Know Thy Butcher! At This New Birmingham Shop, Nobody Stays a Stranger for Long

In an era of two-day shipping and grocery delivery, Addam Evans wants to give you an old-school butcher shop experience.

"We want you to come in and we want to challenge you a little bit on what you think you want, then talk about what you really want," says Evans.

Opened this summer in Birmingham, Alabama's Pepper Place market district, The Son of a Butcher is a purveyor of thoughtfully sourced meats, seafood, cheeses, and other specialty kitchen goods, like olive oils and small-batch jams.

The idea started bubbling during the pandemic. Evans and his family, who together run Evans Meats & Seafood, Inc., found that their usual buyers—restaurants, mostly, along with some clubs, hotels, and independent grocers—suddenly had no need for what they were selling.

"We were sitting there with a warehouse full of inventory and nowhere to go with it," says Evans.

Within a week, they launched an online, direct-to-consumer ordering platform and began offering curbside service at their warehouse. When that was successful, they used their delivery trucks to offer the same service in remote locations in Alabama and Tennessee.

Their efforts saved the business and gave them a new idea.

"I thought, 'Well if we can do this out of a warehouse in an industrial area, we can do this with a proper shop,'" remembers Evans.

And thus, The Son of a Butcher was born.

"Everything in here has a pretty unique story from a product standpoint, whether it's a cheesemaker in Vermont that makes amazing artisan cheeses, or if it's a small farm that we work with in Tennessee that produces really nice beef, or a small operation up in Western Pennsylvania that produces a unique, high-quality lamb," notes Evans.

Few things in the shop come pre-packaged, and most everything is cut to order. That's by design.

"We're trying to say, 'Hey, come in, shop, and let's have a relationship," says Evans. "Let us show you what we have and what makes it fun and interesting for you to take home and cook."