Mark and Brian Lobel. When you get advice from a family that’s been butchering for six generations, it’s not just about meat, it’s about tradition, patience, and craft. Listening to them feels like being invited behind the counter, shown the ropes, and reminded that great cooking starts with curiosity and respect for what’s in front of you.
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Hello, and welcome to Five Rules for the Good Life. I’m your host, Darin Bresnitz.
Today, I am joined by Mark and Brian Lobel, father and son, legendary butchers in New York City whose family has been serving and selling meat to the public for over six generations.
They share their five rules for how to never be afraid of cooking meat again. They talk about how setting yourself up for success starts with selecting the right cut of meat, that when you’re using high quality beef, simplicity is key, and how to ensure the perfect cook every time by taking out the guesswork.
It is a real masterclass from a family who’s made it their life mission and business to know everything there is about meat. So let’s get into the rules.
Mark and Brian, it’s so nice to meet you. Been a longtime fan of your butcher shop. Thanks for sitting down with me, especially right after Labor Day. I’m glad you had time to catch your breath.
Thanks. It’s a pleasure to meet you and a pleasure to be with you.
When I think about family businesses, being a butcher or owning a butcher shop always comes to top of mind. Why is butchering the type of profession that gets passed down from generation to generation?
That’s exactly true. It does get passed down. And that’s because when your father is a butcher at the age of eight or nine or 10, you grow up in the butcher shop and you grow up taking care of customers and get a real education on how to cut meat and how to prepare meat. The whole retail mentality behind being in the butcher shop and selling. You generally become a butcher because your father was a butcher. Your uncle was a butcher. Somebody in your family was a butcher. There’s a lineage there.
There’s also a lot of passion behind it. It was really all I knew growing up. Even from a young age, it was like, okay, my dad went to work, and when my dad went to work, he was also there with my uncle. And then he was there with my grandpa. He was there with my cousin. So there was that camaraderie and family bond that was always instilled in us at a young age. We’re such a close family. We’re always all together. So business is always being discussed. And when you’re young, it’s so cool to think about, wow, one day I’m going to be a part of this and then I’ll be a part of that conversation. That also adds an element to it as well.
Having a great butcher is one of those things in life that people often brag about. Why is it such a special relationship to have? What makes it so important to living the good life?
You really develop a bond with your customers because food is so important. We’re there for recipe questions. We’re there for, “I want to create this dish—so what kind of meat should we use?” I think it’s the wealth of information that butchers have. We’re in a unique situation being where we’ve been for so many years as well. A lot of our customers have become really like family. They’re there because their parents shopped there, and they’re there because their grandparents shopped there. It’s such a personalized relationship between customers and us, and even our other butchers, that just makes it so unique and so special.
I’m not sure there’s another business out there where you have the relationships with the customers the way we do. Those relationships are so important. They just feel like extended family.
And I know that your family started raising beef in Austria in the 1840s and then made its way to America in the 1910s. And you’ve been selling ever since. Is there anything you practice or share with your customers that you’ve been doing since day one?
It’s sharing the information that we have and the knowledge base that we have to be able to educate our customers on how to cook. I mean, if you call the Madison Avenue store, you get that customer service. People are really looking for customer service.
Just to piggyback off on what my dad was saying, to explain the difference in quality—what you’re getting here versus what you’re getting somewhere else—how important the quality of the beef is to your eating experience is something that we provide to them as well.
Being able to take generations of knowledge and distill it to share it with your customers is such a beautiful thing. And it’s why I’m so excited to have you both on to share your five rules for how to never be afraid of cooking meat again.
Now, it’s very easy to see the end result of a dish—a beautiful roast comes out, steak, a whole chicken—and be intimidated about how someone got that perfectly cooked piece of meat on the plate. But as you both know, the entire process starts with selecting the right cut. What is your rule number one?
The first rule would be pick out the best possible piece of meat that you can at the grocery store or the butcher shop. There’s a method to this madness. There are three main grades of beef: prime, select, and choice. Wherever possible, you want to be able to get a USDA prime piece of meat. So important. Not every place will be able to sell prime. Lobel’s, we have only prime. Then you go for choice. And then if you can’t find choice, you go for select.
When you go over to the counter, when you go over to the case, the average person’s in the supermarket and they’re not sure what to look for. First, you want to look at the marbling—and those are the fine streaks of fat that run throughout the meat. You also want to look at the fat on the meat. So if you’re looking at the outside fat on the steak, you want it to be milky white. You don’t want the fat to be grayish in color. Also, the color of the meat should be red. Sometimes you’ll see a grayish tone and that could indicate that the meat is a little older than you want it to be. It won’t be bad for you, but it’s not going to be as fresh.
If you’re going to be looking for lamb or veal, and you look for a little red on the back of the bone, that determines youth in the animal. Younger animals will eat a little bit better. If you’re looking for some lamb chops, looking for some veal chops, if you look hard enough, you can find some marbling. Go for that. Go for the marbling. It’ll help. It’ll make a better eating experience.
Sometimes it can be a very intimidating experience. You see people, they’re pacing back and forth. They’re on their phone. They don’t know what to do. Don’t be afraid to ask the butcher at the butcher shop. Don’t be afraid to ask somebody at the supermarket for help. Don’t be afraid to ask somebody next to you who’s also buying something for help.
Good point. I’ve seen my dad helping people in public before when he’s just looking.
I’ve been guilty of that also. Never be afraid to ask your butcher: “This is what I like. This is what my wife and I would like to have for dinner tonight. Can you pick out a great steak for us?” People really need to just be more comfortable asking for help. That’s what we’re here for.
Most people can agree on selecting the best quality of meat to set yourself up for success. But once you get that cut home, then it comes down to personal preference when you’re preparing to cook. What’s your rule number two?
