It may be 4pm on an autumnal Thursday afternoon, but the Block & Bottle butchery is a hub of activity. The team has just moved all their production to their Heaton Road site, and 80kg of pastrami is being prepared along with 200 steaks for Café Filto in Sandyford.
“It’s been a crazy couple of weeks but it’s so good having all the staff at one site, there’s a real buzz about the place,” says owner Katie Cullen, who is in the middle of fitting a huge walk-in fridge in the basement and has plans to install a smoker in the next few weeks.
Katie, 37, has run Block & Bottle for eight-and-a-half years with her husband, Steven Warren.
In its first three years, the shop gained acclaim for its home-cured charcuterie – winning medals for soppressata and nduja in the British Charcuterie Awards in 2018, and being crowned Specialist Food and Drink Shop of the Year at the Guild of Fine Food Awards in 2019.
Katie and Steven met in 2011, when he was working at Stuart & Co. in Jesmond (now Arlo Bistro & Café). Katie had decided to visit with a friend because it was owned by the son of her home economics teacher from school, and that friend decided to leave Katie’s number written on a napkin for the cute waiter (Steven) to find. It turned out to be his last shift, and Katie says: “It’s funny to think if I hadn’t gone in on that day, we never would have met, and Block & Bottle would never have existed.”
Both from the North East, their jobs took Katie and Steven to Edinburgh and then London before they decided to move back to Newcastle and start their own business. Early in his career, Steven worked at Hook and Cleaver in Ealing, where he was given a lot of creative freedom to run butchery classes for customers and develop his charcuterie skills, starting out with salami.
“I’d been working as an event organiser,” adds Katie. “I really wanted to open a bottle shop, and Steven wanted to own a butcher’s shop, so we put those two ideas together.”
They opened their original shop in the railway arches in Gateshead in 2017. “A lot of great local businesses were opening up and doing pop-ups – like Northern Rye and Proven Goods. It was an exciting time to be starting up,” says Katie. “There were a few big food festivals happening at the time too, like EAT! at Boiler Shop, which I think really solidified that the foodie vibe had arrived in the city.”
In November 2017, they made it into the top-100 on the Small Business Saturday list, leading to an invite to 10 Downing Street to exhibit a selection of their cured meats and favourite local beers.
A few years later, Katie and Steven had just signed for the lease on their new shop on Heaton Road the week the first Covid lockdown was announced. They managed to get the shop painted thanks to Mick Potts from the Free Trade Inn, who had been forced to close the pub and offered to come in out of hours. Finding that most of their wholesale business had disappeared overnight with the closure of pubs and restaurants, they tentatively opened the new shop to find queues of socially distanced customers going round the block. “Our first Christmas, the queue went from the shop all the way down past Sainsbury’s!” Katie says.
By this time, Si King had become a regular customer and contacted them to take part in The Hairy Bikers Go North in late 2020. The show was filmed in face masks and they didn’t hear much more about it until shortly before it aired the following year. They were unprepared for the number of customers who would come in and request a côte de bœuf, which The Hairy Bikers had used in their surf ‘n’ turf.
The four years since then have seen unprecedented changes in the butchery business. “The price of everything has gone up, all the overheads and the price of meat. Lamb has gone up 30% in the last year alone,” Katie explains. “With the cost of living crisis, we have also seen some changes in customer spending – but we love to talk through all the options with each customer and there’s always an affordable cut of meat they can choose for a certain recipe.” Katie also explains that they’ve chosen for their staff not to wear the traditional butchery uniform of shirt and tie, to maintain the approachable vibe.
There has been discussion of a less but better approach to meat consumption in recent years, and Katie and Steven know the origin of every cut sold in the butchery – with much of the beef and pork reared in County Durham.
“People have definitely changed their habits when it comes to eating meat. People are consuming less meat overall but choosing providers with better animal welfare, environmental sustainability and quality,” says Katie, who used to be a vegetarian and values meat being prepared and consumed mindfully.
Block & Bottle takes a whole carcass approach to butchery, utilising every part of the animal down to the pigs ears, which are cooked as dog treats. Meanwhile, any leftover bones are sent away to be made into biofuel.
Looking ahead to the festive season, the busiest time of year for the business, Katie has the task of planning all the logistics. “Pigs in blankets are a lot of work,” she laughs. “They’re so fiddly and there’s no machine that can roll a pig in a blanket!” This Christmas they will also have turkeys from Herb Fed in York, along with ducks and geese; some beautiful poultry from France; and gammons prepared using pigs raised in Burton on Trent.
While there are options for Christmas feasts, Steven wraps things up with his suggestions to explore better quality meat on tighter budgets. “For beef, try onglet – or hanger steak – which is cut from the diaphragm and is a tender and flavourful cut which must be served rare to medium-rare. For pork, try porchetta – loin and belly meat rolled together – as a great alternative for Sunday roast or as sandwich meat.”
Block and Bottle is open Tuesday-Saturday 9am-5pm at 188 Heaton Road, Newcastle, NE6 5HP. Follow @blocknbottle on Instagram.