When you have such a high-end steak that’s going to provide so much flavor naturally, less is more. Keep it simple. Easy. Olive oil. Black pepper. Kosher salt. Over-seasoning and getting too excited is very, very easy. And we’re all guilty of it—including me, including my dad. We’ve all gotten lost in the moment.
Lost in the sauce.
When I get my meat home, I like to pat it dry before I season it or marinate it. I won’t wrap it. I’ll actually leave it open in the refrigerator. That whole process of leaving it open and that drying process, putting it in the refrigerator after you season it, will help you get a better crust after you cook it.
Marinating also—a lot of fun. Whether it’s chicken, whether you use a barbecue sauce, whether you use a salad dressing. We have a blast marinating our beef kebab, our chicken kebabs. My dad is a wizard behind the grill, so he’s always coming up with new ways.
Nobody goes near the grill in my house except…
That’s a lot of fun.
No one could ever ask me where I learned to grill because if I’m not getting a chance to do it…
Oh, please.
When I first started cooking meat, there was this method about touching different parts of your hand to understand the doneness of what you were cooking. But what I found is that it was a lot of guesswork and I ruined a lot of good cuts of meat. Your third rule talks about using this instrument to ensure cooking perfection every time.
You should never guess on doneness of meat because there’s nothing worse than having a great piece of meat and you overcook it. Using an instant read thermometer is the best tool. If you think you should cook something for 50 minutes, you’re going by a recipe—an hour, an hour and 10 minutes—15, 20 minutes before, you can probe it and put the instant read thermometer in to see where you are.
Everybody’s oven is different. Sometimes people will put something in the oven and they’ll open the oven to look and they can lose five or 10 minutes and not even realize because they’re glaring at the piece of meat. It’s not an exact science.
But remember, when you take the piece of meat out, if you’re looking for rare at 120 degrees, just realize that when you take something out of the oven, it’s going to go up five points also. So you have to build that in.
I can’t stress the importance of not being afraid to check it. Still to this day, if I’m cooking something new, I’ll call my dad and I’ll say, “Dad, question for you—how long am I putting this in for?”
Even when he knows the answer, he still calls me.
I have to double check because if I overcook the meat—
That’s trouble.
Or then undercook it and then put it back in and overcook it—
That’s the worst. That’s one of the worst cooking experiences anybody could ever have, undercooking and then overcooking at the same time.
There’s always that moment when you pull a perfectly cooked piece of meat out of the oven or off the stove and you want to rip in right away. But your rule number four talks about the importance of waiting to make sure that your fantastic cook doesn’t go to waste.
Rule number four is to let the meat rest. After you take it out of the oven, you put it on top of the stove top or on the counter. Take it out of the roasting pan and put it onto a butcher block where you’re going to slice it because there’s still a lot of heat coming up from the bottom. You’re letting the meat rest.
If you slice it right away, you’re going to notice a lot of the juice will run out. And you don’t want that. If you wait—not too long—five minutes on a steak, 10 to 15 on a roast, like if you’re doing a prime rib or a larger roast, you’ll notice that instead of the juices running out onto the carving board, they’ll stay and redistribute in the roast.
Really important. A lot of people don’t follow that rule, but it’s a good one to have.
You’ve selected the right cut. You’ve prepped to your preference. You’ve cooked perfectly and you’ve given the meat time to rest. And your fifth and final rule ensures that when it comes time to carve, you are slicing with perfection.
When it comes down to slicing and carving the meat properly, it’s really important.
The most important.
You want to have a really sharp knife. That’s really important. Have it on a cutting board. Do not have it on a plate. Some people just kind of wing it.
You’d be surprised.
I get it—maybe they don’t want to wash the cutting board.
It’s worth it. And you have to slice it super thin. The difference between thin and thick could change your whole eating experience.
If you have a good prime piece of meat—which everyone is not going to be able to find—if you cut a little thicker, you’ll be fine. If you’re going to find something choice or select, you want to really try to cut it as thin as you can.
The important thing is when you’re slicing, you want to cut it against the grain. You’ll see the lines in the piece of meat running in one direction. You want to cut it against the grain. And the meat—whatever you’re carving—will be so much more delicious, so much better.
Sometimes in the butcher shop, people are so intimidated, they’ll say, “Can you score—make the lines in the meat—so I can follow the guideline after it’s cooked?”
I never heard that.
Especially brisket. If you cut brisket the wrong way, it becomes stringy. You cut pastrami the wrong way—it becomes stringy. You cut a roast or any steak, it makes a huge difference.
Don’t be afraid to ask that. As a butcher, that is not something that you’re going to see a butcher huff and puff or roll their eyes at. That is something we are more than happy to do.
And I’m sure every butcher is more than happy to do because at the end of the day, you’re doing your job because you want to make their eating experience as great as possible. And I’ve found that every time that I’ve asked, they’ve never been condescending. If anything, they’ve been happy to share their knowledge.
Definitely.
Make sure that I don’t waste a piece of meat and that I honor what was killed for consumption.
They want to help, even if they can’t be at home with you.
That’s exactly right.
Thank you, guys. Congratulations. Six generations.
Thank you, Darin.
Thank you so much.
It’s truly incredible. If people want to visit the store or order online because the holiday seasons are here and I am already thinking about where I’m going to get my brisket...
Oh yeah.
Where can they go? How can they shop with you?
Prime rib, brisket—they can go to our Madison Avenue store at 1096 Madison Avenue. We’ve been there since 1954. Or they can visit our website at lobels.com or our new store at Rockefeller Center, which is Lobel’s Original, where we’re doing great steak sandwiches and just great protein like we do at Yankee Stadium.
I can’t wait to be back in New York and just swing into the store for a sandwich and for a perfect slice of meat.
We look forward to having you there.
Thank you so much.
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